[Dragaera] Vlad and his father

[Philip Hart]

On Wed, 17 Sep 2008, Alexx Kay wrote:

> An idle notion while re-reading.  Vlad almost never talks about his
> father, and when he does, he is usually contemptuous or dismissive.  But
> it's rare for two chapters to go by without Vlad's deep and abiding love
> of cooking and eating being mentioned.  And who do you think he learned
> those things from?  While we don't, strictly speaking, *know* the answer
> to that, his father the restaurateur seems the most obvious candidate.  So
> it seems that, in some senses, his father's influence on him is incredibly
> strong.

In _Dzur_ Vlad describes Noish-pa's langosh (garlic bread) as, if not 
better than Valabar's, at least in the conversation.  And in _Teckla_
somewhere iirc or perhaps Orca there's a scene where N-p's cooking is 
described as masterful.

Surely Vlad's father is a big influence on him, but we may need to
argue from negative evidence about what that means.  Maybe Vlad
as father will shed some direct light on the issue.