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GASTOWN REVIVAL

The partners who built Boneta (renovating a former restaurant space decorated in the style of “Tuscan Regret,” as one of them quipped) are the funniest restaurateurs in town. Neil Ingram, Mark Brand, and Andre McGillivray have worked, it seems, in most of the restaurants in town. Their common ground was found during overlapping stints at Lumière, back when it was a happier place.

Boneta might have been a daunting venture, but the jolly trio never wavered, despite the mean-streets location and the major rehab, both of which required some serious vision but a lot more sweat equity. In an 1892-vintage building on the corner of Carrall and Cordova that once housed a bank (the original survey marker for the Granville townsite can still be seen today), it was clad in stone quarried from Queen Elizabeth Park and horse-carted downtown.

“Everything was covered up,” says McGillivray, who, with Brand and Ingram, spent five weeks (they slept on-site) stripping back 115 years of bad rehabs. “How could you fuck this up any more?” they remember asking out loud, as yet another layer of acoustic tile rained down to reveal a period ceiling.

That the threesome managed to open a stylish restaurant with a very hip bar, restaurant, and patio (total seats: 154) on a budget of $89,000 could warm even the chilliest Scottish heart. “It wasn’t a shoestring budget,” said the chap on the next barstool one night, “it was a flip-flop budget—Valu Village flip-flops.”

The dining room shows few signs of the inexpensively homemade (except for the food, which from the hands of former Lumière sous chef Jeremie Bastien is delicious and reasonably priced)—it’s cool and for the cool, apparently from many walks of life. We watch the telltales, having arrived early in the Friday evening cocktail hour. Local artists caftaned in black and gold share the space with captains of industry and their cling-ons, who have followed the lads from their former West Broadway precinct. Some arrive by public transit, but most walk from their Gastown digs, although by the time we leave, there are three Mercedes valet-parked across the street. The trio refer to these latter gastronomic explorers as “adventurous—the Marlon Perkins of the culinary world.”

On the glossily verathaned bamboo bar, stripey as a brunette zebra, Brand slides down some of the cocktails that made him this magazine’s barman of the year. His drinks, like the design of the room, don’t hit you over the head (at least at first)—they are balanced and inflected, with subtle aftershocks of innuendo. Huge canvases by local avantiste Charles Forsberg loom overhead, but the room, which is tall, enjoins an intimacy found in that ephemeral thing called conviviality. People are laughing and talking to their neighbours, charmed by the diversity of clientele and the rumpus of happy noise and pretty features.

“It was actually a smooth process,” Ingram says of the construction. “We’ve opened a lot of restaurants and there was nothing especially challenging.” Certainly the rent wasn’t. Pegged at just $5,000 per month all in, and with sales already approaching $50,000 per week, these three gutsy young men, while renovating the past, have added to Gastown’s future, and their own.

KITSILANO REDUX

Vancouver is still just small enough that two like occurrences constitute a fad, three an outright trend. So when a number of fine dining establishments moved into the short strip of Fourth just west of Burrard, foodanistas took notice. The studied but stylish Zen of Gastropod was soon followed by the sleekly defined edges and open kitchen of Rob Belcham’s and Tom Doughty’s Fuel. Across the street, the Noodle Box, all concrete and glass and steel, has an altogether more designerly feel than the chipped formica rooms where we usually get up to ramen speed. Down the hill, on the Yew Street mall of dining opportunities, Hapa Izakaya opened a stylish small-plates room.

Then the Fourth Avenue strip looked more complete when Bistrot Bistro opened, the design another example of construction on a modest budget: 50 seats for $50,000. “The floor and banquettes are neutral [black and charcoal] and we can repaint the [lime green and fire truck red] walls in one day,” says proprietor Laurent Devin. This raises interesting possibilities: instead of seasonal ingredients, how about seasonal decor?

Devin and his wife Valerie completed the bistro in just 25 days. It inhabits the space of a former Chinese restaurant. “The mouse droppings and other filth would have put you on a diet for two weeks,” he said.

This summer they placed a garage door on the storefront, letting in the nightly air, and the covetous stares of passersby. An outsize wine rack badges the interior, but “we wanted to detach from the old image of the French bistro,” says Laurent. “No cutesy Dubonnet posters, no lace curtains. France has moved on. So should we.”

And so, moving on further west, at the site of the original Henry’s Kitchen on MacDonald Street, is another fine example of a big-hearted room on a small budget: La Buca, a neighbourly trat from Parkside’s Andrey Durbach and Chris Stewart, with its streamlined, bar-less room with banquettes and black-and-white tiled floors.

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