Devouring Main Street
There was a time when all the cool restaurants in Vancouver seemed to be in Kitsilano. At other times, they were clustered in Yaletown, or Gastown, along the Drive or downtown. There are, of course, still plenty of great restaurants in all those neighbourhoods. But right now, the hottest dining scene in the city is happening all along Main Street.
Any lingering doubts about that were laid to rest in May when Published on Main became the first Vancouver restaurant ever to reach the top of Canada’s 100 Best Restaurants.
As Published’s executive chef, Gus Stieffenhofer-Brandson, says, “Number one restaurant in the country, what the hell.”
What the hell indeed. Published is justly earning all the accolades right now, but it is not the only reason to hit Main Street. From Chinatown all the way south to 33rd Avenue, the strip is jam-packed with noodle bars, cafés, pubs, bingo halls, breweries and even a farmers’ market, as well as some of Vancouver’s most celebrated restaurants and bars.
“Where we are here at Published is awesome. We’ve really seen a lot of change in the last two and a half years,” says Stieffenhofer-Brandson, noting that several new restaurants are set to open in his ’hood over the next few months, including the modern Peruvian Suyo and his own Novella. Plus, the street is packed with places for hospitality industry staff to hang out after hours, including Hero’s Welcome, The Narrow Lounge and Tocador. “We’ve got lots of pals on the strip,” he says happily.
Here’s a guide to the good eats you can find along Main Street. Plan your feasting accordingly.
Where past meets present
Main Street may be the trendiest street in town right now, but it’s also one of the most historic. It begins at the site of the Hastings Mill, where the original settlement of Granville began on the shores of Burrard Inlet, and was built to connect with what is now Kingsway, the route to New Westminster, B.C.’s first capital and, until the early 20th century, its largest city.
It travels from the Port of Vancouver through Gastown, the Downtown Eastside and Chinatown, past the Pacific Central railway station and Science World Skytrain station. It then hops over Terminal Avenue and into the lively mix of residential, light industry, retail and restaurants that comprise Mount Pleasant and neighbouring Riley Park-Little Mountain (though people often just call the whole area Mount Pleasant).
This is where you will find the circa 1912 historic structures Heritage Hall and the Lee Building, Vancouver’s first skyscraper. This was also the site of Brewery Creek, a waterway long used by Indigenous people for harvesting food when this was still dense rainforest, and later by Europeans to power industry, including the city’s first breweries. The creek has long been built over and lost, but is commemorated in cairns dotted around the neighbourhood and, of course, a new crop of craft breweries.
This is the heart of the dining action, home to a growing number of low-rise residential buildings, shops, restaurants and bars.
By the time it reaches 33rd Aveune, Main Street is mostly residential, and south of 41st has a large Indo-Canadian population and a lively Punjabi market. Around Marine Drive, it’s all big-box stores and heavy traffic. It ends at the shores of the north arm of the Fraser River.
Chinatown
When it comes to dining, most of the best eats are in two sections of Main Street — around Chinatown and Mount Pleasant/Riley Park/Little Mountain.
Chinatown is one of Vancouver’s oldest and most historic neighbourhoods, established in the 1880s and declared a National Historic Site in 2010. You will still find old-school bakeries, dim sum joints and markets fragrant with bins of dried herbs, ginseng and teeny dried fish, but in recent decades many of the traditional Chinese businesses have either closed as their owners retired, or moved to the suburbs.
In their place are a growing number of new bars and restaurants. It’s here that you will find the natural wine-forward Bar Gobo, fusion-y fine dining at Kissa Tanto, vegan MILA and modern Chinese Bao Bei, as well as the craft-cocktail meccas such as The Chickadee Room, Keefer Bar and Laowai, the speakeasy behind the Blnd Tger dumpling shop (ask for the No. 7).
A bit farther south — on the other side of the Dunsmuir and Georgia Street viaducts, which may or may not be scheduled for demolition — there’s the award-winning pan-Asian Torafuku, classic Spanish Bodega on Main and the Ivanhoe Pub, which has been serving pints since 1907.
From here, the landscape becomes more industrial and the traffic much heavier. But once you cross 2nd Avenue, it’s a whole new world. You could even say it’s a pleasant one.
Mount Pleasant
It’s a sunny Sunday afternoon and the intoxicating aroma of saffron, tomatoes and onions wafts over the patio at Como Taperia. As we sip vermut and Albariño, a giant pan of paella bubbles away. Every passerby pauses to watch as the chef creates a mosaic of prawns, clams and mussels atop the rice.
