Quilicum -- At This Native American Restaurant, The Cook Keeps It Simple

-- Quilicum. 1724 Davie Street, Vancouver, B.C. 604-681-7044. Reservations recommended. Open seven days for dinner, 5-11 p.m., and for lunch Monday through Friday, 11:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m.

We were knee deep in mud on a fern-choked trail that skirts the west coast of Vancouver Island, days from real food and mighty tired of gorp, when a companion started talking about the Quilicum restaurant.

``Native West Coast food,'' he said, proceeding to launch into a detailed description of salmon belly strips . . . crisp on the outside, tender as butter on the inside. And goat ribs . . . crunchy and tangy. And bannock . . . a kind of adopted native bread-cake.

By the third day of our trek, the food of the Quilicum had assumed such heroic proportions that the first thing we did (after showering and carving the mud from our boots) was make a mad dash for Vancouver.

One ``potlatch dinner'' later, we decided our friend hadn't been exaggerating.

The Quilicum is part experience, part exploration. The experience part is the restaurant itself. It's buried in the basement of a Davie Street building. The place is modeled after a longhouse - cozy-close and dark with cedar support poles and gravel pathways down the middle of the floor. Diners sit on cushions at low tables with pits for their feet.

Meals are served in hand-carved potlatch feast bowls adorned with bird heads and painted in the bold blacks, whites and reds of

Northwest Native American art. Those bowls, by the way, all were carved by one of the owners, Art Bolton. The walls are lined with more bowls, along with spirit masks and totems . . . all of which are for sale.

If this sounds familiar, you've got a good memory. Quilicum means ``return of the people'' in Chinook and, essentially, that's what has happened with the restaurant. You probably remember it as the Muckamuck, a long-time Vancouver landmark. But the Muckamuck closed in 1980 and opened five years later with a new name and new owners.

Bolton, a Tsimshian artist, and his wife, Bonnie Thorne, a Nootka, have made the place as authentic as they can. The recipes came from Bolton's cousin George Ross, who in turn got them from his grandmother. The food all comes, one way or another, from native Canadians.

The smoked oolichans and seaweed are from Prince Rupert, B.C.; the herring roe from the Queen Charlotte Islands; the wind-dried salmon from Vancouver Island; and the goat from someone in the Northwest Territories. Even the fiddlehead ferns come, roundabout, from an Indian source. Though the ferns arrive at the restaurant in a commercially frozen package, they're picked by natives back in the province of New Brunswick.

These items, basically, are at the heart of Quilicum's food. But it's not so much what's in the dishes as how they are prepared. And the joy of Native American cooking is its simplicity. After all, how complicated could you get 100 years ago when you were whipping up dinner on the beach for 200 people?

Much of what the Quilicum serves is barbecued. To most folks hovering over the family Hibachi on the back porch, barbecue means ribs slathered with spicy tomato sauce. When Native Americans say barbecued, they mean grilled.

``Barbecueing to me is cooking over alder so you get the natural flavor from the wood,'' Thorne said. ``There's no sauces on any of the barbecue while it's cooking.''

If this were a real potlatch, Thorne explained, she would take an entire salmon, butterfly it, thread skewers through it sideways to hold it open and prop the whole thing upright, leaning toward the fire with the skin facing the heat. The traditional way is to cook fish three quarters through, then turn it briefly to sear the fleshy side.

Obviously, Bolton and Thorne can't stake their salmon in the restaurant. But they can still cook it skin-side-down over alder until it's three-quarters done, then flip it.

The menu lists the familiar: salmon, Alaska black cod, poached halibut, smoked oysters and prawns. But there are also the other goodies.

Everyone should try oolichan grease at least once. In the old days, oolichan grease was the bottom line for Native American cooking. You dipped fish and bannock in it, mixed it with berries, even used it as cough medicine.

The taste, to the uninitiated, is, uh, unique. Personally, we were split on the stuff. Bill thought it was like melted butter, albeit with a fishy aftertaste. Yvette thought it was closer to smoked motor oil.

Smoked oolichans - the fish, not the oil - are another thing entirely. There is no argument here. Each small smelt-like fish is crispy, bursting as you bite down to flood your mouth with a warm, velvet, smoky flavor.

