As almost all of my required reading materials in first year English class, I skimmed through Stanley Park in a few all-nighters before the semester ends, so I can pretend to write some philosophical bullshit in my final essays. Not until a few years later I came across this book again on Amazon and decided to give it an over-due thorough read.

I certainly appreciate this book more after living in Vancouver for the past 6 years, especially when those crosstown street names, downtown landscape and Stanley Park sceneries rings a bell. Given the two intertwined story lines of a father who humbly chose to live in the park with the homeless, and the son who chose to troll the so-call upper class foodies with local bounties, this book is interesting read swelled with full of details and tensions.

As a foodie myself, I can totally picture the interior design, the buzzing crowd at the opening of those name can't even be pronounced Yaletown restaurants, and the bang-on crips menu formula of "Classic Ingredient A + Exotic Technique B + Totally Unexpected Strange Ingredient C". It's so smooth but yet so sarcastic when there are people sleeping in the damp dark forrest within walking distance. This gap of life condition is not just because of money and social status, it's because of this unbridgeable gap of mindset, life choices and maybe faith.

One thing I don't understand about this book was the babies in the wood, at first I thought there might be something deep or heralding unfolding, but I didn't really get anything other than the fact that the notes about the babies in the wood led Jeremy to discover more of his fathers' diary. I start to think maybe the author is using this as a selling-point. Hey, who doesn't want to read more about babies mysteriously died and buried in a city park.

After all, I'm happy I get around to finish this book in great details, feel like this is a salute to my 6-year lives in this city, from a utterly strange city to a nostalgic second home, I have a soft spot for things that happened in this raining city, either real or fictional.

A fun book but one that you need a computer & wifi near so you can look up words

I loved reading about the invisible life of Stanley Park and the challenges of being a high profile chef in a city full of restaurants.

This book was slow moving and long. Didn’t love it. Wouldn’t reccomend.

Hilarious satire on the sustainable food movement with a dark mystery thrown in. The Monkey's Paw Bistro is wildly successful but a financial disaster - there's no cost consideration in sourcing or presentation. The protag is forced to sell out, and therein is the tale. The narrative is accelerated by the protag's father, an academic who loses himself studying the homeless of Stanley Park where the natural extremes of locavore living are the norm.

"Dark, slightly crazed, and black-and-blue funny," says The Seattle Times. Nice blurb extends the ideas: "Mystery, romance, scaldingly funny satire of the urban 'fooderati'"

A must read for anyone interested in food, cooking and restaurants. Thank you Knopf Canada for this marvelous book!

n  --Ashland Mysteryn

It was about food and living on the land...in an urban park. What's not to love? I did find the writing a bit rough in places, and I would have preferred more about life in the park over life at the restaurant, but that's probably a personal taste. When I was a kid, I used to fantasize about how I would live in small pockets of green amid the bustle of the city. I'd map out what I'd eat, how I'd sleep, how I'd hide. OK, I was a weird and probably not very happy kid. But this book caters to that with an adult version: a society of homeless people, many of them with mental issues, who manage such a life in Stanley Park. It's on the idealized side, but not entirely unrealistic, and to me, it was an utterly satisfying world to enter...in fiction anyway. Oh, and did I mention that in addition to touching on some disturbing emotional and political themes, Stanley Park is often hysterically funny.

A definite must-read, especially for foodies and fans of the Pacific Northwest.

I'm beginning to think that all novelists should start out as poets - certainly the best books I've read recently have been written by poets.

An entertainment, a mystery, some sly and some not-so-subtle digs at millennial Vancouver, with some glorious descriptions of our environment - in all its seasons - and flashes of brilliant word play.

It took me awhile to get around to reading this, and in the meantime the Vancouver food scene caught up to Taylor's prescient observations. The strong sense of place reinforces Taylor's protagonists' assertions about how we need to be rooted in the ground we live on.

Except for some jarring editing slips near the end - spellchecking is not editing, folks! - this might have even rated at 5 star level for me.

Stanley Park by Timothy Taylor centres on a Vancouver born, French trained chef Jeremy Papier as he strives to stick to his culinary principals whilst his restaurant plummets into economic crisis. He has been running his restaurant with some success, serving sophisticated, hearty meals made with locally sourced sustainable ingredients and he is happy doing so., however his financial problems however are amassing thick and fast due to the immense price discrepancy between fresh, local, seasonal fare and that which he can get - cut price, year round, sold in bulk but farmed in Korea. Farmed in fact anywhere in the world, and this notion of ‘culinary homelessness’ is one that is raised forcefully throughout the novel.
Jeremy’s financial kite is soaring strong and high but – despite his frenetic juggling of an impressive array of credit cards, its all about to come crashing down, unbeknownst to his culinary partner and best friend Jules.
Add to these worries a neighbour and some times friend Dante who could solve Jeremy’s money problems without blinking but who rarely discloses the full price of an arrangement until its too late. Also Jeremy’s estranged father who has taken off to live amongst the homeless of Vancouver’s Stanley Park in order to write his new book researched through this ‘immersive psychology’.
As Jeremy deals with debts and menus and Dante’s increasing strangle hold on his business, his father becomes more and more prominent in his life. A man Jeremy has intentionally turned his back on and neglected over the years is now appearing in thought and person at many strange and inopportune moments. After fighting it for as long as he can, without really knowing why, Jeremy finally allows his father in and follows him into Stanley park, a place of lost and wandering souls, a place of myth and legend, a place where thousands of people homeless for one reason or many, unseen by the throngs of people who pass through during the day, are making their homes and their lives, struggling to stay warm and fed day after day.
Jeremy becomes more and more involved in their lives and their struggles, hearing their tales, learning their pasts, understanding his father’s involvement and fixation with these people, he begins feeding them. After he closes his restaurant he goes to the park and feeds the homeless, cooking up the things that they bring, turning their scavenged and poached offerings into wholesome, sociable cuisine. His ideals and perspectives change as he does this and he begins formulating a plan for his new restaurants ‘opening night’, a plan to give the critics a menu that they’ll never forget.
A intelligent, powerful and thought provoking novel, Stanley park is also exceptionally easy to read with engaging prose and a page turning plot.

