I loved this book! It really spoke to me as a small business owner and someone who appreciates other entrepreneurs just trying to do their thing in a Starbucks world.

This was a fun book to read. Timothy Taylor has a way with words and can really make you feel like you're in a situation. This isn't the best book I ever read, but it does have some very thought-provoking moments and some really interesting characters.

I bought this book because we were taking a trip to Vancouver, British Columbia, which is the location Stanley Park. We stayed at the Pan Pacific Hotel and could see the park, across the water, from our window. The book is about food, restaurants, cooking and eating locally, which is good, but also about business and finance, about deep financial trouble, and about people who take advantage of people in deep financial trouble, which is bad. There are really two books interwoven here, with the protagonist Jeremy moving back and forth from the world where he is a chef to the public park where his father lives as an anthropologist in place, like a needle stitching the two stories together. Because this is literature, many of the things/people/events in one story have something to do with things/people/events in the other. The food is the best part (but that may just be me) so, were I Taylor's editor, and interested in making this a 200-page rather than a 400-page book, we'd lose the part about the park and Jeremy's family, and we'd have to come up with another name for the book.

A interesting read. I had trouble with following some of the tangents the writer moved the plot to but the whole success/failure/success narrative made it a good read.

A stunningly good read! Set in one of my favorite cities, Vancouver, we follow Jeremy, the main character, through intense experiences in his career as a chef: training in France, running his own little bistro, juggling finances [incredibly badly], then running with the big boys who provide high end financial backing. Surprising twists of plot and a fascinating look at both homelessness and the nouveau food industry - including guerilla eateries.

In his debut novel, Timothy Taylor gives readers an original storyline, complex and quirky characters, a little humour and important themes to consider. Although an accomplished writer recognized for his short stories, this was Taylor’s first novel, which gained critical recognition when it was shortlisted for the prestigious Giller Prize in 2001.

Jeremy Papier is around thirty. He recently returned from France, arriving in his hometown of Vancouver where he hoped to fulfil his dream and start his own restaurant. A confident young man, he is full of ideas of what he wants his new place to be, ready to put in the work needed to create menus based on using local ingredients. After arranging for a bank loan backed by wealthy family friend and next-door neighbour Dante Beale, Jeremy opened The Monkey’s Paw Bistro in the Downtown Eastside. The area had the kind of shifting, multicultural client base Jeremy favored, although not everyone is comfortable in that section of town and avoids it. Jeremy is also in love with Jules, who shares his dream and serves as his pastry and sous-chef. They care deeply for each other, but have wisely decided to put their personal relationship on hold until they get the restaurant up, running and making a profit.

Jeremy has always had an uneasy relationship with his father and that rift deepened after the sudden and premature death of his mother Helene with whom he was very close. His father, always referred to simply as The Professor, is an unusual character, a respected writer currently doing research for his next book on the homeless. He is deep into what he calls “participatory research”, living in Stanley Park and becoming part of a community who have sought refuge in its trails and forest. He is reaching out to these people, among them the delusional, the alcoholic, the paranoid and the bipolar, trying to understand their lives and record their stories. By living among them, his presence has become less artificial and distracting, allowing him to gain a more accurate glimpse of their world.

Jeremy is not comfortable with any of this and feels guilty seeing his father living among these dispossessed people, unshaven, filthy and surviving by eating food from dumpsters or catching ducks, squirrels, raccoons and starlings. He offered his father his home, but The Professor refused, choosing to stay where he was to complete his work. Jeremy also worries his father may be slowly becoming mentally unstable, slipping into a madness from which he will not return. He rarely sees him and when he does, he is called to meet him at a pre-appointed location by a man name Caruzo, one of the mentally frail young men in the Park community.

Jeremy and Jules have no difficulty creating a menu they are proud of, but the start up costs for the new restaurant are enormous and Jeremy, who has no idea how to manage money, quickly falls into serious debt. The bank relentlessly hounds him and after he tries to get cash using a ridiculous scheme at Canadian Tire, he ends up in legal trouble, forced to turn over the restaurant to Dante, the wealthy entrepreneur of Inferno International Coffee, who guaranteed his loan. Dante owns a large string of high-end coffee shops (think Starbucks) that are scattered all over the world, are popular and earn him big money.

Beale quickly dismantles everything Jeremy had created, renaming the restaurant and turning it into something else entirely, based on his research of what customers wanted and what would be profitable. His creation is the antithesis of everything that Jeremy believes in and stands for and he finds himself trapped in a world he hates.

