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