Greetings, Internet Stranger, and welcome to the best Granville Island Vancouver BC Canada tour. Vancouver has a reputation as a nice city, with beautiful scenery, and lots of tasty food. However, Vancouver doesn’t get enough credit for having many unique spots that you can’t find anywhere else in the world.
One of my favorite unique spots in Vancouver is Granville Island, and we’re going to spend the morning taking a wonderful food tour here. Then we’re going to go to one of the strangest museums I have ever seen, and finally we’re going to end with a truly special meal. Our day of the best Granville Island Vancouver BC Canada tour
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Granville Island Vancouver BC Canada tour
Where Should I Stay?
Vancouver is the third largest city in Canada, and it’s pretty spread out. That’s why it’s important to pick the right neighborhood.
I recommend the Victorian Hotel, located right near the atmospheric Gastown neighborhood. It has several charming amenities, but the best are the fresh croissants every morning, which is really all you need in life.
I also recommend the Burrard, if you are looking for a hotel in Downtown Vancouver. It was easy to get to many of Vancouver’s most popular restaurants and attractions from here, and my room was very comfortable and clean.
If you’re looking for a great deal on the Victorian, click here. And if you want to check out deals on over a hundred other amazing hotel options in Vancouver, just click here. This search engine will help you find the perfect place to stay as the base for your day of the best Granville Island Vancouver BC Canada tour. With hundreds of options to choose from, I’m sure you’ll find something for your schedule and budget.
Granville Island Vancouver BC Canada tour
Morning: Granville Island Food Tour
It’s my great pleasure to take you to one of the most delightful spots in Vancouver: Granville Island. As you can probably guess, this is an island, and you actually have to take a boat if you want to get here. Fortunately the boats leave frequently, and they are quite cheap. You can find more about it here.
Once you arrive on Granville Island, you can go explore! There are tons of galleries and cute little stores, but the real treasure here is the Granville Market, which is stuffed with amazing food.
Do you want to be able to try as many of these delicious treats as you can without your stomach exploding? Then go ahead and take this wonderful Granville Island Food Tour. It’s simply the only way to explore the market.
You can go ahead and book this wonderful tour by clicking here. Then get ready for…
Approximately Top 5: Granville Island Market
1) Bread
You really shouldn’t get breakfast before the tour because you’re going to need to save room for all the delicious treats. That’s why it’s perfect that the tour starts at A Bread Affair, where we can kick things off with a breakfast-y vibe.
This place claims to be Vancouver’s best loved organic bakery, and I’m just going to let them have that. We sampled two kinds of bread here. The first was Sweet Heart, which was a decadent cranberry semolina, and the second was a more savory pecan flax bread called Sleepless in Seattle. I feel like Nora Ephron would be happy to know that someone named a bread after her movie.
2) Cheese
And what goes better with bread than cheese? That’s why we stopped at Benton Brothers to sample their wares. We got to try the most Canadian of cheeses:
That’s the humble cheese curd, an essential ingredient in any poutine. This one was squeaky fresh.
Next we got something a little sweeter with a goat cheese and blueberry preserve spread.
And finally, we got a powerful dose of hard cheese with Gruyere and a 5 year cheddar. When someone says, “Cheese,” my answer is always, “Please!”
3) Demented platters of fish and meat
Our next stop contained so much fish and meat that I could hardly believe it. In British Columbia, you need to eat as much salmon as possible. That’s official Canadian law. We tried a traditional cold smoked salmon lox and a highly untraditional maple candy salmon. (The maple candy salmon was actually extremely popular with people on the tour, and many went back to buy some.)
As for the meat…well, have you ever seen so much meat in your life? This platter contained everything from black forest ham to pate, to bison, to sake infused coppa, to elk juniper salami. I have honestly never experienced meat on this level before. And we still have a ways to go on this food tour.
4) Pad Siew
We’d eaten a whole bunch of snacks, so now it was time for our main course at Sen Pad Thai. (Don’t worry, there will be plenty of desserts up ahead.) Even though Pad Thai is in the name of this stand, we had the Pad Siew.
It was filling and flavorful with lots of Chinese broccoli, noodles, and egg. I’m not sure I’ve ever had Thai food on a food tour in North America before, but it just shows how popular the cuisine is getting. It’s hard to believe that we still have many more stops left on this tour…but we do!
