by Martin Nichols
Whistler...ya gotta love it. And if you go there you gotta visit the funkiest place in town to eat. Great food, great selection, eco-friendly, great people working there, and it won't cost you an arm and a leg (a real bonus...don't get me wrong, I love Whistler but holy cow can it do a number on the old net worth). I'm talking about the brilliantly named Gone Village Eatery and Moguls Coffee Shop right in the main Village Square.
Best of all, they agreed to hang a whole bunch of my work there for the month of May (huge thanks to the tireless Jules for setting this up with Lauren, the owner). Of course, she did manage to find the only restaurant in Whistler with three rooms, necessitating another round of print production and framing (sorry about the hairy deadline, Les) and working out how to get all 25 pieces up there in one Jeep (thank you Rita for the weekend Jeep swap: 4-door for 2, did the trick).
OK, so it's Whistler...mountain country, snow, skiing, boarding and all that. Thing is, I've never done any serious shooting up there so the cunning plan was to call it the "Un-Whistler Show" and give people a break from snow pictures. How well it goes down of course only time will tell, but for the record we filled one room with landscapes of the Sunshine Coast, one with the West Coast of Vancouver Island, and one with people.
One thing I'm not is a food critic, so I won't go into the ins and outs of the cuisine, although the breakfast burrito was effing fantastic...I'll just say that it's my kinda place. And it's obviously many people's kind of place as it was busy from the moment it opened on Sunday. We know because we were there well before it opened at something like 0530 to get started hanging pictures. And if the variety of people we met while there for just those few hours is anything to go by then the only word for the clientele is eclectic; the only adjective that couldn't be ascribed to anyone in there was boring.
Visitors from everywhere flock to Whistler year-round and there was no shortage of engaging characters taking advantage of what was on offer, but maybe the best evidence that Moguls/Gone is the real thing is that the locals go there...say no more.
Anyway, many thanks to owner Lauren and the incredible Ami and Kate for all their help, and of course to Jules for not leaving me to hang on my own.
Whistler...ya gotta love it.
