You don't exactly have to be a libertarian to think maybe North Vancouver city counsellors are being heavy handed when they talk about banning the restaurant drive-through window.
The decision is built on the moral high ground of our day: concern for the environment. And certainly no one can deny that idling cars at the drive-through window add to the total carbon emissions of the region.
Still, there are apparently only a small handful of drive-through windows in the entire North Vancouver region. The reduction in carbon output attributable to the ban wouldn't be modest so much as it would be infinitesimal.
I suppose you could argue that all noble initiatives have to start somewhere. But even so, something about the ban strikes me as ridiculous. I say this particularly since we live in a hyper-foodie town; a significant part of our civic identity is derived from our patterns of dining out.
If we're prepared to hand over to city counsellors the power to shape that most important part of our social commons, wouldn't there be a long list of bans that would rank higher in priority?
I can think of a dozen with hardly any effort. If you read the food chatter online - eGullet, Chowhound, Epicurious, etc. - you may recognize some of these since they regularly show up in those "worst restaurant trend" features. In other words, many people find these elements of the foodie scene annoying. And, I say, let's be annoyed no longer. Invoke the iron fist of the City of North Vancouver: Ban 'em.
Ban menus with more than 80 items. If you are offering both pizza and matzo ball soup (and pan-Asian rice bowls) in your restaurant, you have no idea what you're doing. Nothing is likely to be good without focus.
Ban menus on which every item is spelled out with techniques and supplier names. It is unnecessary to tell us in which part of Langley the carrot was grown. "Local" will do. Although please ban any waiter from offering the table "local water." That would be tap water then, right?
Ban any reviewer who writes 25 consecutive positive reviews. Also, ban reviewers who do not make their assessment incognito. "The service was excellent." Well, of course the service was excellent. They knew you were writing a review!
Here's an easy one: Ban cologne and perfume in the dining room. Cellphones may be set to vibrate and it's none of my business who you talk to during your meal. The D&G, though, is really not working with my lamb shank.
Ban any restaurant so large that floor managers need to speak with servers via phone headsets.
Ban foam except that found on beer and cappuccino. It is clear that block of sponge that tastes like corn chowder is innovative. It is not clear in which way it is better than the corn chowder from which it is derived. And what did corn chowder ever do that required renovation anyway?
Ban burning vanilla beans with laser beams and using the smoke to treat the wine glass in advance of pouring the pinot noir. Admittedly, there is only one restaurant in the world I've ever heard of doing this (Moto in Chicago), but Vancouver could send a message here.
Un-ban Emeril Lagasse and ban Mario Batali for a while instead.
Ban chocotinis (which are not martinis), duo burgers (which demonstrate a lack of commitment), and any dish containing gold leaf (which goes beyond pretension to approach actual insanity).
And once we're at this point, we might as well just acknowledge that drive-through windows are really only ever found at fast-food joints, and ban fast food entirely.
As Morgan Spurlock and Eric Schlosser and Richard Linklater and many others have by now exhaustively proven, fast food is really extraordinarily bad for the environment. And for you. It's probably only an improvement on smoking insofar as it's not yet proven you can become obese merely by inhaling the fumes of dirty French-fry oil secondhand.
Nevertheless, we all know that there won't be any fast-food ban (or any of the bans I've suggested above) because such bans would be cranky, inflexible and obnoxious. They would suggest to the world a small-town Presbyterian unwillingness to just let people do whatever the hell they want when they dine out.
And I'm sure nobody in North Vancouver would want the world to think of them that way.
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