Tuesday February 11 2025

Ricardo Valverde. | Photo courtesy of Suyo

While Peruvian restaurants in Vancouver are few and far between, Peru itself is highly regarded in culinary circles and is home to three of the restaurants making the World’s 50 Best Restaurants list. Suyo is Valverde’s way of bringing Peru’s dynamic food culture to Vancouver, while also serving as a canvas for his culinary creativity.

“There’s nothing like what I wanted to do in Vancouver having to do with Peruvian cuisine,” he says. “My concept [for Suyo] … is to have the Peruvian soul with a modern approach.”

A melting pot of flavours

Suyo’s menu has a multitude of dishes with a fusion of various cultural flavours. From Japanese prawn tempura to Spain’s chicharron, each dish is a celebration of Peruvian cuisine’s history and origins.

Peru’s cuisine has long been known for its blending of different cultural flavours. Those from Spain, Africa and Italy brought their own dishes and ingredients, and this forged a unique culinary landscape that is still evolving.

“[T]he Spanish brought paellas,” Valverde notes. “So, we have a lot of rice-based dishes because of that.”

Given this history, the process of creating a menu for Suyo was no easy feat. As one of the few Peruvian restaurants in the city, Valverde sought to include classic dishes familiar to the Peruvian community while also pushing the boundaries of culinary innovation.

“I understood that there was going to be people [who] were looking for familiar names with Peruvian cuisine,” he says. “So, we tried to touch on those but still give it our modern spin.”

A well-rounded experience

When crafting new menus for Suyo, Valverde likens his creative process to a quote by Peruvian singer Gian Marco.

“I thank God for giving me the gift or telling a love song or a love story in five minutes,” Valverde recites. “It’s the same for me. Like I wake up one day and [a dish idea] suddenly pops in my head and [it’s basically] 95 percent done… Most of the dishes, I imagine them first before I even taste them.”

While chefs tend to have a signature dish, Valverde admits that he does not have one. Instead, he takes pride in the effort and balance of each dish. This emphasis on balance is also applied to the other aspects of Suyo. As Valverde runs Suyo’s kitchen, bar manager Max Curzon-Price is given free rein to run Suyo’s bar and craft its menu.

“All I did for the bar, to be honest, is [bring] in someone that knows his craft well,” Valverde says. “The only thing we asked is that we had a couple of traditional drinks.”

Valverde’s goal of creating a well-rounded dining experience for customers has led to the 48-seat restaurant being packed practically every night, with diners coming back for both the food and drinks. The success of Suyo sees investors approaching Valverde in hopes of bringing the restaurant abroad, but the chef has yet to decide.

Instead, he is focused on keeping Suyo modern and fresh, ensuring that repeat diners can enjoy a new experience with each visit.

“Keeping it interesting and keeping it fun,” he says. “That’s how I see Suyo in five years.”

For more information, see www.suyo.ca

For more information on The World’s 50 Best Restaurants, see www.theworlds50best.com

Jasmine Sealy at the Whistler Writers Festival. | Photo courtesy of Jasmine Sealy 

“The most rewarding part of a residency for me is the connections that I make with people on campus, especially emerging writers, and even more especially [with] emerging writers of colour,” says Sealy, offering insight into her writing journey and her approach to mentorship in the literary world.

The author will participate in a conversation with fellow writer Kevin Chong, Feb. 26, where she will delve into themes from her book, The Island of Forgetting, and her creative writing process.

Grounded in cultural roots

Drawing from her Barbadian roots, The Island of Forgetting takes inspiration from the Greek mythological figure Calypso and reimagines her as a young, precocious teenager from Barbados. Sealy grew up in Barbados, receiving an education focused on Caribbean literature and the history of Indigenous peoples.

“I was raised in a very post-colonial era, where my teachers in Barbados centered our education on the Caribbean experience,” she says. “We read West Indian writers in literature classes, and our history lessons focused on our own story – from Indigenous populations to slave revolts and revolutions.”

She further notes how Barbados, although small in population, is a country that contains an infinite number of stories. For her, the challenge lies in creating space for these stories to be told in their diversity. This strong cultural foundation continues to influence her writing, where women of color, particularly Black and Caribbean women, take centre stage.

“I grew up in a place where my culture and my history were the center of the universe,” Sealy reflects. “Black women have played a really strong role in my life and in this book as well.”

Sealy, at 18, moved to Canada. And while she’d always been drawn to writing, it wasn’t until her early twenties that she started to write through a blog on the social networking site Tumblr.

“I started writing flash fiction, short prose pieces, stories that were happening in my life,” she recalls.

The real-time response on Tumblr from readers further validated her interest in writing. Sealy’s journey continued as she pursued creative writing at Simon Fraser University (SFU) and later at the University of British Columbia (UBC) where she earned her Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing.

“My novel was my master’s thesis,” she adds, noting how writing is now a life-long pursuit. “Writing is something I enjoy and something I’m good at, and so far, it has worked out in my life.”

Her debut novel, The Island of Forgetting, was a Best Book 2022 for CBC, The Globe & Mail and The Sunday Times (UK). It also won the 2023 Amazon Canada First Novel award.