These are the Paella Guys, whose owner and head chef Javier Blanc is heading to Spain this September to represent Canada at the World Paella Day Cup. Every second Sunday this summer, they brought their giant pans and burners to the Como patio.
“Originally it happened during COVID because we couldn’t have people inside. It was kind of fun, and then it got so popular,” says Como’s co-owner Shaun Layton.
Como opened in 2018, propelled to the No. 2 spot on enRoute’s list of best new restaurants by its selection of authentic Spanish tapas, drinks and lively Iberian vibe.
“We wanted to be in this neighbourhood, especially around here,” Layton says. “It’s just a mix of up and coming [businesses] and it’s also got a lot of history. And it is in the brewery district, where we were already hanging out a lot.”
Just a block away is the natural wine-focused Bar Susu from the folks behind Published on Main. “Mount Pleasant is ramping up to be a great place,” says general manager Aaron Saymac. “And everyone is doing something different. Opening a natural wine bar is one of those things. Will people be open to it? Natural wine can be really funky.”
Their goal is to focus both on wines that promote regenerative farming and chef Ashley Kurtz’s equally adventurous cuisine. Still, Saymac says, “There’s something for everyone without compromising our goal. That’s why we’re here. We just want to share these things.”
Between Bar Susu and 16th Avenue — where the neighbourhood technically becomes Riley Park-Little Mountain — you will also find Burdock & Co, where chef Andrea Carlson transforms locally farmed and foraged finds into transcendent meals, and The Cascade Room, among Vancouver’s buzziest gastropubs. Novella, the highly anticipated new restaurant from the Published team, will also open here sometime this year, permits allowing.
This is also paradise for craft beer lovers, with Main Street Brewing, Brassneck and 33 Acres already brewing away, and Steamworks and others still to come.
Riley Park-Little Mountain
Cross 16th Avenue and the traffic slows down and the eating gets even better. It’s here that you will fine Anh and Chi, the elevated, award-winning Vietnamese restaurant as well as The Acorn Restaurant, voted world’s best vegan restaurant by Big 7 Travel in 2019. Sun Sui Wah, one of Vancouver’s most legendary Cantonese banquet rooms, is here — har gow and siu mai for Sunday dim sum is a longstanding local tradition — and so is The Shameful Tiki Room, where you can enjoy a volcano bowl amid the faux grass huts and puffer fish lights. And SUYO, the highly anticipated modern Peruvian restaurant from former Ancora chef Ricardo Valverde, will be joining the strip later this year.
But the restaurant everyone is talking about these days is Published, which was opened at the end of 2019 by brothers Cody and Clay Allmin, with chef Stieffenhofer-Brandson leading the kitchen.
“My vision was something that could be a neighbourhood spot as much as it could be dining destination. It would be my cooking, with a big focus on local and foraging, and really just running with that and making it beautiful,” says Stieffenhofer- Brandson. “Something like Nightingale, with this big menu that was really diverse, but eclectic.”
It was just what Vancouver was hungry for — and it helped that Stieffenhofer-Brandson has created some of the most visually stunning dishes in the city, including a pickle-bedecked schnitzel that looks like a mosaic and chicken liver parfait that is as pretty as a tapestry.
But just a few months later, COVID wreaked havoc across the industry. They discussed turning to pizza and burgers, making things more accessible as so many fine-dining restaurants did during the pandemic. “And I said no,” Stieffenhofer-Brandson recalls. “We should do what we set out to do. Now is the time to double down.”
Clearly his strategy has worked, propelling this relative newcomer to the top of the C100B list, ahead of local stalwarts such as St. Lawrence (No. 3) and Hawksworth (No. 25) and even Toronto’s legendary Alo (No. 2).
“You always set out to be the best at what you do. I want to be at the top of my genre, but it’s hard to put yourself in the same category as something like Alo,” Stieffenhofer-Brandson says.
He adds: “I wanted to create a dining space that was missing in Vancouver, to not just be a white tablecloth space. It can be so many different dining experiences and that’s something we do really well.”
He’s talking about Published, but that sounds like the perfect description of Main Street and its eclectic dining scene, too.
Main Street has gone through good times and tough ones (sometimes at the same time, depending where you are on the strip) but it’s always been a lively mix of residential and commercial, the well-to-do and down-on-their-luck, of old- timers, newcomers and recent immigrants. And it’s never been more exciting or more delicious than it is right now.
