The new Vancouver Convention Centre has helped kill the 15-year-old restaurant Aqua Riva, which has long relied on traffic from the old Vancouver Convention and Exhibition Centre.
Toseki Entertainment Ltd., which owns Aqua Riva along with Horizons on Burnaby Mountain and the Salmon House in West Vancouver, is closing the venerable 9,000-square-foot restaurant partly because the size is so vast it is hard to generate profits with the lease rate being so high.
Toseki’s director of operations Geoffrey Howes told Business in Vancouver on Wednesday that the seafood restaurant has long depended on convention centre business.
The new convention centre’s opening has made Aqua Riva’s 200 Granville Street location a bit on the fringe of where convention-goers want to dine.
“In the long term, we didn’t have enough confidence that the Aqua Riva concept would continue to grow,” Howes said.
“The reality of our business is that margins are so tight that unless you have very significant brand recognition such that sales are very strong in a downtown building, the reality is that it’s a very expensive place to do business.”
Howes said an Earls or a Cactus Club might be able to get by in the location that Aqua Riva is vacating. But, the lease costs of operating a free-standing restaurant in a suburb are likely to be about $10,000 less per month than doing the same thing in the Aqua Riva space.
“By the middle of this year, we will look for another new operation where we can control the costs,” he said.