Mentoring storytellers

As UBC School of Creative Writing’s inaugural Writer in Residence in 2023, Sealy found the most rewarding aspect to be connecting with emerging writers, especially those of colour and from marginalized backgrounds. She hopes to bring the same inclusive energy to Langara College, encouraging all students to seek her out.

“I want to make space for everyone,” she says. “I hope that people will come knock on my door, talk to me, and let’s talk about writing.”

It is important for Sealy that marginalized voices are heard and that their stories are not reduced to stereotypes. She emphasizes the need for gatekeepers, such as educators and literary figures, to recognize their influence.

“I’m being given a huge responsibility here because I am now being put into the position of a gatekeeper,” she says. “And everything that I say and do in response to this person’s work could have a huge effect on whether they continue to write at all or what kind of writing they choose to do.”

She believes this responsibility requires open-mindedness, particularly when it comes to unfamiliar topics and cultures. The writer hopes to carry out this responsibility by recognizing the value in everyone’s story and acknowledging the “multitude, infinite stories” that exist in cultures and subcultures around the world.

Sealy will be available Tuesdays and Wednesdays, from mid-January to mid-March. Information on securing an appointment and the format for submitting writings can be found at: https://langara.ca/departments/english/events/writer-in-residence

Jessea Lu floating on water’s surface in 7 Beats Per Minute. | Photo courtesy of Intuitive Pictures and the National Film Board of Canada 

The first step to telling a story is feeling it, says Mongol-Chinese Canadian filmmaker Yuqi Kang whose desire to shoot a documentary about freediving led to her own training in the sport for 7 Beats Per Minute (Feb. 11 at Capitol 6). That film and Quebec-based animator Véronique Paquette’s short film, Loca (Feb 13 & Feb 15 at Intrepid Theatre), are part of the National Film Board of Canada’s eight features and shorts to be screened at the Victoria Film Festival (Feb. 7 to 16).

“I decided to learn freediving myself…to understand what it takes to dive in the ocean,” Kang adds. “The feelings and the visuals, the emotional and physical journey, [it] would take for somebody to do this.”

Directing rebirth

Kang’s 7 Beats Per Minute follows freediving champion Jessea Lu’s return to freediving at the site of a near-death experience in 2018 when she was unresponsive for four minutes – a story Kang sees as Lu’s rebirth through her confrontation with physical and mental traumas.

“What’s really happening in her life in this chapter is about [being] reborn from that experience, to be opened to another perspective,” Kang says. “I really want the audience to understand who Jessea is.”

The director adds that the choice to place the near-death experience in the middle of the film rather than the beginning was a deliberate one, allowing audiences to see the freediving champion as a regular person with vulnerabilities. Inspired by Lu’s wide-ranging talents – as a professional athlete, a clinical pharmacologist with a PhD and a graduate of Peking University – Kang first reached out to Lu via social media, resulting in a coffee meeting that lasted past midnight.

“What really drew me to the story is that Jessea is a person of colour, a BIPOC female person in North America,” Kang says. “I feel like she represents myself and many other people like [me].”

Five years in the making, the documentary also highlights their growing connection, blurring Kang’s roles as a filmmaker and friend to Jessea. The director hopes that viewers will feel immersed in the world of freediving, appreciating the sport’s peaceful and scary sides, while feeling hopeful that their own traumas can be resolved.

“Jessea pushed me into that very uncomfortable zone to be more vulnerable, to open myself up more to that,” Kang adds. “And it made me overall a much stronger storyteller and filmmaker.”

Dancing with ink

“I wanted to liberate myself in both [tango and animation],” says Paquette of the inspirations behind her first featured film Loca. Named after a widely used Argentine tango song, Paquette’s film portrays a female silhouette swept into a dance of liberating self-discovery – which allowed the creator to dance with ink.

“I had a personal quest to find a good balance between control and freedom,” she adds. “This film is a good meeting between both.”

Having danced the Argentinian tango for over 20 years, Paquette sees it as a multisensory experience of responding to other dancers, the music, the space, and even one’s breath. Seeing dance as a language capable of crossing linguistic barriers, she notes how the tango is about building connections with the present moment – a theme that Loca expands to connecting with oneself.

“You can’t just be there for the other,” says Paquette of the approach to dancing shown in the film. “If you’re not there [yourself], it’s not working.”

Paquette had originally planned to animate the dance scenes by imagining herself dancing tango. After finding the process challenging, she persuaded choreographer friends to pose the different moves, allowing her to capture photos from various angles. Starting with traditional animation, Paquette then used ink and palette knife to personalize the final result, translating these dance moves into what she sees as the two universes of Loca.

“She was not feeling [well] at the beginning,” Paquette says of the film’s narrative. “And at the end, she’s alive with all those experiences in her life.”

Paquette also worked with a musician of the bandoneon, a common instrument in tango music, adding what she calls “the breath of the film.” She hopes that audiences will experience Loca as “a good breath” and feel inspired to move to their own intuitions.

“I had good comments from tango dancers about the general feeling and the experience of music in the medium,” she adds. “It’s started a lot of really good discussion about connection [and] about music.”

For more information, see: www.victoriafilmfestival.com