Malcolm Parry
Sun
Chris Stewart and Andrey Durbach’s Pied- a- Terre does strong day- and- night business on reviving Cambie Street.
BUSINESS LUNCH: New blacktop and fast-moving traffic are seen through the Pied-a-Terre restaurant’s four vertical windows, visible as Andrey Durbach tucked into a chef-style lunch of onion soup, $8, a 12-ounce cote de boeuf steak with roquefort-and-mustard sauce and pommes frites, $25. Betraying his four years of cooking in England, he called his $6.50 crème caramel “pudding.”
Durbach and business partner Chris Stewart tasted a Vosne Romanee 2005 burgundy that will likely go on the wine list at their upper-market Parkside restaurant, They then switched to the more modest Pied-a-Terre’s bestseller: Gres St. Paul Romanis from France‘s Languedoc district, that is $45, or $11.25 by the glass.
Most of Pied-a-Terre’s 32 seats were occupied by folk ordering the three-course price-fixe lunches that are $20.07 until 3 p.m. They fill completely most evenings as the Cambie-off-18th-Avenue joint serves up to 80 covers.
That’s right: Durbach and Stewart opened on woebegone Cambie in early November, and have had a hit from day 1.
They hadn’t planned to own a third restaurant 10 months after opening their 32-seat La Buca in a Macdonald-at-24th strip-mall. But the long-established Don Don noodle-shop’s business, goodwill and liquor licence became available for $40,000. And though monthly rent there may double the more remote La Buca’s $1,900, the two took possession June 15 and put $250,000 — $75,000 more than they expected — into a revamp and black-and-white decor by designer Erik Lauzon.
“It’s all about real-estate opportunities,” said Durbach, who wishes he and Stewart could have bought the site as Vikram Vij reportedly has to open a Cambie-at-15th satellite of his off-South-Granville Vij’s. “If you want to own a small restaurant, the most important thing is your lease. Location, location, location is one thing. But people end up biting off location with rent they can’t manage.”
That happened to Durbach when his Etoile went dark on Hornby Street in 1999. Four years later, he and Stewart solved the location-rent equation with their 56-seat Parkside on Haro Street. Originally Delilah’s, the well-maintained deep-West-End eatery needed only $50,000-worth of cosmetics when Zev Beck vacated it. Their total rent for the 2,300-square-foot facility is $6,700 monthly.
“Restaurants get very centralized — Yaletown, Gastown,” Stewart said, not to mention the nine on Pied-a-Terre’s block. “But it’s just dinner.” The objective for globally popular neighbourhood restaurants, he said is to provide “casual fine dining at Earl’s prices.”
“Restaurants are thirsty for labour,” Durban said, noting that his and Stewart’s three employ 40 between them. “And a 30-seat restaurant needs the same staff to serve 30 sinners as it does 60. So the key element is turnover. If you’ve got a 300-seat place, maybe everyone comes in at 7 p.m. But we stay open from noon to 10:30.”
As for Pied-a-Terre’s no-nonsense French dishes — steak-frites, coq au vin, duck a l’orange, trout amandine, etc. — Durbach said: “Vancouver is such a modern city. Instead of avant-garde being all the new, progressive stuff [served elsewhere], the good, old-fashioned food is new to people here.”
And the best people to talk it up, he and Stewart agreed, are the industry folk who spend afternoons at Pied-a-Terre.
“Nothing will help your business more than waiters at other restaurants recommending it,” Durbach said. “They know what side is up. And if you want to cultivate that reputation, you have to offer them high quality and good value.”
Even on born-again Cambie Street.
© The Vancouver Sun 2007
