He comes across as outspokenly brash and intense, but restaurateur David Duprey is reluctant to discuss the evolution of Main Street and its surrounding neighbourhoods into an enclave of hipster chic.
Main Street these days reminds Duprey of the West 4th Avenue or Commercial Drive of the not-so-distant past, but it also gives him pause to reflect on the changes he saw rapidly overtake Yaletown where he once owned an imported furniture store.
He paid $15 per square foot on his lease in Yaletown not so long ago, but two years later when his lease came up, the sweeping gentrification had taken hold.
When he inquired about moving his store across the street, the rent had shot up to $37 per square foot.
Now it's around $60.
"I watched that change there," he said during an interview at his office above the Rumpus Room, one of two restaurants he owns on Main Street. "Main Street's got the potential to do that too."
As the pace of development ramps up and demographics shift with the influx of young families and youthful members of the so-called cultural creative class, Duprey and other entrepreneurs on Main Street are vying for a slice of what could soon be a considerable cash-pie – hoping the way to people's hearts and wallets is through their stomachs.
Hipster chic
They're creating the antithesis to Granville Street; they want a place where people collectively roll their eyes at the idea of going to a chain restaurant or nightclub to watch a UFC event and would instead opt for a meal at a tiny hole in the wall like Duprey's Narrow Lounge.
With so many restaurants concentrated for blocks north and south of Broadway and Main Street, the competition might seem fierce, but owners insist it's friendly with enough customers and cash to go around to sustain them all.
Instead, the real challenges they face are labyrinthine and constrictive liquor regulations.
Those regulations, Duprey said, force restaurants throughout the city to straddle precarious lines to avoid running afoul of provincial and municipal governments.
The Rumpus Room, Duprey's newest venture, did just that before opening last year.
Its original name (Fast Food Disco) was nixed by the province for being misleading to patrons.
More recently, Duprey has had to jump through bureaucratic hoops to get permission to build a Rumpus Room patio.
He takes the challenges in stride though – chalking up his optimistic attitude to time he spent in San Francisco, where he saw an "entrepreneurial spirit" that Vancouver once lacked.
"The people that are my age in their 40s kind of let Vancouver down in the 1990s. A lot of us left, and I was one of them," he said. "There's a new generation that's coming up of people in their 30s that are more entrepreneurial and experimental … and are willing to push limits."
He concedes that the limits he's trying to push haven't all been money-makers, but finding a money-driven hyper-capitalist attitude among Main Street business owners is unlikely.
His struggles with opening the Rickshaw Theatre near Main and Hastings Streets, immortalized in the documentary No Fun City are well known.
He calls the Rickshaw's original model "the stupidest business plan in the universe," because, for a while, he relied on special-event licences to hold events, which incensed other venue owners for the perceived special treatment the Rickshaw received.
While the Rickshaw is not a money-maker, much like the many artist spaces he's renovated and opened over the years, Duprey admits there's a tinge of self-indulgence in his businesses.
"I'm 43 now so I wanted to create places that I wanted to go back to when I was in my 20s and 30s. When I got here, I saw that there wasn't that, so there was obviously a vacuum there that desperately needed to be filled."
His next move is to open an 80-seat lounge-style venue where he can host live music.
As density in the surrounding neighbourhoods around Main Street increases – a galvanizing issue for many residents – the vacuum to which Duprey referred may be expanding as the buzz around the vibrant urban artery grows.
The Rize Alliance development, slated for a 19-storey tower at Broadway and Kingsway (down from 26 in its original proposal), has divided Mount Pleasant residents worried about a downtown-style skyscraper casting too large a shadow over the neighbourhood, a gentrifying darkness seen as a threat to the essence of what gives Main Street its eclectic character and vibe.
While many share Duprey's concerns, change is inevitable and can either be embraced or resisted.
The new hot spot
With less reluctance, David Nicolay and Nigel Pike, co-owners of the Cascade Company, have also tried to cash in on the Main Street crowd with eateries Cascade, Habit, Latitude and the Union Bar.
The pair has watched with keen eyes as demographics have shifted and other businesses shuttered such as Bert's Restaurant, unable to adapt to the neighbourhood's emerging hipster focus.
"Yaletown, as a neighbourhood, sort of happened really fast and then Gastown we see happening really fast, and now you see even like portions of Hastings just sort of east of Cambie [developing] really fast," said Nicolay during an interview at the offices of Evoke Design, which he also co-owns. (Evoke is responsible for the branding of the Cascade Co.'s restaurants.)
"Main's been sort of a consistent slow crawl."
As did Duprey, Pike and Nicolay saw opportunities on Main Street, with its collection of old, one-storey buildings long paid for and long past their prime, that were unavailable in other parts of the city.
"We sort of pegged Main Street as being a huge community really underserved," Nicolay said. "For the young community that was growing around there, there wasn't really anywhere to go at all."
Seeing the demographic shift especially over the last five years, Pike, a transplant from Britain, laughs about the diversity he witnesses in their many rooms.
"It's an interesting demographic," Pike said. "You'll get your fully tattooed hipster types and then, as I said, like you've got your white-haired old granny sat next to him and they're chatting."
But even amid the optimism, business hasn't always been easy.
Before the 2010 Olympic Games, the Cascade Co.'s restaurants were saddled with restrictive licences that dictated a bizarre food-to-booze sales ratio, although the company said the situation has since improved.
Their next move is a brewery and new restaurant off 7th and Main, which has come with its own challenges.
They reduced their original proposal to 60 seats from 150 to placate local residents' concerns.
The plan is to brew their Main Street Pilsner beside the new restaurant, which they hope to open by next spring.
Even though residents may be motivated by fear of change, Nicolay and Pike see it as inevitable.
"You don't get a lot of these little single-storey neighbourhoods anymore," said Nicolay. "It's hard to retain that stuff, and we'd be fantasizing to think it's going to stay like that forever."
The competition
The rumour mill on Main Street, meanwhile, is always abuzz.
The pair heard grumblings recently about big chain restaurants like Milestones, the Cactus Club or the Donnelly Group itching to move into the neighbourhood.
Representatives of the Donnelly Group didn't respond to requests for comment.
But the prospect of competing with big chains doesn't bother Pike or Nicolay because they don't believe such places would work on Main Street.
"People still want everything to be individualistic," Nicolay said.
"They like that idea of it being very boutique. So they don't want to be sitting in a restaurant that looks exactly the same as the restaurant sitting in Kerrisdale."•