5) Cute Little Desserts
Next up, we had a whole bunch of cute little desserts before getting the main dessert. That’s the great thing about the food tour because we’d never be able to sample all these treats alone. Our first little dessert was at Bubble Bombs.
These little bubbles are filled with fruity cocktails, so you can put them in something like Prosecco for a fun celebratory treat! We got to try the pomegranate and the passionfruit flavors. I think, along with the maple salmon, these were the biggest hits with most people on the tour. We also snacked on a lemon square at this stop.
Would you like to try some organic mint chocolate at the ChocolaTas stand? Of course you would because this chocolate has won all sorts of awards. You’re also supposed to capitalize the T in ChocolaTas, though I’m not sure why.
They let you pick from a few flavors, but mint is always my favorite. So don’t worry, mint haters! You won’t have to eat it.
Our final little dessert is this salted caramel macaron from Bon Macaron, which means good macaroon in French. Nothing hits better than salty and sweet! But I like that they let you take it to go because we need to save room for our final dessert!
6) Final Dessert
I realize that this came out looking very weird, but it’s really just a doughnut in the bottom of a bag. In fact, it’s a honey dip donut from Lee’s. (Honestly, I’m not sure how to spell doughnut, so I’m just going with every which way.)
This donut stand has been making handmade donuts since 1979, and honestly, being able to skip that line for donuts is probably worth the entire price of the tour. The honey dip flavor is their most popular, and it tastes like the sweet dreams of Winnie the Pooh. But they claim their jelly donut is Seth Rogan’s favorite, which is how I found out that he is actually from Vancouver.
24 Hour Tip
Those are all the secrets of the tour I can share with you for now. You’ll have to go ahead and buy the tour by clicking here to find out the rest!
Granville Island Vancouver BC Canada tour
Afternoon: Vancouver Police Museum
OK, Granville Island is one of the most unique things to do in Vancouver, and we’ve already eaten our way through there on a Granville Island Vancouver BC Canada tour. So now I’m taking you to one of the oddest museums I have ever visited: the Vancouver Police Museum.
This is one of the most popular small museums in Vancouver, and it teaches you all about the history of the Vancouver Police Department, including brutality and corruption, as well as the story of some of Vancouver’s most famous crimes. (I honestly thought Vancouver had no crimes, but it seems like I was wrong on that score.)
I can’t tell you everything I learned at the Vancouver Police Museum, but I can tell you…
Three Fascinating Facts: Vancouver Police Museum
1) What was this about Vancouver crimes?
Oh, there were so many crimes, it’s hard to know where to start. I think the worst crime was the story of the young man in the 1960s who murdered his parents and three of his siblings, and then turned himself in. I’m honestly not sure how the police were involved in this, since he turned himself in and no one had to solve a crime.
If you want something a little more Agatha Christie, there’s the story of Esther Castellani, who supposedly died of stomach problems. However, her doctor persuaded the coroner to reopen the case, and it turned out that her husband had slowly been poisoning her with arsenic. (He put it in her milkshakes, so people called it the Milkshake Murder.)
Again, not sure what the police had to do with this because the doctor (and the coroner) did all the investigating here.
2) Has this building always been a museum?
Great question! Speaking of coroners, as we were in the Milkshake Murder, this building used to be used by the Coroner’s office. In fact, the room that you can see above was once used for autopsies. The table was a real autopsy table from the coroner’s office, so you can swan about and pretend that you are Dr. Warner from Law and Order: Special Victims Unit.
But the most famous autopsy ever performed on this table was the autopsy of Australian actor Errol Flynn. He was definitely not from Vancouver, but he died suddenly of natural causes while he was in the city, so they had to examine him.
Turns out he died of a heart attack with complications brought on by the fact that his liver was absolutely pickled. Ah well, he lived hard and swashed many a buckle, so I’m sure he didn’t regret anything.
3) Is this a coroner’s museum? What about the police?
Well, they have plenty of police equipment in the museum, like fingerprinting kits and polygraph test. In fact, lie detector tests were actually invented by a Canadian named John Augustus Larson. Before this was invented, police were more likely to use “the third degree”, which involved hitting the suspect. (This is what they actually say in the museum, not my invention.)
