Show Rooms

Diners used to choose restaurants based on what they wanted to eat. These days, it’s all about the where

By Jamie Maw

For years, the architecture and design of our restaurants has lagged the adventurous spirit of what we eat. Many of the condominium towers that crowd the city’s core were built with retail spaces along their streetside podia. But landlords, in a bid to mitigate their financial gamble (restaurants are notoriously poor credit risks), built those spaces as narrow and deep as batcaves, and were generally unwilling to pay for the expensive ecologizers necessary to run a proper restaurant. As for older storefronts, many required seismic upgrades, or were uncommonly expensive to renovate. From the earliest days in our dining history, most of the dramatic, big-box rooms were buried in hotels and, like scurrying bellmen, carried with them the attendant baggage of hotel dining: all things to all people, three times a day.

That didn’t hold back pioneering designers such as Werner Forster. Best known for his warm, Mediterranean-influenced rooms (like Il Giardino), Forster understood what people crave: intimacy. He intuitively understood that intimacy requires less wow and more cosy gemutlichkeit—because wow is for tourists, and cosy is for regulars. He also understood—two decades ago—that Vancouverites were becoming an increasingly casual, last-minute lot of diners, seeking easy access without a necktie. Dining in the new century, it seemed, was much more about a sense of taste than a sense of occasion.

No one understood that better than Jack Evrensel, who commissioned Forster to design all his restaurants (Araxi, Blue Water, CinCin, West). The point was brought home by the rapid expansion of tapas and izakaya, or small plates dining, that spread across the city long before it did elsewhere on the continent.

After the expensive conversion of the ill-fated Gianni’s (originally designed by, yes, Forster), Evrensel envisioned a smart dining room that reflected modern Vancouver. And that’s what he got, in the then-named Ouest. But Evrensel thought the first iteration formal and starchy, and asked Forster to redesign. The result—after the installation of a ceiling sculpture, removal of glass partitions, and addition of greenery and mirrors—is what you see today at West. Evrensel relaunched the room at about the time chef David Hawksworth was becoming more at ease with local product. Voila: the studied informality—in design, food, and service—was a runaway hit, and today West is probably the finest restaurant in western Canada.

WHERE'S PALLADIO?

Palladian symmetry puts people at ease, and can be as important as food and commodious service. Forster, who travelled widely in Europe, admired the Palladian ratio of width (1.0) to length (approximately 1.5) in the dining rooms he thought most comfortable. The third dimension—height—also factors importantly into the equation. Dining rooms with too-high ceilings (like the two-storey “great rooms” that peppered mansions late in the last century) make diners feel vulnerable and uncomfortable. The ideal ceiling height is from three to about four-and-a-half metres, high enough to allow noise to dissipate, but low enough to feel cocooned. Lofty ceilings, such as those at Sanafir and Transcontinental, cater to grandeur more than an invitation to return, which explains why the style is endemic in Las Vegas gastroganzas but not at the local rooms you frequent.

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