Alongside this fictional story, is the true story of a crime that took place in Stanley Park years ago which has become part of The Professor’s research. In January 1953, the skeletons of two young children who were brutally murdered were discovered by a groundskeeper. They were never identified and their their killer never caught. The Professor asks for Jeremy’s help getting information about the case from the library as Caruzo, is obsessed with the crime and The Professor wants to know everything he can about that event.

Taylor is an excellent writer He provides detailed descriptions of Stanley Park with its sights, sounds and its place in the city. And the food! What can I say, except to advise readers not to pick up this novel when they are hungry. He writes about the various textures, tastes and colors and how every meal is plated. Jeremy’s menus combine foods you might never think to put together, describing them so well, they are easy to visualize. The action he describes in the kitchen leading up to the opening night under the new administration, are simply masterful and are some of the best in the book. Readers will feel they are right there in the confusion of a working kitchen, as the cooks work to create meals for waiting customers. Opening night proves to be a chaotic event, filled with excitement, humour and grounded with a startlingly and original menu.

Taylor’s dialogue scenes are also remarkable. The more deeply Jeremy wanders into Stanley Park, the more he understands his father who has always believed they were both working on parallel projects. Their interactions as they repair their relationship make for powerful and affecting scenes as they tentatively take steps towards a reconciliation based on their common connection to the land.

The characterizations of Jeremy, The Professor and Jules are well drawn, giving readers a sense of what drives them and their approach to life. Dante, the symbol of wicked corporate capitalism, is simply presented, more a caricature than a fully fleshed character. He comes off flat, devoid of personality, depth or complexity, just as “the insensitive bad guy”, only interested in money.

Taylor’s narrative is not without its inherent wit; the names of the characters and the restaurants provide tongue-in-cheek comments, complementing the content of the narrative.

As an update, readers will be interested to know that when this book was published in 2001, the identity of the children’s bodies was still unknown. In February 2021, seventy years after they were found, new DNA techniques helped identify the children as two boys, Derek and David Alton, aged seven and six respectively. As an aside, I did not find this sub-plot worked well, although I understand why Taylor chose to include it; it could have been eliminated without compromising the story or the novel’s messages.

This story of a young, independent entrepreneur with artistic vision, forced to compete with large corporations, is one repeated in the marketplace every day. Independent book sellers close, replaced by huge big box stores and small hot dog and ice cream stands simply fade away, replaced by large food franchises that dot every small town. The corner grocer is long gone as are all the small stationery, card and hardware stores. Big corporations operate efficiently benefitting from economies of scale and have the resources to weather the down times in the economy. But they are also lifeless, presenting the same face and mundane merchandise in every town.

This is an excellent novel that confronts the reader with several important themes, including a criticism of food fashion, the ties of community, our connectedness to the earth and a warning about globalization. I really enjoyed it.

arch and funny and relevant

I really thoroughly enjoyed Stanley Park. If like me, you're a foodie, you will love this book which chronicles a period of Chef Jeremy Papier's career. He has a rather eccentric father, a professor who chooses to live in Stanley Park (a huge park in Vancouver) to research his area better.
I found Jeremy to be a very likeable character - he's very human. I mean that in a way that he makes mistakes and he's not so great with money (something I can relate to), yet he's very passionate about cooking.

Stanley Park misses out on 5 stars only because I found some passages where Jeremy was researching for his father/with his father to be a little boring. However, the four star rating really does not do this book justice. I was rooting for Jeremy the whole way through, hoping he'd get his act together and pull off something spectacular - you'll have to read it to find out whether he does!

This book took me a few years to read which led to a rather disjointed effect, and in the end, what I was told by the person who recommended it was that 'it's one of those odd Canadian books that I quite enjoyed by the end' turned out to be a perfect description.

Yes. I did quite enjoy the end of this book, but it was rather slow going until about pg 325.

My main issue with it was that the main POV, Jeremy, was very anodyne. Described by an external POV as a merry prankster made me go -- what???? -- because he was the blandest Faust I'd encountered. There was no sense of anything merry or pranksterlike about him.

A lot of the early sections were about the languid descent into debt and poor choices. They were tiring to get through, and I always felt distant from the POV so his decisions never actually convinced me. It meant that although I enjoyed the denoument, I still felt it could have been sharper and better. The descriptions of food were lovely, but not visceral. I did not experience them, I was told about them.