Bannock evolved around the turn of the century, Thorne said. And though it has become synonymous with Northwest Native American cooking, it actually was adopted from early white traders. Like oolichan grease, there are dozens of recipes for bannock. The Quilicum's comes out like a hearty cake-bread, chock full of individual grains that give it character, and topped with a crisp crust.

Soapallalie, also called Indian ice cream, is another thing you either love or hate. Soapberry juice is mixed with water and sugar. The name comes from the fact that when it's whipped, it foams up.

By itself, it tastes rather like sweet shaving cream laced with quinine. But Thorne and Bolton serve it over cold raspberry soup, transforming the whole thing into a woven tapestry of mingled tastes - sweet, bitter, smooth, foamy. And that is really quite marvelous.

When we visit Quilicum, we always have a pitched battle trying to decide what to order. The easy way out is to get the Potlatch Platter. That's a taste of just about everything: smoked cod, oysters and prawns, salmon tidbits, barbecued caribou and side dishes of steamed ferns, wild rice and a sweet potato paste that we dearly love.

Failing that, there's something called the Quilicum Special, which features all those parts of the salmon you usually throw away. ``After you fillet your fish, this is what's left over . . . the back of the neck, the tail and the belly strips. And people don't realize those are the best parts,'' Art chuckled.

``What we do,'' he explained, ``is split the tail along the bone line so it lays flat on the grill, cut the belly strip so that there are two pieces and also split the neck meat. We dip this in vegetable oil . . . in the old days, we used oolichan grease. Then we lay the pieces flat, skin side down on the grill.

``The larger pieces . . . the neck and tail . . . we cook about 15 minutes before flipping. The belly strips only stay on five minutes. Then we flip it for maybe five more minutes and it's done.''

The timing, Bolton added, all depends on the heat of your fire and the size of your salmon. Also, though Bolton doesn't make a big point of it, one of his secrets is that he uses real alder wood, not just chips.

The finished tidbits are so crisp on the outside the skin actually cracks when you bite into it, while the inside is so juicy and tender it virtually melts on your tongue.

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SALMON SOUP;

4 servings;

;

8 to 12 ounces fresh salmon;

2 medium potatoes;

1/2 medium onion;

Salt and pepper to taste;

Water to cover vegetables and fish;

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1. Cut the salmon into 1-inch cubes. Put in a pot with just enough water to cover the fish. Boil until no longer translucent (5 to 10 minutes).;

2. Cube the potatoes and slice the onion, and put in a separate pot. Add enough water to cover and boil until the potato is tender (10 to 15 minutes).;

3. Add the vegetable-and-water mixture to the salmon and salmon stock. Simmer 20 minutes and serve.;

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In the old days, this dish was whipped up using fern stalks or twigs, and sweetened with berries. And only soapberries - also known as buffalo berries - will do, as no other berry foams up correctly.

So if you visit Quilicum and enjoy the Soapallalie, be sure to buy one of their 3-ounce jars of soapberry juice (at $6 Canadian per jar). The restaurant's yearly supply (about 10 gallons) comes from one lone woman, who picks the berries from Vancouver to Banff, Alberta, during their three-week season each August. Quilicum is one of the few retail sources of the juice, short of finding, picking and preserving the wild berries yourself.;

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SOAPALLALIE;

(``INDIAN ICE CREAM'');

4 servings;

;

1 1/2 cups raspberries;

2 tablespoons sugar or honey;

1 ounce of soapberry juice or 2 heaping teaspoons of berries;

1 cup cold water;

1/4 cup sugar (or more to taste);

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1. In a blender, blend the raspberries and 2 tablespoons sugar (or honey) until smooth. Chill.;

2. Mix the soapberry juice or berries with cold water and whip on a high setting with an electric hand mixer until the consistency of meringue. Add the 1/4 cup sugar and whip another 3 to 5 minutes. If the taste is too bitter, add more sugar, a few tablespoons at a time.;

3. Spoon the whipped soapberries over the chilled raspberry mix. Serve immediately.;

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YVETTE CARDOZO AND BILL HIRSCH ARE FREE-LANCE WRITERS LIVING ON COUGAR MOUNTAIN.