God will protect, but dancing in a small boat is still not a good idea. – Irish proverb.


No doubt that bit of folk wisdom would be equally true for a tiny, perfect dining room carefully floating on a layer of plastic bottles.

Saturday night saw the “launch” of the School of Fish Foundation’s floating dining room – basically a covered 8’ x 20’ platform constructed from recycled plywood and other materials, and held afloat by 17,000 discarded plastic bottles retrieved from the ocean. As a dining experience, one could say the inaugural media dinner totally rocked, although thankfully for those of us prone to sea sickness, the raft itself only did so very slightly.

Tethered to the False Creek boat dock in front of C restaurant, and sporting not much more than a single 12-seat table and a large gently swaying crystal chandelier (that could rival the one in the Shangri-la Hotel’s bathroom), the “SS SoFF” looked like someone had shanghaied a dining room set from a Yaletown furniture showroom and set it adrift inside a cargo container.

Needless to say, this was not your usual waterfront fish and chip shack. What was set before us instead was a formal setting of crisp white linen, fine china, flickering candles and tall stemmed wine glasses. On the menu: a 6-course, sustainable seafood dinner paired with organic or biodynamic wines. And all of it, thanks to the efforts of a ship shape team.

School of Fish Foundation founder Shannon Ronalds, who acted as sommelier for our meal, had also worked on the carpenters’ team, sawing the lumber and hammering architect Matt Kirk-Buss’s structural design together. (See the construction video here.) Restaurant owner and long time champion of sustainable seafood, Harry Kambolis, had stepped up as venue host, while Chef Rob Clark’s white uniformed kitchen crew formed relay teams to literally run the food down the gangplank from the galley at C restaurant to the dining deck. The speedy chef bucket brigade was a sight that proved so photogenic on the night of our visit, it actually tested the raft’s stability when all diners scuttled down to one end to snap photos.

Was it the dining experience of a lifetime, as billed? That would depend on what kind of gastronomic life you’ve been living. However, eating alfresco on a balmy, bug-free evening with sunset, twinkling harbour lights and a full midsummer moon lighting up the scenery around you, has to be as spectacular as dining can get in this city – and one of those occasions that tends to make you smug about being a Vancouverite.

In our minds, it was an event that also revealed Ronalds as a brilliant marketer.

In today’s hyper competitive info market, where sales pitches and cause du jours fall on both media and consumers like so much rain, getting attention for any product or idea can be a challenge. The smart tactic is to deliver the message within the context of entertainment or spectacle. It’s the piece of cake wrapped around the bitter pill of inconvenient truth, and Ronalds, with his resto-boat idea, seems to understand this concept completely. After all, if it works with dinner tables suspended in the air by construction cranes, or for meals served in the dark, why not a dining room bobbing atop pop bottles?

The established media who can’t resist an ear-perking sound bite, especially one combined with a trendy eco angle, has certainly taken the bait - zeroing in on the novelty factor of an aquatic dining room that is supported by what is essentially ocean garbage. And it has certainly pushed all the right buttons for the “hey-guess-what-I’m-doing-now?” social media types who make a priority of getting first posting status for their twitters and photos online. (One fellow in our party, fork in one hand and mobile device in the other, and obviously a believer in the saturation method, managed to blast off more than 25 tweets over the three hour period, while never missing a beat with his dinner.)

Even for the crowds passing by after the fireworks show in English Bay, the vision of fine dining on the dock proved irresistible camera fodder as they stopped to gawk over the sea wall.

All that being said however, it was vitally important that the message not be lost under the spectacle. On the surface, the evening may have been a fun meal in an unusual setting but our job as media was to go forth and be fishers of men regarding the School of Fish Foundation’s primary agenda - to install seafood sustainability awareness programs into the curriculum of culinary training institutes throughout the world. It’s a goal that Ronalds has pledged to raise $100,000 in order to achieve, and to which the proceeds from the floating dining room will be applied.

The fact that seafood sustainability is a global issue, as opposed to a local one, was reflected in the ingredients for each dish, which were chosen primarily for their compatibility with conservation awareness and not necessarily for their origin. While the spot prawns, scallops, and northern coho salmon provided by Organic Oceans were sourced from British Columbia, other items, such as the farmed Indonesian tilapia fish, were imported from an eco-conscious firm based in Florida. The wines (organic or biodynamic) came from BC (Tinhorn Creek, Twisted Tree and Summerhill), but also from California (Benzinger) and New Zealand (Mud House).

As Ronalds stated: “In the course of their careers, young chefs tend to travel and work all over the world. We don’t want to anchor an association between sustainability and BC spot prawns to someone who next year may be working in France. We want the future generation of chefs and restaurant owners to be thinking about ecological stewardship in the international sense – to keep that philosophy with then wherever they go.”

To see that dream realized the Foundation will need to cast a mighty net. Yet, according to a Chinese proverb “He who can see heaven in the waters will see the fish in the trees.” Perhaps a moonlit night on False Creek is a good a place as any to start learning how to look differently at the future of our seafood and how we must take responsibility for it.

Dinners will be served for 60 more days, and then after that the structure will be dismantled with all materials (including the plastic bottles) recycled or repurposed. "Although it would be great", Ronalds admits, "if other cities would pick up on the idea and the floating dining room and its message could be sent on a “voyage” around the world."

If you would like to reserve a seat for an upcoming evening, or the entire dining room for a private party, call 778-997-6977, or contact the School of Fish Foundation at www.schooloffishfoundation.org. Tickets will be priced at $175 until July 31^st, and then $215 after that.

After the program ends in Vancouver, Shannon Ronalds has another promotional idea in support of sustainability that he’d like to try. One, he emphasizes, that does not come with a carpentry job.

See photos and menu below.

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