Man on quest to eat in every restaurant in Vernon - there's more than you may think

A Vernon man is on a quest to try every restaurant, eatery, and watering hole in the Vernon area.

Logan Saunders says if it’s on Google Maps, then it’s on his list to review.

“I think I’ve done 87 and have 53 to go,” Saunders said recently.

He's now up to number 95.

He’s doing this to honour his late wife, Jee-an, the pair met while Saunders was travelling in the Philippines.

“We met on a pub crawl, on one of my backpacking trips.”

The seed was planted in 2020, when his wife was visiting and the pair tried to find the best poutine place in Vernon. Saunders says they received a lot of unhelpful advice from internet trolls, but eventually a few people helped them.

Their google review journey officially began in 2021 when Jee-An was visiting for the summer. Saunders says they had a bad experience at a parasailing place, and that’s when they left their first review.

Saunders says the duo didn’t want to have just one bad review on his Google profile.

“Then I thought about my other travellers where I used Google Maps and other online reviews and researched so much, and I thought ‘I should really put effort into this because of how much I’ve gotten out of it.”

“So every place that we went to during the summer of 2021, we would just review everywhere we would go to make up for all of that information and research that we got from other people.”

He shared that visiting Niagara falls was on Jee-An’s bucket list, and they visited there together on that 2021 summer trip.

Reviewing all of the restaurants in the Vernon area, he says, is inspired by his wife.

“It was an extra thing to do to help out other people, and she was always like ‘oh how many stars are we going to give this place, what photos to upload to google maps?’” Said Saunders.

“So it became this fun extra little thing that we did on the many other adventures that we always had on a daily basis.”

He says prior to his wife visiting town, he “usually stuck to ordering delivery from the same few pizzerias”. Saunders says he had to work to come up with a new place to take her to almost everyday she visited.

On his journey to keep reviewing in his wife's honour – Saunders says he’s been surprised at the variety of food Vernon has to offer. And by the amount of cult classics in town.

“People always reference Donut Fridays at Ratio, I didn’t know how big of a thing that was until I tried to go in there and all the donuts were sold out really early on in the day.” Said Saunders.

“And it’s not like they made a few donuts, they made a lot, it’s just that many people go there for their donuts.”

The first milestone of his quest is eating at every Japanese restaurant in town. As he continues trying all cuisines, he plans to rank each place from favourite to least favourite based on category.

To follow his journey, you can check his Instagram or Facebook, or visit his Google Maps profile.