Where should I eat in Vancouver, and which local food or drink is worth trying?

Vancouver's claim on sushi is not about proximity to Japan; the city rewired the food. Hidekazu Tojo arrived from Osaka in 1971, aged 21, when Vancouver had just four Japanese restaurants, and found customers who would not eat seaweed or raw fish. His answer was to build the roll inside out — rice on the outside, the nori hidden, cooked Dungeness crab and avocado inside — and the stream of visitors from Los Angeles who loved it gave the Tojo-maki its lasting name: the California roll. In 1974 he followed it with the BC roll, barbecued salmon skin standing in for the saltwater eel of the Japanese original, and on October 6, 1988, he opened his own room, Tojo's; in 2016 Japan named him a Japanese Cuisine Goodwill Ambassador.

The spot prawn is the city's other signature, and it keeps office hours of six to eight weeks a year. Spot prawns are the largest of the seven commercial shrimp species on Canada's West Coast — big females exceed 9 inches (23 cm) — reddish-brown with white bars and the white tail spots that name them. Fishers work baited traps on the rocky bottom at 130 to 330 feet (40–100 m), a low-bycatch method the Ocean Wise program recommends, and the harvest totals about 2,450 tonnes a year. The season opens in mid-May — May 14 in both 2025 and 2026 — and the Chefs' Table Society of BC and the Pacific Prawn Fishermen's Association mark it with the Spot Prawn Festival at False Creek Fishermen's Wharf, beside Granville Island, where boats sell the catch live off the dock.

The everyday eating sits a short ferry ride away. Granville Island's Public Market, open since 1979, lines up around 50 stalls of British Columbia produce — smoked salmon, Fraser Valley berries, baked goods — and down the Fraser at Steveston, Canada's largest commercial fishing harbor, boats sell their catch directly from the wharf.

On a May afternoon at Fishermen's Wharf the boats sit low with their tanks running, chefs in aprons queuing on the same dock as home cooks, and the prawns come up still kicking — translucent, banded red and white, big enough to mistake for small lobsters.

Most of the catch never stays for dinner. Over 90 percent of BC's commercial spot prawn harvest is exported to Asia, which makes the six-week live season the one window when Vancouverites can eat their own prawns straight out of local water.

• Lunch — Graze the Granville Island Public Market: smoked salmon first, berries and baking to carry out to the docks.
• Afternoon — In season, be at False Creek Fishermen's Wharf when the boats sell live spot prawns, and buy them the same day they were trapped.
• Dinner — Sit at Tojo's counter for an omakase built around the rolls the chef created, starting with the California roll he still makes with fresh crab.

The California roll's paternity is genuinely disputed — Los Angeles chefs, including Ichiro Mashita of Tokyo Kaikan, made inside-out rolls in the same era, and both cities tell the story as their own. And the prawn calendar is unforgiving: outside the mid-May to late-June window, spot prawns in Vancouver are the frozen product, good but not the event the live season is.

If the trip falls in prawn season, book the sushi dinner around it rather than instead of it. The timing question in this group explains why late spring is Vancouver's best window.