In the photo, clockwise: actual rainbow (colours not computer enhanced); a temporary listing of butcher shop items on brown paper; a sampling of deli items; Chef Sean Cousins; house-made potato chips.
FEATURES
A NEW SO.CIAL ORDER COMES TO GASTOWN
Is there a pot of gold in Gastown? The magnificent rainbow arching over the Sun Tower (at about 7 p.m. last night) as we made our way in that direction portended that there was.
Perhaps we found it at 332 Water Street. Last night’s “hard hat� preview for the media given by So.Cial at Le Magasin made it clear that Sean Heather is not the only restaurateur bringing a new culinary excitement to the city’s long neglected, tourist trap area.
Maureen Fleming, one of the co-owners of Ocean 6 Seventeen, claims that she has had her eye on the 1911 vintage Le Magasin building for the past 20 years, watching it through various incarnations that have included Kilimanjaro restaurant and the Capri 19 Lounge. When the lease came available last December, she and partners Chef Sean Cousins and hockey men Kirk McLean and Bob McCammon jumped at the chance to take it over and convert the space into a dream ensemble of restaurant, oyster bar and charcuterie/butcher shop.
With an April 4th opening as their goal, Fleming and her team have been hard at work on the restoration and the results of their labours are impressive. Layers of old paint, banged-up flooring, false ceilings and walls, glue and other leftover '80s gunk have been peeled away to reveal gorgeous pressed tin ceilings, fir timber support pillars, handcrafted floor tiles, wrought iron and beveled window panes. A new kitchen has just been installed, and the next couple of days will see the installation of hand blown, glass chandeliers from Italy plus the painting of the walls to a clean, antique white finish.
The look of old world, market hall charm combined with elegant, baroque touches will be used to full effect in the upstairs, 110-seat dining room overlooking Water street, as well as the smaller and more casual oyster bar downstairs. The most exciting element however, is likely to be the adjoining custom butcher shop with its own entrance and its proximity to a proposed Gastown farmer’s market outside on the cobblestoned alley.
This is where Chef Sean intends to present a cornucopia of small farm-raised meats and house-cured and -smoked deli items such as: corned beef, bacon, pates and sausages; as well as homemade condiments; house-baked breads; and last but not least, his soon-to-be-famous salt, pepper and vinegar potato chips.
The butcher shop will also have a small eating area serving coffee, chowders, and the old-fashioned sandwiches that Sean promises will be stuffed as wide as the space between his thumb and forefinger. A fun feature is the fact that restaurant patrons will be able to visit the shop to view and custom order the cut of their steak or chop before it is cooked by the kitchen and served to them in the dining room next door.
To deliver both the atmosphere and the quality of product that your grandparents would have encountered when visiting a family-owned and operated butcher shop seems to be the mandate here. How appropriate then, and how fortunate for our modern generation, that this sort of artisan resource has now returned to Vancouver’s most historic neighbourhood.
