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This hour is 22 minutes I stole my thunder. In a viral sketch of the show of new Canadian simulating, a man in harangus another to buy the Canadian in the light of Donald Trump's trade war. “Boston Pizza. New York Fries. Basically, if there is an American city in the name, it's probably Canadian,” he jokes.
The list of Canadian restaurant channels with American names is as long as the names are absurd. “Boston Pizza”? Many American cities are known for their pizza: New York, Chicago, New Haven, Detroit. Not boston. List these restaurants was a pandemic hobby for me. I lived in Ontario and I was getting late to drive. The roads were straight and empty, the landscape trivial. My attention turned to the omnipresent shopping centers in the region. This is where I started to notice them.
There is New Orleans pizza – not Gumbo or Jambalaya, but the pizza – a must in rural cities in Ontario. There is BBQ & BAR DU MONTANA. Then there are sandwiches in California. No shadow here: their breaded calfskin sandwich, garnished with strong peppers, Provolone and Aubergine, muffled in red sauce, served on a Kaiser bread, is a masterpiece. However, that has nothing to do with California.
There is more: Lone Star Texas Grill, St Louis Bar & Grill, Philthy Philly's, California Thai, State & Main. I became obsessed. How did these restaurants get their names? The few explanations that I found were disappointing arbitrarily. Boston pizza was chosen because. . . The word has six letters. California sandwichs was chosen because. . . The girls of the owners went to California once. I needed more. I dug websites, sent emails, LinkedIn invitations, website requests, Facebook messages to restaurants themselves. No answer.
I changed course, I tried to populate the other side of the big book: restaurants with Canadian names. But the only Canadian brand restaurant I could find was Tim Hortons, noting the irony that a coffee named after a 1960s hockey player belonged to a Brazilian multinational. And to add the insult to the injury, its most popular donut is Boston's cream.
What does that mean? Just we don't know. Flooded by American culture, Canada does not have a strong identity, so American references resonate. The notion of vancouver pizza, sandwiches in Halifax or Calgary steakhouse is laughable.
Canada, submerged by America but defined as non-American. The border, a cultural-camera kaleidoscope obscura, the scrambled images of America on the scrimage that is Canada.
Anyway, then came Trump's trade war, and things have changed. Suddenly, all these restaurants announce that they are “proudly Canadian”. St Louis Bar & Grill even went to the metric system; Its wings now come in grams instead of books. He has not changed his names, of course, but perhaps he should consider it. Apparently, the largest pizza chain in Cyprus is called Toronto Pizza.
Daniel Glassman is a Canadian writer living in London
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