It’s not just another restaurant loss in a city in the grim grip of another round of COVID closures. It is the loss of another piece of local charm and grace that Vancouver’s business community can ill afford to lose.
John Bishop finally threw in the towel with a New Year’s Eve last supper after 36 years of operating Bishop’s Restaurant on West 4th Avenue in Kitsilano.
Anyone who has an appreciation for the finer details of dining will know who John Bishop is and what his restaurant cultivated and stood for.
There has been, of course, his careful and enthusiastic cultivation of the farm-to-table movement that championed fresh, local, organic and inspired cookery.
But Bishop and Bishop’s were always about much more than food on the table.
The John Bishop experience exemplified a service industry art in danger of being lost forever in Vancouver: dining as social entertainment and community interaction presided over by a restaurant owner who interacted with his clientele every night. That attention to customer engagement and service is almost unheard of in today’s age of fast-food takeouts, masked-and-mumbled service, robotic table turnover and overpriced meals delivered by underexperienced servers employed by absentee restaurateurs.
The Bishop experience was seeded and cultivated in an era when more than bottom-line business survival was on the menu.
Still, Bishop, who was set to retire in 2020 before the pandemic turned Vancouver and the rest of the world upside down, determined at that time that he and his carefully constructed and meticulously delivered dining experience were not going to bow out in the face of a virus.
That he has done. The virus has not killed Bishop’s.
It has been killed by an overly expensive city being hollowed out by an irrationally expensive real estate market and increasingly reliant on the taxes, levies and bureaucratic complications that are suffocating small businesses and choking the life out of the character and charm they contribute to their communities.
