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About a dozen friends are coming over tonight for dinner and the hockey game, says Iron Chef Rob Feenie. On his kitchen stove is a large pot of Bolognese sauce, thick with veal and pork, that he’ll finish with “cream and tons of cheese” and toss with tagliatelle. Also on the menu: garlic bread and “a garlicky, Parmesan-y, anchovy-y, over-the-top caesar salad”. He’ll roast a couple of chickens, make a batch of béarnaise sauce, chop up a loin of albacore tuna along with avocado, and dress both with an Asian-influenced vinaigrette, and set it all out on the big, round kitchen table for people to serve themselves. “It’s all family-style at home,” he says.

Granted, the meal is a little more labour-intensive than most of us would have the time or the skill for, but at the core, it’s simple, unpretentious, tasty food. And that’s how Feenie predicts we’ll soon be eating in restaurants. Not that fine dining will ever end, he says. “There’ll still be special-occasion places.” He names Le Crocodile, Bishop’s, Il Giardino, and other mainstays. But the general direction? Casual.

Some Vancouver establishments have already nailed what’s happening, he feels: “Andrey Durbach has hit the niche with La Buca—he’s
under the radar with a lot of media. Fuel and Bistrot Bistro, Crave…” He also cites Boneta, for its really funky room. “Look at what Salt did, although I wish [co-owner Sean Heather]…could make more of his own charcuterie to make it more real.”

Real is an important word to Feenie, who is convinced that the whole “El Bulli spume, foam” school of molecular gastronomy is toast. A kitchen is not a laboratory. “I would rather make you the best burger, Bolognese, best schnitzel you’ve ever had,” Feenie continues. “My heart has always been in casual. Casual is real; it’s not phony.” Dollars do come into it. “I look at the people in my generation,” he says. “Cost is a big factor.” Friends tonight include a teacher and someone in the meat industry, and Feenie says the “chefs I work with all have fairly large mortgages.”

Cookbooks get his imagination roaring. Almost all in the stack bought earlier today have the word bistro in their title. The one that doesn’t is
David Nicholls’s Off Duty: The World’s Greatest Chefs Cook at Home.

He doesn’t hold out much hope for torturous pairings of ingredients. Citing basic combinations like strawberries and cream or apples and caramel, he wonders why people mess with a good thing just for the sake of being different. “When you have to sit and struggle with what you want to make…” His voice trails off in puzzlement. “Make what you know.”

So what else is in store for Vancouver restaurantgoers? Feeding into the mix is the “locavore” megatrend. “It’s got so that people want to know where their goat cheese or spinach is coming from,” he says. While his new culinary role as food-concept architect at Cactus Club Cafe undeniably means painting on a far larger canvas than before, he vows to continue to work with local suppliers. “There’s no reason why I can’t eventually work something out with [chicken and duck source] Polderside Farms,” he says, adding that he wants to get live prawns into every Cactus Club. (The restaurants, he adds, are already 90 to 95 percent Ocean Wise–compliant, or marine-environment friendly, according to the Vancouver Aquarium.)

In the past, “I’ve done stuff that’s been too fancy,” Feenie freely admits. “Simplicity is more difficult to achieve than complicated cuisine.” He’s done unpaid internships at high-profile restaurants like Charlie Trotter’s in Chicago and Jean-Georges in New York, but the best chef, he thinks, is Johnny Letzer, now retired, in Alsace. Both Feenie and his wife have eaten his fare. Michelle calls it “Alsatian soul food”. Her husband describes it as “really, really simple food done well”, and he’s convinced that’s where we’re headed.