The Restaurant Everyone Wants Doesn’t Make Sense Anymore

Vancouver’s economics have made the neighbourhood restaurant a gamble regardless of how honestly or cynically it’s pursued.

Photo by Priscilla Du Preez 🇨🇦 on Unsplash

A few weeks back I stumbled across an op-ed on Eater titled: *No Influencers in the Neighborhood Restaurant, Please — How the “neighborhood restaurant” jumped the shark in Los Angeles. In it, author Hilary Pollack details her frustration of how marketing and social media have commodified the phrase neighbourhood restaurant to the point she felt the need to examine the archetype overall. The piece has sat with me ever since because what she feels is necessary to build and to establish a “neighbourhood” restaurant — you can visit often, the staff know your name, reservations are largely unnecessary — seems somewhat of an aspirational viewpoint of what a neighbourhood restaurant ought to be versus the reality of what restaurants need *to be in 2026.

She goes into detail about what constitutes a neighbourhood restaurant, right down to the four C pillars — consistent, convenient, comfortable, and casual. In my nearly thirty years working in the restaurant industry I’ve been lucky enough to have worked at two well established “neighbourhood” restaurants. One was in Toronto at a Little Italy joint called Bar Italia, while the second was at a now closed space in Gastown called Chill Winston. Both restaurants possessed these four C components in spades.

Then there’s my good friend Ron Oliver, who thankfully ran probably my all time favourite “neighbourhood” restaurant, Mamie Taylor’s, for seven years in the mid 2010s. The appealing picture she painted: frictionless, familiar, no reservation required, is also, notably, a description of what a regular wants from a restaurant, not what a restaurant can afford to give. Ron had to close Mamie’s in early 2020, two months before the pandemic hit, which means there’s no external shock to blame. Even with every box of what a neighbourhood space should be ticked off, business wasn’t strong enough to sustain profitability. So many cried foul when they heard the news of his impending closure that they soon rushed to visit one last time. I remember him vividly saying to me on his last day with a room packed full of regulars that, “if they loved us this much, where has everyone been for the past two years?” That sentiment hasn’t left me nor has seeing one of my other all-time favourites, Bao Bei, abandon its no-reservations policy, because guests, myself included, wanted the certainty of a table over the gamble of a walk-in.

The author’s emotional intent feels more like a sentimental longing to an old episode of Cheers, where the gang is always there and space is always available. That being said, with respect to Vancouver, rent, labour and food are insanely high, few operators can tolerate or withstand a slow or unpredictable period. Which raises the real question: can a restaurant still feel like a neighbourhood joint — unpretentious, familiar, unhurried — while also playing the visibility game that keeps the lights on?

Playing the game or losing it

Last week while reading one of the many Prof G Media newsletters I receive (they’re great by the way, I suggest signing up) two words stood out the most from what I’d just read: founder and virality. The title of the piece was: *Today’s Top Founders All Have One Thing in Common — Founders with big followings raise more money and spend less acquiring customers. *In it, author Isabella Kyncl argues that to be a successful startup today one must do the following: “daily posting, personal branding, and community building.” She goes on to say that “what makes companies stand out is the size of their community, and the loyalty of their followers.” Upon reading this I couldn’t help but think of the restaurant community, and how this is playing out locally. My friends Max and Andrew who are currently in the process of opening their own bar were on my podcast recently to discuss the process of things so far. They understand the importance of branding and finding a voice on social media and why virality is essential to crafting curiosity and excitement. In some way, their brand’s survival and success hinges less on how much better they are than their peers, and possibly more on how they cultivate their image. The more attention they can generate, the greater their chance of winning an audience.

Pollack’s essay essentially builds off this sentiment in that the three restaurants she names at the top branded their likeness towards our fondness for that real neighbourhood spot. People want restaurants to feel genuine, personal, unmanufactured, that’s the actual appeal of “neighbourhood.” But because that feeling is desirable, it becomes marketable, which means operators (and PR firms) reach for the “neighbourhood” label as a branding tool, even for restaurants that are structurally destination spots — Wilde’s, Hermon’s, Bar Di Bello in her reference but possibly places like June here in Vancouver. The more the label gets used as marketing, the more it gets hollowed out, which is Pollack’s complaint. June’s GM told Vancity Lookout’s Sara Harowitz plainly: “We want it to be a neighborhood spot. Cambie Village has been super supportive of us, and we want to make sure that everyone who comes through gets to experience and have access to it without feeling like they have to be or dress a certain way.” But by Harowitz’s own account the dilemma is hard to resolve — they cap reservation windows and reserve walk-in space, yet the piece still closes by calling it “both the blessing and the curse” of being one of Vancouver’s most sought-after reservations. Wanting to be a neighbourhood spot and operationally being one, it turns out, are not the same thing, no matter how hard you try to engineer your way there.

Meanwhile, the restaurants that are the real thing, no PR play, no influencer courtship, just an honest neighbourhood spot, don’t get rescued by their authenticity. Ron had zero marketing cynicism and still couldn’t survive. Kyncl’s article suggests that it is even more important today to play the game of attention and virality than ever before. What she is describing as a survival requirement for startups is the exact same math forcing restaurants to manufacture “neighbourhood” branding as visibility alone isn’t enough anymore. Max and Andrew know that to post about themselves is to create that connection of telling the best story of who they are. You can feel it in their branding through and through. But the game asks for more than a good Instagram feed. When I asked Max whether it felt strange to lean on brand sponsorships from Patrón, Grey Goose, St. Germain, and San Pellegrino to get their rooftop pop-up open — given that Supernova’s entire concept is built on being unaffiliated with corporate brands — he didn’t hesitate: “Yeah, for sure it does.” There was, as he put it, “exactly zero dollars” left in the budget to do it any other way. People want restaurants to feel genuine, personal, unmanufactured, and even the operators who agree with that most, who build a business on resisting exactly the kind of branding calculus Kyncl describes, still can’t opt out of it.

You know when you know

Throughout Pollack’s piece I kept reminding myself of what she ultimately wanted: to experience the joy of that space you just feel at home in without all the PR fuss. The muddled waters of social media and the baseline economics of running a restaurant in either Los Angeles or here in Vancouver have made being an operator that much more difficult and perilous. It isn’t enough to care about providing good food and drink anymore, the game of virality has taken what makes this industry such a fascinating world to be in and tossed it through the ringer. Owners now need to be savvy story tellers, day in and day out. Consistent exposure is winning out over quiet consistency.

So is there a right way to do this? Not by any of the three paths I just walked you through. There’s the cynical part of me that somewhat distrusts the PR-driven marketing emphasis restaurants seem to have found themselves in. To be a true neighbourhood as Pollack suggests means to truly lean on skills and relationships one has formed organically with their community. Many continue to do so, but with the reality of costs today, that risk is harder and harder for many to stake their fate on. It’s a sad reality but one worth recognizing nonetheless.

So as Pollack struggles with the PR usage of “neighbourhood” spaces for those hot and trendy spots, the real winners are those “you know when you know” gems every restaurant critic and influencer tries so hard to find. Vancouver is blessed with many neighbourhood spaces, probably more than I can even count or dare to know of. Their place in the community they sit in is itself a piece of what makes that community great — the people who return, again and again, to share in it. None of this changes what happens when Bao Bei’s door opens and we smell the room, sip that impossible to not have Piña Colada and devour their insanely delicious Pork Belly. None of us fall in love with a restaurant because of its Instagram strategy. We fall in love with how it feels when we’re inside. The tragedy is that increasingly, getting us into that room requires a completely different set of skills.