Our favourite Hired Belly, Tim Pawsey, passes on a review of a repositioned restaurant literally just down my lane – “Left Bank Vancouver: Modern French Trumps Classic Bistro.”
John Blakeley has decided it’s time to shift gears. He’s shuttered Le Parisien (the latest name in a series descended from old stalwart Café de Paris). In its place he’s opened much edgier and more updated—less obviously French, he says—Left Bank. …
Most notable is the addition of a brand new, stylish, 35-seat, cedar enclosed and LED-lit patio on the south side, which expands the room out into the lane. It’s the first licensed patio in a West End lane—and likely not the last.
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I went down to check it out (the patio, I mean; food later) because it’s a small sign of what may be the biggest change in the West End in the next decade: the transformation of the lanes.
Developing the lanes was the most innovative idea in the recently passed West End plan, and I’m told there are several dozen applications in process to take advantage of the new opportunity to do residential development at the rear of existing apartments.
But here, a restaurateur has decided it was worth giving up parking to do something that a few years ago would have been unlikely, if not considered unsavory: to use service lanes for outdoor eating.
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If this takes off, who knows where it might end.
