Janice Lotzkar was recently mentioned in a recent post on Aaron Chapman’s popular and widely read Vancouver Restaurant History Facebook group. My good friend Kurtis Kolt was asking for people’s memories of the pioneering Lotzkar. In 2020 I had written a brief piece about Lotzkar’s achievements and her contribution to the [...]
After 36 years, a period in which he was instrumental in transforming the Vancouver scene, John Bishop leaves a monumental legacy.
I’m truly saddened to learn that Burnaby’s long-running The PearTree is closing. Since its opening in 1998, the restaurant has been a beacon of regional cuisine. In fact, in the late 1990s, it was one of the first ‘fine dining’ rooms to establish away from downtown Vancouver. (One of the originals was Bruno Marti’s Le [...]
Provence Marinaside joins the list of re-openings in Vancouver, which have been coming thick and fast this week. That’s really good news. How reassuring to see all those familiar names returning to whatever the new normal might be. Of course, many never completely shut down but switched to takeout almost without [...]
In a Vancouver still ruled by straight-jacket liquor laws they came also for late night tea pots—filled with beer. The code name was cold tea. And all you had to do was ask.
Updated July 31st, 2020 (Press release) Earlier this year, John Bishop announced that he was closing Bishop’s on August 1 after 35 years as one of Vancouver’s most popular restaurants. But COVID-19 has changed all that and Bishop’s will now remain open until the end of the year. “Just before COVID arrived, we announced that [...]
“There’s no view in Vancouver anywhere like this,” says Glowbal Group CEO Emad Yacoub. We were sitting by the west-facing windows in the Five Sails Restaurant, just off the soaring Pan Pacific atrium. Yacoub’s company (which operates numerous successful entities) took over the iconic space on January 1, from the accomplished husband and wife team [...]
Toptable Group has announced that award-winning West Restaurant + Bar will close at year end. It will not be renewing its lease. It's by no means official. But I'll hazard a pretty good guess that the cost of the new lease didn't make sense to continue. The building is also possibly slated for development. The closing [...]
Lot185 is a new spot downtown with plenty of promise. If you look back a while, there wasn’t a whole lot happening around what’s now Jack Poole Plaza. Then along came Cactus Club, followed by Tap & Barrel. And now, perhaps not surprisingly, Vancouver Trade & Convention Centre has thrown its hat into the [...]
