Faced with what is proving to be a challenging combination of the harmonized sales tax (HST), rising food costs and stiffer penalties for driving with a 0.05 blood alcohol reading, many Vancouver restaurants have closed recently.
But despite various BC Liberal leadership candidates promising to add even more challenges for restaurateurs (raising the minimum wage by 25% to $10 and adding a new statutory holiday in February) there are still ample confident entrepreneurs ready to take a stab at opening new restaurants.
New or planned restaurants include:
- Patrick Corsi and Alex Tsakumis opening their second Q4 restaurant on Richards Street last month – a 70-seat, 2,200-square-foot location that’s slightly smaller than the duo’s longstanding Kitsilano eatery;
- Justin Ault and wife Lea Ault opening a 150-seat Japanese tapas restaurant called Hapa Umi in the former Metro Restaurant location at 200 Burrard Street;
- David Hawksworth opening his long-awaited 216-seat Hawksworth restaurant in May at the renovated Rosewood Hotel Georgia; and
- Dunn’s Famous Montreal Smoked Meat’s plans to launch its first restaurant outside Quebec – a 150-seat bistro slated to open in May at the corner of Robson and Seymour streets.
All will be open long before Cactus Club opens its marquee 150-seat location at English Bay this summer along with a 48-seat outside concession stand.
Those openings more than counter recent restaurant closures such as:
- the months-old and much-hyped Corner Suite Bistro De Luxe, on December 31, in the former Saveur and Piccolo Mondo location at Thurlow and Smithe streets;
- Piato Estiatorio in Kitsilano on West Fourth Avenue near Burrard Street in the first week of January; and
- Sweeney’s in Yaletown in the first week of January.
Aqua Riva, which has served upscale seafood in a 240-seat, 9,000-square-foot location at the foot of Granville Street for 15 years, is also slated to close at the end of July.
“Aqua Riva’s closure has absolutely nothing to do with the HST or the new penalties for driving with a 0.05 blood alcohol reading,” said Geoffrey Howes, who is the director of operations for Aqua Riva’s owner, Toseki Entertainment Ltd.
The money-losing restaurant is on a trajectory to profitability, Howes stressed, but its ownership group determined that the site was too large, given that the centre of convention centre traffic has shifted west, along West Cordova Street, to around Burrard Street following the opening of the new Vancouver Convention Centre.
Howes acknowledged that the Aults have therefore secured both a good location, at the corner of Burrard and West Cordova streets, and an appropriate size.
“There’s quite a difference between having 240 seats and having 150 seats,” Howes said.
The Aults, who are both fourth-generation Japanese Canadians, opened their first of three Hapa Izakaya restaurants in January 2003 at the corner of Robson and Nicola streets.
Success convinced them to expand from an original 2,000-square-foot space to 4,000 square feet in December 2004 and then to 6,000 square feet in October 2009.
Before the last expansion, they opened a second 3,000-square-foot Hapa Izakaya in Kitsilano in May 2007.
The couple’s most recent opening came in January 2010 when they launched a 2,000-square-foot restaurant next to the Cactus Club on Hamilton Street near Davie Street.
The Aults are branding their Burrard Street restaurant Hapa Umi partly to signal that it’s more expensive than their Hapa Izakaya brand – a three-location chain that’s slightly more upscale than the popular, Vancouver-owned Guu Izakaya, which has five Lower Mainland locations and is scheduled to open in February in Toronto.
Izakayas are Japanese tapas bars that attract customers as much for sake and beer as for the food. That’s another reason that the Aults dropped the word “Izakaya” from their planned Burrard Street location.
Restaurateurs like the Aults and Corsis say that the stiffer penalties for driving with a blood alcohol reading of 0.05 have cut into their business at least as much as the HST.
“The HST has had some impact, but it’s an easy bogeyman for people to point at,” Justin Ault told Business in Vancouver. “It’s a tough business in general. The HST adds to it. Maybe it can push over the brink a place that was teetering in a previous year.”
Corsi similarly believes most British Columbians have accepted the HST and are not changing spending patterns drastically.
“On the flip side – it was very normal [before more stringent drinking and driving penalties] to see a table of four order two bottles of wine. You don’t see that anymore – it’s one bottle of wine for a table of four.”