Homage to my Brother, Gary Robert Lavery

 By the time my brother Gary was in his early-30s, he had acquired expertise in unearthing the most unusual places to eat and drink. He had a penchant for the unlikely hole-in-the-wall whose name and setting belied what was behind its kitchen doors. Decades before culinary gurus Anthony Bourdain and Stanley Tucci acquired cult-like followings with their food and travel adventures, my brother was exploring diverse cuisines.

Gary developed an endemic hunger for aboriginal cuisines and indigenous street food culture after moving to Scotland at seventeen. Tracking down local specialties with time-honoured traditions was his forte, from haggis to ceviche to sashimi to smalahove (sheep’s head) to banoffee pie. 

Gary worked in the dining rooms as a steward on the Norwegian Royal Viking Sea luxury cruise lines, travelling to some of the most exotic ports with off-the-beaten path itineraries. Passengers were mostly wealthy retirees. The ships were built for lengthier round-trip luxury trans-Atlantic excursions. Royal Viking Line prided itself on single-seating dining, allowing guests to arrive in the dining room unscheduled. High atop the bridge a restaurant and glass-enclosed lounge provided magnificent panoramas.

Gary took pleasure in telling us how he was assigned to take care of British performer Jean Alexander, who starred as Hilda Ogden, and a couple of other well-known actresses from the British soap opera Coronation Street. The actresses were on hiatus and travelling together on this particular voyage.

Gary's penchant for sampling local delicacies and immersing his inquisitive palate in new flavours had included domesticated rats in China. Anecdotes about communist China's economic reforms and open-door policy which allowed the easing of its borders and restrictions to Westerners is a story he never tired of recounting. A too-blunt observation was Gary’s strong suit, and if he could repulse you in the process, it was a bonus.

Gary would purchase tchotchkes and traditional crafts from ports of call, such as decorative, papier-mache Russian lacquer boxes, hand-painted with iconic, highly detailed scenes from folk tales on shore excursions. I retailed these decorative items in my shop, Not Just Antiques, on Talbot Street at the foot of Market Lane in London, Ontario in the mid-eighties. He purchased a large handmade Peruvian tapestry made from dyed, woven alpaca wool in the village outside of Machu Picchu that hung in the dining room of my Proudfoot Lane apartment. He would later abandon it in a dispute with a landlord. There is a traditional woven wicker rooster with a removable head that presides on my parent’s kitchen island that he purchased in China. The body of the rooster is the resting place for his cremation ashes which we brought back from Birmingham, England after his funeral.

In 1992, with only my brother's previous address and a verbal commitment to contact him, I arrived in Southampton, England, unannounced. Aware that he recently moved, sold his catering truck, separated from his partner Colin, and did not have a telephone.  I put faith in my investigative abilities. We had spoken long-distance weeks after my grandmother died. During the sale of my first restaurant, La Cucina on King which I co-owned with my parents, and before I sold my Palace Street turn-of- the- century cottage we talked vaguely about taking a trip to Izmir, Turkey. We were concerned about the politics and unrest. I remember reading, after hours of siege an extremist mob set a hotel ablaze in the city of Sivas, killing 37 people. The hotel was the residence of Aziz Nesin, The Satanic Verses translator.

Travelling on the early evening express from London-Waterloo to Southampton, and disembarking from my compartment, I bumped into my brother. Gary was in London for the weekend and was returning home in the carriage next to mine. At the precise moment I did, he descended onto the platform beside me. By any measure, it was a remarkable coincidence.

A month later, I booked an inexpensive flight on a small overloaded turbo-prop plane. Gary and I were soon crossing the English Channel in the middle of a sudden, severe thunder and lightning storm for a vacation at the seaside town of Benidorm just outside of Alicante in Spain. Benidorm is a fishing village that turned into a mega-resort dotted with skyscraper hotels with pristine white, sandy beaches, palm-lined boulevards and promenades with a mountainous skyline.

 With the small inheritance my grandmother left me I had underwritten this trip. Exhausted, Gary slept most of the holiday with a few brief forays into the old port town for a local specialty of memorable sea bream with capers and heavy cream baked in a low-fired, wide terracotta pot known as a cazuela. We left a glowing review of the restaurant at the front desk of the hotel despite the hotel clerk’s indifference.