However, it’s not scientifically possible to detect a lie, so the polygraph test doesn’t really work. Detectives in Canada and the US still use it, but the evidence doesn’t do much good in a court of law. I’m honestly not sure why they still use it, then, but perhaps this is why I’m not John Augustus Larson.
Fingerprinting, on the other hand, was not invented by a Canadian. The first time it was ever used in a criminal case was to prove that a woman had murdered her two sons and then tried to make it look like she had been stabbed as well. Well, first we have the son who murdered his family, then the milkshake murdering husband, and now this.
The moral of the Vancouver Police Museum is that families are bad.
Granville Island Vancouver BC Canada tour
Evening: Dinner at Botanist
There are many wonderful restaurants in Vancouver, but Botanist is one of my favorites, so that’s where I’m taking you on our day of the Granville Island Vancouver BC Canada tour. It seems to have a plant theme, which you can especially tell in their use of botanicals in their cocktails.
I recommend their Council of Trees cocktail, which is made with cedar, oak moss, birch sap, alder, and cherrywood smoked tea. (Also bourbon and sherry, but that seems to have less to do with trees.)
I also recommend getting the tasting menu if you want to sample the most of their treats.
Each dish is like a glorious work of art, and you can definitely see the “botanical” influence. We begin with a light seabass with rhubarb and truffle. The delicate fish combined with the rich truffle makes it the perfect way to start a glamorous meal.
I enjoyed my Granville Island Vancouver BC Canada tour in the summer, and what soup goes better with summer than gazpacho? This one was served with basil sorbet and a sourdough crust, so it was extra tart and refreshing.
Next we have a creative little salad with duck prosciutto, three kinds of mushrooms, and a leche de tigre sauce. (Leche de tigre comes from Peru, and it’s a citrus sauce usually used in ceviche.) All salads should have a little more duck prosciutto, I think.
As I mentioned earlier, every meal in Vancouver is legally required to have some local salmon. However, adding a rich leek velouté and some caviar to that salmon is both optional and most welcome.
And for the main course, we have a gorgeous crispy duck served with a buckwheat tart filled with green strawberries and served with a brown butter sauce. It was probably my favorite course, not least because of those lovely botanicals in the tart.
Of course, it’s not a proper tasting menu without a cheese course. This one is buffalo cheese with honey and sea salt. The sweet-salty flavor gets you perfectly prepared for dessert.
Do you think you can guess what this is? Would you say a rye donut with carrot sorbet? Well then, you guessed right. It’s the perfect dessert for any rabbit gourmand, and it’s the perfect end to our Granville Island Vancouver BC Canada tour day
Granville Island Vancouver BC Canada tour
Tools For Travel
- A cell phone charger so you can take photos throughout your Granville Island Vancouver BC Canada tour
- My favorite guide book to Vancouver
- My book Get Lost, that I wrote myself with all my best travel tips. This book will show you exactly how solo travel can take your life from BLAH to amazing!
- The most reliable travel umbrella that is small enough to fit in my purse, but strong enough to stand up to powerful winds on our day of the Granville Island Vancouver BC Canada tour
- These great TSA approved clear toiletries bags, so I can always keep spare toothpaste and travel sized toiletries in any carry-on.
Granville Island Vancouver BC Canada tour
How to Get There
I can’t tell you exactly how to get from your home to this Granville Island Vancouver BC Canada tour
But I can tell you that I used a lovely airplane to get from my hometown NYC to Vancouver, and I recommend Expedia for the best way to find the cheapest flight to Vancouver at the best time of day.
Just click here to start looking for the best possible deals on your flight, so you can head out to your Granville Island Vancouver BC Canada tour
That’s a Granville Island Vancouver BC Canada tour
What would you do on a Granville Island Vancouver BC Canada tour? Are you ready to start booking your hotel in Vancouver now? Please email me at stellajane@aroundtheworldin24hours.com and let me know!
Note: If you want to know how I put my travel itineraries together, just click here. Keep in mind that while each article is about how to spend 24 hours in a place, that doesn’t mean you should ONLY have a day of the most unique things to do in Vancouver BC. If you have time for another One Day in Vancouver Itinerary, try this itinerary.
