Malcolm Parry
Sun
STORES IN STORE: Meinhardt Fine Food Inc. president Linda Meinhardt says she has no plans to close her 11-year-old 6,000-square-foot gourmet grocery store on South Granville, nor its adjacent 1,000-square-foot deli-eatery, Picnic. Instead, July will see the family-owned and recently incorporated Meinhardt & Associates Inc., doing business as Meinhardt, open a 15,000-square-foot store-and-offices complex at Arbutus Street and 16th Ave., with 31-year-old Michael Meinhardt as general manager.
Two years later, mother, son and a silent partner plan to open a like-sized Meinhardt store in Calgary‘s Mount Royal district, where they’ve acquired an entire city block. They’ve since sold one site to West Vancouver entrepreneur Glenn Bailey, who’ll renovate an existing building to house an outlet of his Liberty home-furnishings chain. A new four-floor complex will house the Meinhardt grocery and wine stores, and leased-out business offices.
Back in Vancouver, where the Meinhardts have a 25-year lease on premises beside the Ridge theatre, contractor Craig Strand poured the new store’s white-concrete floor this week.
Arbutus rent is “half what it is on Granville Street,” Linda said. Asked what the latter might be, she replied: “Way too much.” By 2012, though, an option on her existing lease would switch to market rent, which is presently in the $80-per-square-foot range.
All that new space spells big changes for the Meinhardts. And not just the moderne branding the Taxi firm (Telus, Mini) developed to supplant the Granville store’s homespun feel.
Commuter-customers will have the choice of 36 prepared meals to take home — and 140 stalls to park in. “The deli and kitchen is the engine room of our business,” Michael said. Nodding, Linda added: “The entire profit is on that side.”
Cook-at-homes will be served by a first-time in-store butcher with doubled display cases, and even a Reinhardt stainless-steel cookware line produced by Finland‘s Iittala outfit.
Also new will be Meinhardt sauces, dips, condiments, jams, breads, cakes, pies, chocolates, sweets and the like — even a lifestyles-and-recipes-themed $60 Meinhardt coffee-table book and store-ground coffee — roasted by JJ Bean chain owner John Neate — to go with it. Meanwhile, bottled still waters will be dumped in favour of a single brand from Pemberton branded — you guessed it — Meinhardt.
By opening day, Michael Meinhardt should have a self-produced documentary movie ready for screening to staff and customers. It’ll be no debut, though. He’s produced and directed music videos, and premiered his 19-minute Nostalgia Boy at the Ridge in 2006. That picture featured a teen who dreamed of the past yet convinced his father’s pregnant girlfriend to face the future by not aborting her child.
Linda Meinhardt herself sounds nostalgic for southern France, where she once owned Chateau Drouille. Now she’s seeking a farmhouse and 11-hectare property for three-months-a-year occupation.
– EAT, DRINK AND BE READY: Two years have passed since B.C. Wine Institute executive director Peggy Athans said that the 1990-founded organization would shift its focus from wine to “marketing, government advocacy and communications.” Claiming then that B.C. “has the potential to be another Napa or Tuscany,” she urged the B.C. government to get behind a BCWI proposal to develop wine and culinary tourism.
That was a natural for an outfit that claims its 63 member wineries and 14 associated grape growers produce 95.5 percent of B.C. wines.
Now Athans has swung the promotional spotlight from vineyard-winery regions to downtown Vancouver. She says the BCWI expects to have a $3-million, 7,000-square-foot wine and culinary centre operating in time for the 2010 Winter Olympics. Fund-raising for the “sustainable and profitable” facility has begun, says Athans. “The challenge now is to find a space. We would love to work with a developer on this.”
Based on a feasibility study conducted by the Grant Thornton accounting firm, Canada‘s one-of-a-kind centre should include a demonstration kitchen featuring B.C. ingredients, presentation facilities, wine-retailing space and a full-time 55-seat wine bar with patio. The unique licencing entailed would include the single VQA (Vintners Quality Alliance) Wine Store licence remaining from 21 issued.
While applauding a similar facility under construction in Walla Walla, Wash., Athans says: “We want one where people in the centre of population can taste the wines and food.” She envisages an open-plan centre similar to San Diego‘s, but almost twice the size.
– CANNES DID: Omni Life executive producer Heather Hawthorn-Doyle was back at her desk five metres from city railway tracks Monday. She’d spent a good chunk of the previous week in the air, looking to get the $4-million-worth of television series she oversees on the air.
On the air or distributed via cable in any global market the Cannes TV Festival’s 15,000 attendees might represent, that is. On-line, too, although producers like Hawthorn-Doyle are still trying to work out funding models for shows that might cost $100,000 an episode to make but would realize only 15 percent of that from on-line showing.
Hawthorn-Doyle returned from her first-time trip to Cannes with few firm deals on the four shows — She’s Crafty, Smart Cookies, Pure Design and Word Travels — presently under production by two-year-old Omni Life, which is a division of 1981-founded Omni Film Productions Ltd. But Du Cote De Chez Vous TV (France‘s HGTV equivalent) signed for 23 episodes of She’s Crafty, and sale of another show’s 13 episodes is as close as Cannes is to Cap d’Antibes, she said. She also met many prospects for future arm-wrestling, including Canwest Broadcasting’s senior vice-president of lifestyle programming Karen Gelbart, and W network VP Joanna Webb.
“At the [festival’s] opening party, 5,000 people were there, and I knew maybe a dozen,” Hawthorn-Doyle said. “There were 1,000 at the final party, and I knew a couple of hundred.”
With international competitors pitching 3,000 new or limited-airing shows, months of work at a producer’s home base can depend on minutes of conviction at Cannes.
Then again, Hawthorn-Doyle was “thrilled” to be back in Vancouver for final wrangling with National Geographic International on 13 episodes of the Word Travels series, featuring Julia Demon and longtime Vancouver Sun travel writer Robin Erick. She’s also reviewing applicants for a new show — contact [email protected] — that will track unmarried couples’ experiences with family-planning, housework, income, sex and the like as their relationships develop.
Her own relationship with husband Gearin — named for the priest who baptized Canada‘s first immigrant Doyles — began when they were assistant managers at McDonald’s franchises. But her entrée to television entailed a genuine McTerror. That was when B.C. Institute of Technology instructors granted her leave to work on the late Jack Webster’s show if he pledged to grade her performance. Sensibly, Doyle wore a Macdonald kilt to the interview.
“What kind of mark d’ye want, lassie?” Webster asked.
She never looked back.
