Magnum Opus

By Jamie Maw, Vancouver Magazine - June, 2002

The restaurant service crew sitting in my living room on a Sunday morning almost two years ago was verging on hysteria. They were the young men and women who had worked the floor at a too-briefly shining restaurant on Burrard Street. One minute they were maudlin, as if their best friend had just died, the next minute angry, as if that friend had died too young.

As it turned out, their source of employment-The Moustache Café-had just ended its short life, too young and too recklessly. What began as a discussion quickly turned into a wake.

The plaintive voices in my living room that morning included those of two of the best servers in this city, Mikel Kanter and Jodie Jubenville (both recipients of this magazine's Premier Crew service award). They'd been tipped to the financial problems of the restaurant just days before, when most of the wine cellar had disappeared and stereo speakers had been ripped from the ceiling. The previous day, their tip pool, amounting to several thousand dollars, had vanished. And now that they had quit, they worried that holiday pay would be difficult to collect. One server, known as J.R., had already left. He had made the error of getting his ex-wife pregnant, which did not sit well with his new one. According to the staff he left suicide notes, money and mementoes for both, and then vanished. Months later his new wife Maude would track him down in Singapore.

Moustache chef Don Letendre had seen the writing on the stainless-steel walls of his kitchen long before this. A talented chef with a lengthy resume and loyal West Side following, Letendre had given six weeks’ notice on June 1, 2000. When he stepped aside on July 15, he was happy to be leaving.

Today, a casual Italian trattoria called Incendio stands where the Moustache once was, serving pizza to cinema patrons. The servers scattered around the city. Kanter went to Coco Pazzo for a stretch, while Jubenville now works happily at Lumière.

Don Letendre called me later that summer. He wanted to let me and others know that he was in play, looking for work. But job one, he said, was to find a responsible proprietor and a long-term position. We met and discussed the new Opus Hotel, even though it was slated to open at least 18 months away.

“for all its style, I wanted one simple thing,” Opus developer John Evans says. “I wanted it to be inclusive, a true neighbourhood house, where hotel guests could mix easily with the locals, with wonderful drinks and great food.”

Evans is referring to Elixir, the modern brasserie that will open on July 15 in his 97-room hotel, at the corner of Davie and Hamilton streets. The hotel will move the nexus of Yaletown south, so that the redeveloped warehouse district will now turn on the heel of Davie Street, marching down to the waterfront through the wall of glass that lines False Creek.

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