I was rather put off by the way Jeremy interacted with the female characters also. It was like a list of people he had/should have/could have had a romantic relationship with, rather than people he did have a relationship with, colleagues and friends. Regardless of his 'sticking it to the man' approach, he did nothing but the very minimum to try to make up to Jules of Ruining Something Important to her, and there is no way he deserved her attention at all.

My favorite character of all was Kiwi Frederique, who _was_ a merry prankster, and was so delighted by the Events of The End that I was delighted along with her.

Oddly, though the book is called Stanley Park and it spends a lot of time in Stanley Park, I never got a good sense of the sort of space Stanley Park is. It needed a bit more grounding for the non-Vancouverites in the audience.

Also, as a final note, the review on the back of the book that compares this book favorably to Anthony Bourdain is Full Of Garbage. Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly had what this book lacked in spades, clarity, vividness, the sense of an experience of eating food, and personality, and that was his journeyman work. RIP. <3

I basically hated this book by the end of it. There's a lot of potentially interesting thematic stuff in it (homelessness in public parks, foodiness, groundedness/sense of place, Vancouver itself), but the whole thing is a hot mess that had me skimming just to get to the goddamn end by final quarter.

Jeremy Papier is a young and talented chef trying to make a farm-to-table restaurant float in crosstown in the late 90s when this was still a new thing. His father is an eccentric anthropologist living in Stanley Park with homeless people. As Jeremy struggles financially, he gets sucked into his father's life in the park at nighttime.

There are so many pointless side/back/off-stories that add nothing. Example: the main character's mother's history, the detailed backstory of homeless people in the park, an unsolved murder, a uncanny god-child, something about first nations people recolonizing the park? None of these things matter in the least. The dialogue is terrible. The late-nineties setting feels dated, and the stuff that should be cool just isn't anymore: "the Monkey's Paw Bistro"? ugh eew. Even the central love interest is romantic-comedy shallow: attraction, obstacle, resolution. The pacing of the book is horrible - you just want it to be over by the first main plot turn. The final denouement is the longest most drawn out piece of sappy pointlessness I've read in a while.

The most annoying thing about it stylistically is the faux-mysterious faux-cryptic "poetic" tone adopted at various passages, mostly as Jeremy is wandering around Stanley Park. Maybe the author thinks he's being edgy and cool by having bizarre non sequiturs or leaving simple chronological events mysteriously unfinished, but it is merely ridiculous and artificial. No, you cannot convince me that there is something 'deep' to be gleaned from all this - except maybe that this author tries very, very, hard.

The most successful parts of the book are around food, and take place in and around Jeremy's restaurant kitchen. Jeremy himself isn't a wholly uninteresting character (though pretty much everyone else is). A simpler story about a new restaurant in financial trouble and a complicated relationship with a father would have been so, so much better. This is a book where the flaws of form and content are deeply connected, and there's no easy fix - even an editor taking a hack at it wouldn't work because almost the whole thing is devoted to tangents with no beauty, no emotion, and no real stakes. Maybe very loosely-based movie could work.

I'm not going to finish this. I don't care about the protagonist, the oh-so-passionate chef who wants to serve "high end rubber-boot food." (Seems like that describes about about half the chef population, but this is painted as some sort of laudable, novel goal.) I don't care about the secondary characters, especially his father, who lives in a public park as part of an anthropology project on the homeless and is enigmatically remote and weird. Pages and pages of description about how the author used to be in a band has so far not inspired me to care that the author used to be in a band. And I definitely, definitely do not care about the protagonist's devotion to local food. OH MY GOD shut up already. This was written in 2001, when the local food thing was perhaps not as thoroughly over-hyped as it is now. But it's 2009, and WE GET IT already. The book is taking itself very seriously. And the whole thing feels like a pre-write. It needs thinning.

Would I be more invested if this story about local food were more local to me? If the main character's father were living in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park instead of Vancouver's Stanley Park? If the protagonist's precious "Monkey's Paw Bistro" (hello, annoying name) were located in SOMA? Maybe, but doubt it. Sorry to be so cranky. And in a way I'm sorry that I can't seem to drag myself through to the part where everything goes awry, and he gets bought out by Starbucks, and then solves a really old murder mystery. But life is short. Maybe I'll flip to the end.

DNFing this about 20% in. I could see this getting better, but am bit sure I'm invested enough to find out. I'm not clicking with the characters or the writing style. There may be some interesting ideas in this, but right now everyone feels a bit pretentious and out of touch, and not really like people I want to spend a whole book with.