The Rise And Fall of Magic Wolf takes deep dive into restaurants

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I’ve come across many a chef who has pivoted from other careers — engineering, accounting, marketing, art, biology, law, medicine — to do what they really wanted to do, which was cook.

Vancouver writer and novelist Timothy Taylor was a pivoter. He began his working life as an MBA in the high net income world of banking before aborting that mission to, not cook, but the next best thing — immerse himself in writing about it.

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Spoiler alert! He succeeds. In his debut 2001 novel, Stanley Park, nominated for the prestigious Giller Prize, the protagonist is a chef, struggling to hold onto his restaurant while navigating a life that includes an eccentric anthropologist father. Along with Stanley Park and many food-related magazine articles, Taylor wrote Foodville: Biting Dispatches from a Food-Obsessed City — essays about culinary experiences and culture. In much of his work, he’s been drone-like, circling and zeroing in on food.

His recently published novel, The Rise and Fall of Magic Wolf, takes a deeper, confident dive into the culture of chefs, cooking, and restaurants. In this go-round, Taylor blends contemporary issues of abuse and toxic behaviours in restaurants with his impressive knowledge of cooking, cuisines and the opera of running restaurants. All through it, you intermittently salivate as he talks food. Cockles and clams cooked in sweet Barsac wine. Discs of aspic suspended with spider crabmeat and dill flower. Thrushes on skewers, served with baguette slices grilled in duck fat. Baby cuttlefish grilled in a puff box. Udon carbonara with salmon roe. Spot prawn tamagoyaki.  Parmesan sablés on tomato jelly with parsley oil. And so on.

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He consulted with Adam Busby, a friend and former Vancouver chef and current general manager of Culinary Institute of America Napa, for insider information on restaurant kitchens, especially in France, during the late 1990s and 2000s. “I wanted to look at some of the ways the trade was darker and more challenging than foodies might appreciate. They were tough and brutal places to work, historically speaking. I wanted to drive my character to a crisis moment with that type of behaviour. It isn’t based on anything I drew from Vancouver restaurants but I am informed to some extent — a crisis of this kind broke out in my Creative Writing Department (at UBC). It wasn’t handled well. I had a little closer exposure and I wanted to explore the fallout.”

Taylor is steeped in food knowledge, having read, researched and cooked. He devoured Jacques Pépin’s La Technique: The Fundamental Techniques of Cooking and relished La Methode, cover to cover.

“It was my mini-cooking school,” he says. Just prior to the pandemic, he took a professional class at the Tokyo Sushi Academy to learn about Japanese cuisine for a New York Times article.

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France, the wellspring of food epiphanies and awakenings, triggered something.

“I was intrigued by how the small country restaurants worked. My imagination exploded,” he says of the experience that incubated Stanley Park into existence. Taylor remembers the exact moment, in Pellerey, deep in the food and wine terroir of Burgundy. “I was standing near the source of the Seine River and it was like a religious experience. I felt I was near the heart of something really important.”

His self-analysis of why two of his novels focus on restaurant drama?

“I think writers often have a profession they look at with a bit of admiration, maybe envy, and are drawn to the human drama,” he explains. “It could be athletes, police, doctors. It’s the cooking trade that draws me in. What cooks do, the lives they live. I think it had something to do with my mother. She was a really, intensely natural cook and I saw her in action as a little kid. I’m curious and work out on the page what these things mean to me. I’m revisiting my past. It’s a way to connect with family history.” Those who know Taylor would see a lot of connective tissue between his fiction and reality.

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And you might think cooking and writing are worlds apart. Not for Taylor.

“In a restaurant, there’s a huge transformation from product to plate to delivery, and in fine dining there’s a reverential hush when it’s delivered. But back in the kitchen, it’s a pit of inferno with fire, blades, ego, hierarchies, and sometimes, it’s unfriendly. Novels are like that — flames, crashing, banging of things, feelings of failing, getting into the weeds, being completely slammed, losing complete sight of what you’re trying to do. And you push it out and make it look effortless.”  Words from a dazzling writer!

The restaurants he patronizes aren’t Michelin anointed.

“I look for restaurants doing one thing well. A brilliant smoke shack or an approachable neighbourhood bistro like Au Comptoir on Fourth Avenue. I like to know they’re pursuing something with integrity and that, for me, is a worthwhile place to go on a night out.”  Vancouver cuisine, he says, is a pastiche of global influences. “My son,” he says, “eats the world and doesn’t think about it. It’s not ethnic cuisine. You get the feeling here that there is no somewhere else.”

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I met Taylor at Cafe Medina where he’ll launch The Rise and Fall of Magic Wolf. It will double as a fundraiser for the B.C. Hospitality Foundation as a thank you to the restaurant industry. The BCHF helps hospitality and tourism workers without health benefits who find themselves in financial crisis. Cafe Medina will donate its $10 charitable reservation fees from October to December. The Jane and Timothy Taylor Foundation will donate another $5,000. Taylor will donate royalties from Book Warehouse sales of his book until the end of the year and publicist  Dana Lee Consulting has pledged $2,500.

“They really understand what I’m trying to do with this book,” says Taylor. “It’s payback for the years of inspiration and gives meaning to the book launch. I’ve been involved for years with the Writers Trust Woodcock Fund, which distributes emergency funding to writers in times of crisis and need. The BCHF is a very similar organization.” Attendees can donate to the fund at the event as well.

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