More than 300 restaurants are coming together for the annual 17-day-long Dine Out Vancouver Festival, starting on Friday.

On The Coast‘s food columnist, Gail Johnson, says the food festival, one of the largest of its kind in the country, has evolved a lot since it first started out in 2003 with just over 50 restaurants participating.

“This whole event came into being as a way to get more people into restaurants during what’s normally a painfully slow time of year after