74 VANMAG.COM MAY 2017
meet Seán Heather on a snowy Friday two weeks before
Christmas in his flagship gastropub, the Irish Heather.
It’s 10:30 in the morning and already he says he’s had
over a dozen cancellations for dinner because of the
weather. Not that he’s worried: “I have 160 seats here,”
says the gruff 50-year-old, who insists on doing the
interview at the bar, standing up, in the still-unlit room.
“We’ll easily do 400 people through the door tonight.”
When he opened the Irish Heather in Gastown two
decades ago, success was no sure thing. Heather was born
in Toronto but moved to Ireland as a toddler, and had
only ret urned to his mother’s native Canada—this time,
to Vancouver—in his early 20s to launch his restaurant
career. After managing Benny’s Bagels in Kitsilano
for four years, the ambitious Limerickman decided he
wanted to open his ow n place. “I knew ever ybody in
Kits, so it made the most sense for me to open something
there. But there was nothing I could afford anywhere in
Kits. I almost gave up.”
At the last minute, his real estate agent suggested
he consider Gastow n—then, much more so than now,
a haven for drug users and petty crime. “I’d never
been to Gastown in the seven or eight years I’d been in
Vancouver,” reca lls Heather. But he says it reminded him
of the streets of Dublin or London, where he’d worked as
a dishwasher, and he found a great lease in the historic
Alhambra building—across the road from his current
location. He initially built his business on what he now
calls the “naive” concept of “serving the perfect pint of
Guinness,” but in time the Irish Heather was earning
equal acclaim for its food program. (It moved across
the road in 2008, when the A lhambra had to undergo
seismic upgrading.)
Twenty years after opening the restaurant, he’s
the undisputed godfather of Gastown. He, along with
wife and business partner Erin, has parlayed that one
restaurant into a thriving mini-empire—one that alsoincludes neighbouring Salty Tongue,
Shebeen Whiskey House (in the back
of the Irish Heather) and Salt Tasting
Room, in Blood Alley, within sight of
where we’re speaking. While Heather
has managed to build a diverse
portfolio of restaurants, he wonders
what the future is for the area—and
the business.
“Our industry—with a few
exceptions—is in danger of becoming
a bunch of businesses owned by old
fogeys and chains. There might be
places in Mount Pleasant, places
like that, but even there the rents are
starting to scream up. I don’t know
where in the downtown core, like
Gastown, this kind of opportunity
presents itself for young people.”
When he launched the Irish
Heather in 1997, he was paying $16
a square foot; it’s now more than
double that amount. “I’ve been
renewing (my leases) at current
market rates. It’s dramatically gone
up. But I’ve been able to develop my
business to where I can afford those
rents. If I were starting out at those
rates? Well, I just wouldn’t have done
it. I couldn’t have done it.”T
he story of Vancouver’s
otherworldly real estate
market has been told in
media around the world
in recent years, but only now are
we hearing about the trickle-down
effect on quotidian cornerstones
of the local economy: the gas
stations closing to be redeveloped
as condos, the garden centres
fleeing for greener past ures on the
city’s fringes, the restaurateurs
pushed east as rents push north.
While Heather laments what’s
happening around him, the man
who inherited the original site for
the Irish Heather—Paul Grunberg,
co-owner of L’Abattoir—has a more
Darwinian take on the restaurants
that will survive in the competitive
downtown scene.
“If you want to make more money,
you’ve got to go out and work harder.
I know that may come across as being
insensitive, but from a guy who’s