Early Game Plan

The proactive Seattleite’s guide to enjoying a super-sliding, high-flying, great-dining time at the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver.

By Kathryn Robinson and James Ross Gardner

Whistler village

Full Medal Racket

Okay, party people, this is where it’s at. Every night after the competitions are over, Whistler Village will light up with celebrations honoring the medalists for that day. Here’s your chance to rub shoulders with the athletes and rock out with the masses. Officials are mum about the details. Our guess: performances by Canadian alt rockers the New Pornographers and Arcade Fire. The village already boasts one of the coolest gauntlets of great bars and good cheer we’ve come across anywhere in the Northwest. Add totally inclusive Olympic medal celebrations and we predict big, big fun.

Where you’ll eat

Araxi (4222 Village Sq, Whistler Village, 604-932-4540; www.araxi.com) is the village’s most central and classiest anchor—white napery, formal waiters, walls the color of lobster bisque—with food so fixed in British Columbia, from the perfect Vancouver Island octopus chunks with the house-smoked char to the bounty of fresh Pemberton root vegetables, it imparts a true culinary sense of place. But if you have just one meal to eat at Whistler (read: one budget to obliterate), let it be at Bearfoot Bistro (Best Western Listel Whistler Hotel, 4121 Village Green, Whistler Village, 604-932-3433), the finest food and most formidable wine selection in town. “Un…deux…trois—voila!” cries a merry band of waiters in unison, lifting the silver domes off of plates to reveal extraordinary preparations of wild caribou loin with black truffle jus and Quebec foie gras crème brûlée with poached fig terrine. Something about the inventive formality of the fare within an ambience this casual—rustic stone fireplace, brassy Sinatra standards, martini trolley trundling by—makes Bearfoot an enchanting original.