Into the Spanish interior we travelled by bus to a tasca for over-priced tapas owned by what turned out to be a German ex-patriot. Gary's malaise concerned me, as we were planning on travelling up the coast to Barcelona to visit architect Antoni Gaudi's Sagrada Familia Basilica. He was exhausted and could barely summon the strength to get out of his hotel bed. And thinking about it, I realized he was depressed. I believe this was the beginning of his lengthy battle with HIV.

Months later, back in Southampton, England, working as a waiter in an upscale Italian restaurant where Pizza Margherita (a sad concoction of out-of-season tomatoes, sketchy mozzarella, basil, and olive oil) was at the pinnacle of popularity. In the wrong hands, it was unworthy of the Italian sobriquet. One night after my shift, standing in a telephone booth on a cold and rainy February night, my mother relayed long distance that my friend Catherine had been brutally murdered by her husband. Attempting to come to terms with the horror and barbarity of Catherine’s shocking death made for a long period of despair and grief and outrage.

Gary saw a posting for seasonal employment at La Sablonnerie, a 16th-century inn on the remote island of Sark in the Channel Islands off the coast of Normandy that was agriculturally self-sufficient.  A couple at the Italian restaurant in Southampton, talked late into the afternoon about Sark’s limitless supply of seafood and the island’s sustainable ethos, leaving me an unheard of 20-pound gratuity  to show their appreciation when they left.

At the time, my brother and I were both devotees of the book, The Road Less Travelled, and the island of Sark, the last bastion of feudalism in Europe with a population of 600 residents, appealed to our adventurous natures and curiosity. Sark, long considered a hideaway from the stress of contemporary life, with its prohibition on cars, no airport or hospital, and a lack of modern-day tourism infrastructure combined, with its status as the last feudal outpost in Europe, beckoned.

Instead of cars, there were tractors, a ubiquity of rusty bicycles, and an assortment of carriages and carts for horse-drawn transport. Sark was once entirely Norman French, still evidenced everywhere on the island. Some older residents still spoke Sercquiais, a disappearing patois of Norman French that differs between Great Sark and Little Sark. 

The day after Easter Sunday, we arrived by a small ferry from Guernsey to Sark’s tiny Cruex harbour pier, a tower-like rocky outcrop. The harbour surrounded by a jagged coastline with steep perpendicular cliffs is accessed by a narrow road through a 200-foot tunnel within the cliff face. We were greeted warmly by a resident holding a sign with our surname. He was the driver of a vintage horse-drawn barouche that our employer, Elizabeth Perrée, sent to take us to our cottage lodgings. The cottage's former thatch-covered roofs had been replaced with overlapping pantiles, as they were always at risk from fires.

We wound our way along the country lanes and marveled at the daffodils, hyacinths, tulips, and other spring flowers already out in a blaze of spring hues. The driver took us down the tree-lined main avenue, past a sparse collection of essential merchants and low-built, white-washed stone cottages continuing down dirt roads to the interior pastoral countryside. 

The hedgerows, cliff paths, valleys, and meadows possess a rich abundance of bluebells, primroses, dog violets, and celandines and are well-suited to sheep, rabbits and woodcock. Small shrubs of yellow-flowered gorse were in bloom on the windswept cliff sides, and the distinctive sweet scent of coconut and good vanilla was all-pervading on this crisp, sunshiny day. Soon we were heading towards the breathtaking isthmus, known as Le Coupée, which connects Great Sark to Little Sark. It towers above sea level on a plateau above its jagged cliff face. Sark, referred to as an island, is two islands connected by a razor-thin strip of land. There is a 260-foot precipice with a vertiginous drop on the left side of La Coupée, affording a dramatic view of Convanche Bay. To the right lies the expanse of La Grande Gréve Bay, accessed by the north end of La Coupée by climbing down a 100-meter cliff pathway with steps cut into the rock. When the tide is out, Gréve becomes a vast beach of golden sand, and crystal clear water with cauldron-shaped rock pools, caves, and arches that we would spend many hours exploring...

Bryan Lavery