Boneta

EATING & DRINKING: NOVEMBER 2007

GASTOWN REVIVAL

The partners who built Boneta (renovating a former restaurant space decorated in the style of “Tuscan Regret,” as one of them quipped) are the funniest restaurateurs in town. Neil Ingram, Mark Brand, and Andre McGillivray have worked, it seems, in most of the restaurants in town. Their common ground was found during overlapping stints at Lumière, back when it was a happier place.

Boneta might have been a daunting venture, but the jolly trio never wavered, despite the mean-streets location and the major rehab, both of which required some serious vision but a lot more sweat equity. In an 1892-vintage building on the corner of Carrall and Cordova that once housed a bank (the original survey marker for the Granville townsite can still be seen today), it was clad in stone quarried from Queen Elizabeth Park and horse-carted downtown.

“Everything was covered up,” says McGillivray, who, with Brand and Ingram, spent five weeks (they slept on-site) stripping back 115 years of bad rehabs. “How could you fuck this up any more?” they remember asking out loud, as yet another layer of acoustic tile rained down to reveal a period ceiling.

That the threesome managed to open a stylish restaurant with a very hip bar, restaurant, and patio (total seats: 154) on a budget of $89,000 could warm even the chilliest Scottish heart. “It wasn’t a shoestring budget,” said the chap on the next barstool one night, “it was a flip-flop budget—Valu Village flip-flops.”

The dining room shows few signs of the inexpensively homemade (except for the food, which from the hands of former Lumière sous chef Jeremie Bastien is delicious and reasonably priced)—it’s cool and for the cool, apparently from many walks of life. We watch the telltales, having arrived early in the Friday evening cocktail hour. Local artists caftaned in black and gold share the space with captains of industry and their cling-ons, who have followed the lads from their former West Broadway precinct. Some arrive by public transit, but most walk from their Gastown digs, although by the time we leave, there are three Mercedes valet-parked across the street. The trio refer to these latter gastronomic explorers as “adventurous—the Marlon Perkins of the culinary world.”

On the glossily verathaned bamboo bar, stripey as a brunette zebra, Brand slides down some of the cocktails that made him this magazine’s barman of the year. His drinks, like the design of the room, don’t hit you over the head (at least at first)—they are balanced and inflected, with subtle aftershocks of innuendo. Huge canvases by local avantiste Charles Forsberg loom overhead, but the room, which is tall, enjoins an intimacy found in that ephemeral thing called conviviality. People are laughing and talking to their neighbours, charmed by the diversity of clientele and the rumpus of happy noise and pretty features.

“It was actually a smooth process,” Ingram says of the construction. “We’ve opened a lot of restaurants and there was nothing especially challenging.” Certainly the rent wasn’t. Pegged at just $5,000 per month all in, and with sales already approaching $50,000 per week, these three gutsy young men, while renovating the past, have added to Gastown’s future, and their own.

Source:
Vancouver Magazine Nov 2007 Issue

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