Pala Lago - Guardian of the Lake

PALA LAGO - A NEW UPSCALE RESTAURANT FOR CULTUS LAKE

With new eating places multiplying all over Vancouver like tribbles, you have to wonder why so many prospective restaurateurs would want to fight and claw for breathing space in a city that even two years ago, was already deemed over saturated with high end restaurants for its size and demographics. The question is: How many of these expensively built places can survive?

The situation seems even odder when you also consider the fact that highly populated suburbs outside the city are begging for places that offer better than fast food fare. So the next obvious question is: Why don’t some of these eager new chef/owners look outside the greater Vancouver area where rents are cheaper and there is less competition, etc., etc?

Well, our theory is that the front partners – the earnest, young chefs, the ones everyone likes to talk and speculate about on the chat sites, are not making the decision. It’s the people financing them who do, and a lot of these flashy new restaurants would appear to be coming into existence to facilitate two main purposes.

1) They are created by property developers with the hopes of drawing traffic into city blocks that they own so that they can sell the condos sitting above them at maximum market value and/or hike the rents of the other retail operations on the street. Or…

2) They are the dream productions of gaggles of well-heeled investors, many of them new in the restaurant business, most of them living or working close to the downtown core, and what they really want is have a “my restaurant� to hang out in with their friends, and they don’t want to have to drive all the way to Port Coquitlam to be able to do it.

So, given all that, it’s interesting to run across two savvy investors who have stepped away from the crowd, and have not only found a place more or less to themselves, but despite the great BC recreational property land grab currently in progress, have also snagged a country spot that seems ideally situated to attract both peak summer visitors and local residents.

Peter Schmid is a business man who lives in West Vancouver but has long enjoyed spending weekends at Cultus Lake, and who has seen the area become increasingly packed with people from Vancouver during the summer season. The warm water lake is a popular destination in itself, and it is also a favoured picnic spot for travellers on their way to the Okanagan or points further east on the #5 highway. It was clear that Cultus Lake had all the right things going for it, that is, except when it came to restaurants.

He decided to team up with Emmanuel Tselios from Abbotsford to change that situation. Seeking a suitable location, the partners found what they were looking for in a greasy spoon café that was up for sale on Sunnyside Drive in the Cultus Lake Village. Bulldozing the original structure, they set to work creating Pala Lago (Esperanto for "guardian of the lake") -- a restaurant with a large, airy, modern design incorporating exposed stone, timber, soaring 15 ft. high ceilings and a fireplace that extends from the floor right up through the roof.

Knowing what makes best bait for warm weather diners, a large outdoor patio is going to be the big focus here. There will be space to serve 150 - 160 in total, with up to 90 of these outside, in addition to 60 to 70 covers inside in the main dining room. And while it won’t be a white tablecloth sort of place, the atmosphere at Pala Lago, like that of Whistler Resort, will be targeted towards diners with a more sophisticated palate than that of the burger and six pack crowd.

To head the kitchen they’ve hired Jason Malloff, formerly the chef at Fiddlehead Joe’s in Vancouver. Malloff describes the food he will cook there as “contemporary Canadian upscale bistro�. “It won’t be high end cuisine in the way that you have eight people touch your plate before it gets to you�, says Jason. “But it will be prepared using premium products and modern techniques such as the sous-vide, reductions and emulsions.�

Most of all, Chef Jason is stoked about working in an area where he will be able to obtain ingredients from local sources that are practically a bean throw from his kitchen door. The Cultus Lake area is surrounded by farmland; farmers market stands; specialty food producers such as Polderside Farms (poultry products), Ennis Farms (beef, pork, lamb and game), and Lowland Herb Farm; plus the artisan fish, honey, dairy and cheese producers of nearby Agassiz.

Malloff expects that cooking within this small eco-system of the Fraser Valley will be much like what he experienced when he cooked at a 2 Michelin star restaurant in the countryside of the Jura, Franche-Compte region of France. Like the restaurants of Whistler, we also think it sounds similar to what the chefs have discovered in their surrounding agricultural area of Pemberton.

And what happens when summer is over and everyone packs up their inner tubes and swim suits and goes back to Vancouver?

“That’s when we really expect to do business,� says Malloff. “We are situated between Chilliwack and Abbotsford. There’s a LOT of people living in those areas, and they get hungry.�



Pala Lago is currently under construction and is expected to be open by mid-July, 2007. The restaurant will be located at 105 Sunnyside Drive, Cultus Lake Village. There is no phone number at present.