Nin Rai, Paul Grunberg, and Lee Cooper have taken over the space that was once home to the Irish Heather. It will be replaced with their new restaurant, L'Abattoir.

Credit: Doug Shanks

ON THE PLATE: Gastown’s gastro future

Gastown will be getting another refined shot in the arm with the arrival this summer of L’Abattoir, the latest in a long string of restaurants gifted to the area in the past few years. It will be the first tenant to operate at the 217 Carrall Street address since the storied Irish Heather gastropub vacated in 2008 for its new location across the street. It’s a site loaded with symbolism for us restaurant geeks, the place where the neighbourhood’s culinary and entrepreneurial fortunes started to turn a corner from the grim to the bright over a decade ago.

Named for the local legend that says nearby Blood Alley was once home to butchers who would anoint its cobblestones with blood every day (although I’ve never found evidence to support this), the-80 seat, 2,750-square-foot L’Abattoir aims to add a little fine dining to the Gastown mix, but without the starchy pretense — something that will stand out in an area increasingly defined by the casual edginess of its soon-to-be competitors.

Sounds good to me. Gastown is grittier, younger, and less corporate than Yaletown, Vancouver’s other premiere dining district. Yet for all the great press it’s received, Gastown still hasn’t given us a gastronomic anchor of excellence like, say, Cioppino’s is to Yaletown. Nearly everything that’s there now is what I consider to be alcohol-forward joints, where the plate often plays second fiddle to the glass. And tying them together is an absence of formality that has cemented a new meme: Yaletown is where we dress up; Gastown is where we get down.

Even with the upcoming arrivals of Sea Monstr Sushi at 55 Powell (September), and the homestyle, pie-centric Acme Cafe at 51 West Hastings (this week), there’s still an opening for L’Abattoir in the crowded marketplace. Only Boneta has successfully straddled both the fine and the casual camps; with its reliable wine and cocktail programs, personality-driven service, and chef Jeremie Bastien’s mature, confident cooking leading the way, it has emerged as the best full-package restaurant for blocks around, and the one L’Abattoir is closest to in promise and possibility.

I say “promise” because L’Abattoir marks the first time that front-of-house maestro Paul Grunberg has taken a personal stake in a restaurant, and it’s high time he did. He’s shepherded several of Vancouver’s best dining rooms — including Feenie’s, Chambar, Market, and Bao Bei — but ownership had always been a distant, uncertain horizon. Add to this the experience of his business partner, Nin Ari (of caterers Truffle Fine Foods), and we have an ambitious, well-oiled machine in the making.

The third partner in L’Abattoir is chef Lee Cooper, the 31-year-old nephew of trailblazing Okanagan chef Bernard Casavant. I’d never heard of Cooper before last week, but he has an impressive résumé: Terrace and Fresco restaurants in the Okanagan; Pear Tree in Burnaby and Market in downtown Vancouver (it was at the latter that he met Grunberg, in 2008); and the U.K.’s Fat Duck, Maze, and Tom Aikens. When I met him at the construction site last week, he’d just returned from a short stint at Ubuntu, a Michelin-starred locavore restaurant in California’s Napa Valley.

Cooper’s food, he says, will be “French-influenced,” neither haute nor bistro. Much like the restaurant itself, he’s aiming for something in between — rustic at times, but always refined, polished, and never insincere. And that’s somewhere between what is to be expected and what is to be hoped for with Gastown as a whole. The neighbourhood has enough pubs, diners, bars, tapas joints, and charcuterie pit stops. It’s time for something new, on a par with Boneta; something with its sense of place in the local pantheon squarely fixed, and its consistency assured by pedigreed owner-operators.

“We really want to offer our guests the best aspects of a fine-dining restaurant in an atmosphere that’s casual and approachable,” Cooper told me last week. He and Grunberg repeated words like “accessible,” “comfortable,” and “affordable” — all code for “You won’t be assaulted with caviar or serenaded with silence.” At the same time — and often in the same breath — they employed equally loaded terms like “sophisticated” and “elegant” to describe what they’re doing, without a stitch of worry that they might be contradicting themselves. It’s not impossible to achieve that kind of equilibrium and run it successfully year after year. It’s just uncommon.

If L’Abattoir is a flop (although I’m pretty confident it won’t be), it’ll at least be very pretty. Situ Design’s David Hepworth, designer of Feenie’s and the first incarnation of Lumière, is the aesthete charged with the look of the place. He’s planned a 48-seat mezzanine, a 10-seat bar, a holding area on the main floor, and a 22-seat all-season solarium in the back. There might be some flirtation with formality, but I expect to see more cool than cold. “We don’t want to be a special-occasion restaurant,” Grunberg insists. “We’re looking for people to come in with high expectations, and we’re going to deliver.”