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ALL ASHORE

David Aisenstat loves beautiful women. And he loves restaurants, big rich ones you can pull around you. But most of all, I suspect, Aisenstat loves beautiful women in restaurants. The Shore Club is a place to contemplate both. There are many venues within to engage those possibilities, from the quieter aerie of the second floor to the rousing bar beneath. Elaine Thorsell, who also designed Gotham and Hy’s Toronto for Aisenstat, plays a darker, richer, more textured palette than most other Vancouver designers, and only partly at her client’s bidding. At The Shore Club, the vermilions and clarets are lightened, quite literally, with pretty cascades of chandeliers, and gorgeous canvases of ocean liners by Shannon Belkin. This is dinner as theatre. The food is rich and textured, too, found in big, drizzle-free seafood and beef dishes, the kind that Howe Street arrivistes might find palliative after a day of minor swindles.

Aisenstat and Thorsell have accomplished something tough to pull off in large spaces—intimacy. The best place to analyze the public intimacy quotient is, of all places, a cruise ship. For there is a natural control in place: drinks cost the same in all venues, and the food is free. As we have observed many times, the grand areas such as lofty cabarets (the two-storey dining rooms are always prematurely evacuated) are often deserted, while intimate areas, such as small venue, low-ceilinged jazz lounges, are usually SRO. But the real nexus of a cruise ship is always the mid-ship bar, where passengers are to be found four-deep before dinner, barking orders for cocktails when they could have already had three under their belts elsewhere.

“People want a sense of belonging,” says Aisenststat, who owns more than a hundred restaurants and understands the human dynamic of eating out like few others. “Often, that means seeing people who look just like them.”

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