Restaurants
Are These Guys Nuts?
By Andrew Morrison published Jul 1, 2009
Here’s an idea: find a dubious location, use an unproven chef, mortgage your home, and open a restaurant during the worst recession in memory
If all goes according to plan, the Corner Suite Bistro De Luxe will open in its questionable location just off the Robson drag around the time you read this. Between them, principals Andre McGillivray and Steve Da Cruz have raised barely enough capital to last three months in an economy that has been particularly cruel to restaurants. They're locked into a two-year contract with a 26-year-old chef who boasts a household name but little executive experience. How's that for ballsy? (Or crazy.)
McGillivray, 37, is one of this city's most pedigreed and best-known front-of-house personages. He charms with cool confidence, and few are better connected in the local trade. After serving and tending bar at Robson's top-drawer CinCin for nearly a decade, he managed star-studded perennials Chambar, Lumière, and Le Crocodile. In 2007 he opened Boneta in Gastown (along with sommelier Neil Ingram, also ex-Lumière, and bartender Mark Brand, also ex-Chambar) to critical acclaim, winning golds for Best Design and Best New Informal at this magazine's 19th restaurant awards. In January of this year, after splitting with his partners, he remortgaged his East Van loft and signed for a bank loan with his mother-in-law to secure his $106,000 share of the Corner Suite's $350,000 startup cost.
It was at Boneta that McGillivray met Da Cruz, a 31-year-old veteran of many Manhattan bars, among them the York Imperial, Ruby Foo's Times Square, and City 75. Tall, built like a quarterback, and possessed of a lazy Eastern Seaboard twang that sounds like a young Christopher Walken's, he's considered one of the best bartenders in the city. Like McGillivray, he's a respected figure in the industry. (Many will prefer to sit at his bar than at any of the Corner Suite's 38 tables.) This is his first turn at ownership. For him, everything is riding on its success. His family, in the wake of recent health scares-his mom is a breast-cancer survivor and his dad recently underwent brain surgery-have advanced him a chunk of his inheritance: "They wanted to be alive to see what I'd do with it."
But it's the chef who's generating the most buzz. On TV, as star of the popular Food Network show The Main, Anthony Sedlak is a youthful doughboy in designer hoodies and T-shirts, talking loudly and cooking at the same time. One local chef scoffed when she learned of his hiring, calling him "afternoon food porn for desperate housewives."
