Owners Victoria and Michael Tran, seen here on June 11, 2020, will be opening their new restaurant, The Lunch Lady, on July 1, 2020.Jackie Dives/The Globe and Mail
Victoria and Michael Tran thought they had a slam-dunk formula for success.
Lunch Lady, their new Commercial Drive restaurant in Vancouver that is now scheduled to open on July 1, is a collaboration with Nguyen Thị Tan, a Ho Chi Minh City street food vendor made famous by Anthony Bourdain.
Mr. Tran, founder of the Pacific Poke chain, began courting the celebrated Vietnamese cook, aka the Lunch Lady, after first visiting her “must-visit” soup stall in 2012. His mother, who is also a restaurateur and was raised in Ho Chi Minh City before immigrating to Saskatchewan as a teenager, helped clinched the deal two years ago.
In November, after several visits to Vietnam to make plans and learn Ms. Nguyen’s secret recipes, they closed down Ms. Tran’s Five Elements Café to begin rebranding. By February, the interior renovations were well under way and enthusiastic press coverage was already rolling in.
And then the COVID-19 pandemic struck.
Lunch Lady is one of about a dozen new Vancouver restaurants scheduled to launch over the next few weeks after months of delay and uncertainty. They face all the same hurdles experienced by every restaurant that was forced to close and reopen under strict new safety guidelines – and then some.
After months of delay and uncertainty, the Lunch Lady is one of about 12 new restaurants set to open in the coming weeks in Vancouver.Jackie Dives/Jackie Dives / The Globe and Mai
“It’s been seven months,” a frustrated Mr. Tran said last week, after being hit with an unexpected health permit hiccup (the Vancouver Coastal Health inspector went on vacation and his replacement wasn’t initially willing to sign off on the project), which delayed their planned June 15 launch by another two weeks.
“We just want to open.”
For the Trans, the biggest disappointment was not being able to bring Ms. Nguyen to Vancouver for the opening. “We bought, rebooked and cancelled her plane ticket three times since December,” said Mr. Tran, explaining that her hopes for a North American expansion had previously been dashed after Mr. Bourdain pulled the plug on his New York food hall in 2017.
It wasn’t just a marketing opportunity. Ms. Nguyen was actually planning to stay in Vancouver for three to six months to train the staff and “bless” every dish on the Lunch Lady menu.
Now that menu is radically rejigged to make it more suitable for takeout.
“It almost killed me to think that the first time someone would try her food would be at home in a plastic container,” Mr. Tran said. “Noodle soup doesn’t travel well. We can’t guarantee the quality. I had nightmares.”
Ms. Tran is also worried about the prices, which have yet to be finalized. They were already going to be much higher than her $10 pho at Five Elements. But now their food costs have gone up – “50 per cent for beef and pork,” she said.
They also have to pay for the renovations and recoup seven months of full rent (plus an increase next year).
Vancouver's The Lunch Lady is a collaboration with the Saigon street-food vendor, Mrs. Nguyen Thi Thanh (aka The Lunch Lady) made famous by Anthony Bourdain.Jackie Dives/Jackie Dives / The Globe and Mai
“The messages are already popping on my Facebook page. My customers are used to dining here for a cheap, cheap price. And now they have even less money. We tell them we are doing our best to justify the prices.”
All restaurants are feeling the financial strains inflicted by the fallout of COVID-19 and the protocols for dining. But for first-time restaurateurs who don’t have a payroll history or revenue from last year (to show a current loss), the bridge financing has been even harder to secure.
“We didn’t qualify for the federal rent relief or wage subsidies because we’re a new business,” said Justin Cheung, the co-owner of Cambie Street’s Potluck Hawker Eatery, which should open by the end of June – three months later than planned.
Mr. Cheung, who was formerly the long-time chef at Longtail Kitchen, in New Westminster, B.C., said he recently discovered that he might be eligible for a low-interest loan through the Western Economic Diversification’s Regional Relief and Recovery Fund.
“But we’ve just begun applying. Fingers crossed because our finances have definitely been drained.”
To make matters worse, one of Mr. Cheung’s business partners was stuck in South Korea until early May, which meant they couldn’t even apply for a credit card or a liquor licence transfer.
“Did we consider throwing in the towel? For sure,” he said. “But we were almost 50 per cent there. We had to figure out a way.”
The Lunch Lady's chef, Benedict Lim.Jackie Dives/Jackie Dives / The Globe and Mai
Over in Olympic Village, a new high-end Mexican restaurant called Ophelia was about one week away from opening before the COVID-19 closings in mid-March.
“We had the menu in place, we had started training staff, everything was ready to go – and then the world changed and we had to stop everything,” said Erik Heck, who also has three locations of Flying Pig and WildTale with his business partner John Crook.
This new restaurant, a partnership with chef Francisco Higareda, will be in the last in the group to reopen, likely in a few weeks.
It was also supposed to be the most sophisticated in terms of cuisine. Mr. Higareda did his culinary training at the prestigious Ambrosia Centro Culinario in Mexico City. He has worked at several highly acclaimed fine-dining restaurants, including Pujol in Mexico City and Spain’s Restaurante Arzak.
For his sous-chef, he had recruited Victor Ramos, a well-known chef from northern Mexico, where is currently still stuck.
Together, they had aimed to elevate Mexican cuisine to a level previously unseen in Vancouver.
“It’s still going to be elevated and super authentic, but it’s not going to be fine dining. At least not for now,” Mr. Higareda said.
He explained that he doesn’t have enough staff (front-of-house or in a physically distanced kitchen) to execute the original menu. But more importantly, he said upscale dining isn’t the type of experience that people are seeking.
“The world has changed. Fine dining is not the answer right now.
We have a weekly Western Canada newsletter written by our B.C. and Alberta bureau chiefs, providing a comprehensive package of the news you need to know about the region and its place in the issues facing Canada. Sign up today.