After winning gold at Canadian Culinary Championships and reaching the finals on Top Chef Canada, the sky’s the limit for Five Sails chef Alex Kim.
Consider the oyster. Not just any oyster, but a plump West Coast kusshi, garnished with dots of apple jelly, teensy little shiso leaves and salsify (a.k.a. the oyster plant), neatly tucked in a delicate shell. “Eat the whole thing,” our server says. “The shell, too.” Surprise! It’s a tartlet in an exquisitely fine, hand-painted pastry shell flavoured with sea lettuce.
It’s also chef Alex Kim’s signature dish, the one that won him gold at the Canadian Culinary Championships in Ottawa last February and dazzled the judges on Top Chef Canada. But it’s not the only trick up his sleeve.
Our next course is simply a tin of caviar. Or is it? When I dip my mother-of-pearl spoon into the shiny black pearls, I encounter a gloriously rich layer of Dungeness crab, cauliflower, leek and Gruyère cheese hidden underneath. I may have swooned a little.
Now this is what a tasting menu should be: delightful, delicious, a little bit whimsical, but executed with absolute precision, and satisfying in every way. Of course, it doesn’t hurt that we also enjoy a spectacular view, sweeping from Stanley Park across the North Shore Mountains, while we dine.
Credit that view, that tasting menu and, most of all, the thoughtful leadership of culinary director Alex Kim for making the Five Sails perhaps the most exciting restaurant in Vancouver right now.
Wait, what? The Five Sails? That lofty bastion of old-school, old-world fine dining at the Pan Pacific Hotel? The most exciting restaurant in town? Yep. That Five Sails.
Culinary director Alex Kim, top left, whose profile rose nationally after his run on Top Chef Canada and a gold medal at the Canadian Culinary Championships, now shapes the seasonal, Pacific Northwest–focused menus at Five Sails. Photos by Nora Hamade.
The beginning
“The Five Sails has always been the hidden place that not too many people go to,” says Emad Yacoub, CEO of the Glowbal Restaurant Group. “It was the place to go when you were looking for a quiet dinner where it’s not too many people around you, and you just want to have great food, great service, a mountain view — just a great place to be. When I have somebody coming in to visit me, Five Sails has always been the place I take [them] to show off Vancouver.”
Five Sails first opened in 1986, when Vancouver was in its infancy as a culinary city. In 2007, the husband-and-wife team of chef Ernst Dorfler and food and beverage director Gerry Sayers became owner-operators. Discreetly located up two flights of escalators and a curving staircase, in an aerie overlooking the famous Canada Place sails, Five Sails was a little taste of old Vancouver, serving elegant luncheons, fancy afternoon teas and luxe dinners featuring classic dishes like tournedos Rossini (filet mignon topped with foie gras).
Then in 2019, Dorfler and Sayers retired. Unsure what to do with the space, the owners of the hotel turned to Yacoub for advice. Depending on how you look at it, the timing couldn’t have been better — or worse.
The Glowbal Restaurant Group already had a growing collection of casual fine-dining restaurants in Vancouver and Toronto, including the multicultural Glowbal, seafood-forward Coast, Italian Kitchen, Black + Blue steakhouse and Riley’s chophouse. Missing in the lineup? A smaller fine-dining restaurant. So Yacoub had a conversation with his business partner.
“We always believed we could do so much with Five Sails,” he says. And it wasn’t just because they wanted to round out their portfolio.
“We wanted a culinary mecca for our restaurants. We all came from hotels where you work in the café, you work in room service, you work in banquets and end up in fine dining. That’s the goal for any apprentice, to one day work in fine dining. So we looked at Five Sails as the mecca for our apprentices. You know: If you do very well, maybe one day we’ll put you in Five Sails.”
They took the Five Sails over on January 1, 2020.
“We were four months into renovation when COVID hit,” Yacoub says. “And we couldn’t open until probably August, because there was no indoor dining and there’s no patio. We opened very, very [slowly].”
Aside from the same issues everyone else was facing with pandemic pivots, supply chain shortages and chronic labour problems, they were also struggling to get the right chef in place for what they envisioned as a Michelin-worthy celebration of West Coast cuisine.
They opened with a French chef who was “very, very talented,” but wanted to make French food with French products. Then they attracted another chef with the right kind of Michelin-starred experience, but he left for health reasons. “And this is when Alex stepped in.”
The chef
Until 2025, Alex Kim was hardly a household name around town. But these days his name seems to be everywhere. Not only did he win the Canadian Culinary Championship last year, but in December he also made it to the final round of Top Chef Canada’s Season 12. (The competition was narrowly won by Coulson Armstrong of Matty Matheson’s Toronto-based Our House Hospitality Company.)
Kim had wanted to compete in both events ever since his earliest days as a young cook back in Edmonton. “So a lot of dreams came true in 2025,” he says.
Born and raised in South Korea, Kim’s earliest mentors were his grandparents, who lived on a small farm growing grapes, tree fruits, chilies and rice. From ages four to 14, he spent summers with them, helping his grandmother in the kitchen or the garden, and his grandfather with the wood-fired oven.
“My grandmother had a hothouse and a vegetable garden with zucchini and eggplant and all this summer squash,” he recalls. “On the rooftop, she had these traditional clay jars of fermenting doenjang, which is Korean miso; ganjang, Korean soy sauce; and gojuchang. I got scolded when I’d put my fingers in and taste it. I mean, these are all great memories.