A little long with some parts that almost work (and some on the nose symbolism like a character named Dante who runs a coffee empire called Inferno that keeps his employees “in iron” cuffs), the overall book is a great exploration of an artist working in the most persnickety medium. Food is a fascinating medium to study the vocation of the artist because it’s reception is so important. A painter doesn’t have to worry about food-safe regulations. But the chefs mentality can be the same as Picasso’s or Stravinskys. Also, a single dish has only one consumer, unlike a sculpture. So it distilla what’s at stake in different ways thank other media. As far as the book, it was fun and kept me on my toes to the end.

I first picked this up from the shelf because my father's name was Stanley. Then I realised that it is set in Canada, and I have visited Stanley Park in Vancouver, where they have a great display of native American totem poles. And where we sat and watched a cricket match, which bizarrely I've never done in England (I'm English, by the way). What's more, our hire car broke down in Stanley Park on the first day of our holiday, and we had to wait there until a replacement was brought to us. Ah, memories! The book also reminded me that there are raccoons in the park. It was the first time I'd ever seen them, and I must have photos somewhere. The fact that I've been to Stanley Park added to the story, as I could visualise the setting, although I hadn't realised the forest was so huge. I was also perplexed by the statement that grey squirrels had been imported from Britain and were somehow threatening the native red squirrel, as in Britain the native red squirrel has been almost eliminated by the introduction of the more aggressive American grey squirrels!

This book wasn't at all what I'd expected. Based on the cover photo of a full knife rack with one knife coloured red, and the author's note at the beginning which mentions the discovery of the remains of two children in Stanley Park in 1953, the "Babes in the Wood", I assumed that the book was a thriller. In fact, it was something much better.
The descriptions of the food were mouthwatering, and Jeremy's dedication to locally-sourced food admirable. Unfortunately he was forced to abandon his principles and bow to the fanciful flights of fantasy of his rich financier, who recognised his talent but wanted to impose a concept based on image alone: the colour of the food (gold and purple) and a menu designed to impress by name-dropping, rather than by providing food which would make people want to return because of the quality. I enjoyed the descriptions of the cooking process, and noted that Jeremy's cooperative style was more reminiscent of Jamie Oliver than the aggressive alpha-male style of Gordon Ramsey or Lenny Henny's fictional 'Chef'. A style not at all suited to Dante Beale's aggressive market-response-led restaurant ideas, yuppies seeking "wired, post-national, with vibrant flavours"; "over sixty we're not much worried about - they don't like France or Italy or dishes that are too crunchy."

Another theme in the book is the research which Jeremy's father is doing amongst the people living rough in Stanley Park. Ironically, contrary to ingrained expectations, it is not the park-dwellers who are alcoholics and drug-takers, eating unhealthily and neglecting their children, but the high-earning professionals. Here it is worth mentioning Jeremy's godson Trout, a slightly other-worldly, perhaps autistic child, who perceptively cuts through the sophisticated surface image to reach the truths hidden within. Likewise, in the park, Jeremy's father's friends are true to themselves, more so than those in the false world of business.

There are a couple of strange and unexplained occurrences in the book, so that I am left wondering if I missed something or misunderstood. On the whole, it was well worth reading, with well-rounded characters and a brilliant payback, and I'm hoping to pass it on to somebody whose unusual first name is mentioned in the book, and who I believe will appreciate the foodie aspect, too.

I was in a used book store in Vancouver and asked the clerk for a great novel about the city. He suggested Stanley Park, a bestseller and finalist for the Giller Prize, which I’m guessing is something like the Pulitzer. There are really two stories intertwined here. The first is about Jeremy Papier, the locavore chef who can’t seem to protect his culinary art without selling out to a coffee-shop magnate (named Dante no less). Everything chef-related in this book is a real thrill – from Jeremy’s schooling to his recipes to the interplay with his fellow chefs. The second story is about Jeremy re-connecting with his father, a “participatory anthropologist” who lives among the homeless in Stanley Park and seeks the truth behind the murder of two young children decades ago. I had a hard time with these chapters, though others may not. The two stories converge on the importance of “place” – and the people, the animals, and the history that define it.

I love Timothy Taylor's writing - it's crisp, it's clear, it's evocative. I love how he treats his subjects and I love the subtle moments of poetry: her eyes were the colour of a crashing wave. Wow! But I just couldn't get into this book. Its jacket cover says it's about an ambitious chef, an unsolved mystery, the homeless in Vancouver's famed Stanley Park and a dark-hearted investor. But by half-way through, the threads weren't coming together. Pages and pages and pages into it, Jeremy was still cooking, still in debt. Pages and pages and pages in, his father the professor still living in Stanley Park, for reasons unknown. By halfway through the "Babes in the Woods" felt like a red herring, a device rather than a driver. I didn't make it to the end. But I tried. I really did.