Yew Needles: Sometimes it Pays to Know Your Botanicals

After a lengthy renovation period, tonight will see the opening party for the Four Season Vancouver Hotel’s new Yew restaurant + lounge. (See details here.).

No doubt this week’s press will be filled with awe struck reports on the million dollar design work, the trendy food and the party hardy, Holt Renfrew-draped glitterati in attendance. (Let's hope none of them start their reviews with "When I'm Calling Yew-w-w-".) But for our money, we will be more interested to see if GM Guy Rigby is going to make good on his (or his public relations writer’s) promise that the new restaurant will “provide a new level of sophistication for West Coast design and cuisine.�

Frankly, in this town, that’s a provocative claim, especially when coming from a company who in more recent years, has yet to demonstrate any interest in the current Vancouver dining scene as it existed before they were moved to give it a leg up.

Granted, the Four Seasons Hotel chain is an international company with a global clientele and a brand image to maintain. This sets them in a whole other category, and all that is fine. But are they in a position to lead the way when it comes to our regional identity .. design, cuisine, or otherwise? Not everyone has to be, nor should be locavore. But presuming that the BC business sector and those who travel here to trade with them will be a major part of their target market, one might wonder why they did not at least consult a few BC forest industry executives on their choice of restaurant name.

Considering that the “rare indigenous� Pacific Yew tree with its poisonous berries (also know as the Western Yew or Taxus Brevifolia), has traditionally been considered by foresters to be a garbage or scrap tree of “no economic value�, indeed a kind of botanical pest, it makes an odd choice to represent the hotel’s desire to “celebrate the essence of British Columbia.� In fact, in Britain and Europe, the Yew is associated with graveyards and sadness. To give them the benefit of the doubt, perhaps in our eco-conscious times, they see it as a tree representative of B.C.'s future rather than its past. (Yew bark does hold some promise as an cancer-fighting ingredient and its sustainable wood as an artistic medium.)

If trees that made a more significant contribution to our province's history could have been honoured, and if other claims seem undiplomatic in regards to the local restaurant community, then blame it on a cultural innocence that is exposed when decisions are greenlighted by high level executives living outside the province, and when concept planners and designers are also imported (in this case from San Francisco).

Not that this hasn’t happened before. In some ways it is reminiscent of the time when the Fairmont Hotels first opened the Chateau Whistler and the original wall paper and carpets they chose for the hotel were covered in a pattern of oak leaves found exclusively on trees native to Ontario.

Trees are not just trees? Well, who knew? Not me, and obviously, not Yew.