He adds: “What I learned from her is really how to respect the ingredients, the fresh ingredients, and the true spirit of farm to table. It wasn’t about the technique. It was about the mindset of fresh ingredients and local produce.”
When he was 15, the family moved to Canada, choosing Edmonton because it was neither too far east nor too far west. Kim attended high school and culinary school there and started cooking, first at a Korean restaurant, then at the Fairmont Hotel Macdonald and Château Lake Louise.
But Vancouver, with its plentiful seafood, moderate climate and bounty of fruits and vegetable, was calling. He became chef de cuisine at Market by Jean-Georges at the Shangri-La Hotel, where he worked for five years, until it closed on New Year’s Eve 2019. The plan was to create a new restaurant concept at the hotel in 2020, but COVID had other ideas. “So I departed from the hotel industry,” Kim says.
Meanwhile, Yacoub was having problems with his flagship Glowbal restaurant, where he felt that the food had suffered while he was busy opening Black + Blue in Toronto. He hired Kim to oversee it, to improve the systems, train the staff and streamline the menu to focus on quality. “Alex really did a great job, just took it to that final level that we needed for a restaurant of that size,” Yacoub says.
And then the opportunity at Five Sails opened up. Yacoub promoted Kim to culinary director, so he could keep his eye on Glowbal while also training the team at Five Sails.
“Then I gave him the room to run,” Yacoub says. “And this is where everybody is finding out about Alex and about how talented he is.”
The vision
But what, exactly, do you do when you take over a beloved classic yet also want to create an innovative, Michelin star–worthy restaurant?
“Five Sails has been around for a really long time. And it was a certain kind of restaurant. We had many, many discussions between myself and the ownership in terms of the concept,” Kim says. “We want to keep the legacy of the name Five Sails… but I want to modernize and be a bit more innovative, a little bit more creative.”
As for Yacoub, he wanted to maintain the high quality and exceptional service the restaurant was known for, but he also wanted to aim even higher, as high as a Michelin–star, even though Michelin rarely awards stars to hotel restaurants. “I said, who knows? Why don’t we just push for it and hope for the best, right?”
The team decided to close the restaurant at lunch and focus on dinner. They concentrated on training and hired rock stars like chef de cuisine Juan Ruiz-Torres, whose résumé includes stints at Chicago’s three-Michelin-starred Alinea and Spain’s legendary El Celler de Can Roca, twice named No.1 by The World’s 50 Best Restaurants. They forged close relationships with top local producers. And they seriously honed in on their concept.
“When it comes to the concept, we want to really highlight the Pacific Northwest, where we are, in a fine-dining way. I want to go a little bit more local, a little bit more seasonal, and we’re not scared of using techniques outside of French cuisine or Italian cuisine. So we do a lot of fermentation here, and charcoal grilling. We do lots of preserving vegetables. I want to introduce different combinations of flavours, different contrast and textures.”
But he also wants to offer something for the guests who arrive hungry for the kind of classic, French-style dishes Five Sails was known for. To balance the two needs, he offers two different styles of menu.
One is a seven-course tasting menu (with a couple of surprises), where Kim and his team get to play. It showcases a local farm and its ingredients, along with thoughtful B.C. wine pairings from a team led by the Glowbal Group’s corporate wine director, Sarah McCauley.
The other menu is traditional à la carte and offers many of the Five Sails classics, while still featuring local ingredients and seasonal updates. It changes four times a year; the tasting menu, by comparison, changes more or less monthly.
“That keeps our team excited, and then our guests excited,” Kim says. “There’s a good balance between the classic and modern innovative style and a clear food concept.”
The future
For a chef who’s gone from relative obscurity to national stardom in the space of a year, Alex Kim is unusually humble and eager to share his success. He famously cried when his wife visited Top Chef Canada in Episode 6, and throughout the series frequently reminisced about his grandmother and how she influenced him. When we spoke, his very first words were about how grateful he is to his team, his friends and his family. “Everybody really supported me so much,” he says.
Now he sees an opportunity to give back. For one thing, he’s hosting several culinary collaborations this year with chefs from around the world, among them, chef François-Emmanuel Nicol from Quebec City’s two-Michelin-starred Tanière3, whom he met during the Culinary Championships.
“The Culinary Championships and Top Chef opened up more doors for me to reach out and invite other chefs,” he says. “The biggest benefit for my team is to get to see other chefs’ style… and to work with another chef who is really talented. For our guests, when we bring in a Quebecois chef or Korean chef or chef from New York, it’s a sneak peek to see what they’re doing in different cities.”
He also plans to focus more on team development, especially on the operational and financial aspects of the restaurant business. “It’s a give and take, because the last couple of years, they were really supportive of me going away and doing all this stuff. So I want to give back and spend lots of my time sharing the knowledge I have,” he says.
Meanwhile, Yacoub has been busy opening more restaurants: first, Riley’s in Toronto (“This one is going to be my jewel,” he says); next, Black + Blue in Calgary; and then Gigi’s, a Mediterranean concept he’s been pondering for a while. And he’s also feeling pretty proud of Five Sails and the talented chef who’s been winning so many awards.
“What it means is now the city knows about the restaurant. We are one of the top restaurants in the city, but not too many people were really aware of what we were doing,” he says. “So, because of all this, now they say, ‘OK, maybe we should check it out.’ Now they realize, ‘Oh, wow, this is a very unique place.’”
Five Sails
999 Canada Place, Vancouver, B.C.
glowbalgroup.com/five-sails | @fivesailsvancouver
