West Vancouver gains a French bistro

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Mèreon

Where: 1479 Clyde Avenue, West Vancouver

When: Brunch and dinner, Wednesday to Sunday. Happy Hour, 3 to 5 p.m.

Info: 236-323-2010. mereon.ca

Mèreon, a newcomer to West Vancouver, adds a little classic French vibe to Ambleside village. The name is a mashup of mère and Lyon, France’s gastronomic city. It’s owner Ophelia Arida’s tribute to les mères Lyonnaise or mothers of Lyon —  the city’s legendary female chefs who trained the country’s greats, like Paul Bocuse and Georges Blanc. Mères dominated Lyonnaise kitchens from the mid-1700s to the end of the 20th century and the late Bocuse has said a mère taught him about flavours, hard work and a job done well. “There would have been no success for any of us without her,” he said.

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Eugénie Brazier, “the mother of modern French cooking,” was the first chef to run two simultaneous three-star Michelin restaurants, an honour that was hers alone until Alain Ducasse achieved the same in 1998.

Mèreon also honours the female cooks in Arida’s life, growing up in Lebanon.

“I come from a home where hospitality was love. If you love someone, you just make food, so I’ve been interested in food since I was 12. We used to host a lot of people and I loved the experience of seeing people happy in our house or our big backyard.”  She hoped for female cooks when she was hiring but alas, none applied. “Not even one,” she says.

Arida has a background in marketing but took a sharp career turn, enrolling in hospitality management at Cornell University and earlier this year, Mèreon was born. She refurbished a space in Ambleside in warm and soothing tones of butter yellow and robin’s egg blue and gave it a farm kitchen feel and hired Emmanuel Joinville, who had just closed his Jules French bistro in Gastown, as consulting chef. Service first focused on brunch with dishes like French onion soup, lobster bisque, salad Niçoise, croque monsieur, croque madame, socca, eggs en cocotte, steak frites, duck confit cassoulet and a burger — tempting alternatives to the usual benedicts, omelettes and avocado toasts. A lot of these dishes would be tempting on the dinner menu, too, now that they’ve recently added an evening service. The croque monsieur was delicious as was the burger and the frites.

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Damien McCrossin was recently hired to take over as chef. Like Arida, he knew from the age of 12, when he first worked in the the dish pit at a Nanaimo restaurant, that he wanted a career in restaurants. “My grandfather saw me as a troubled youth and thought his old Irish friend’s restaurant would be good for discipline,” he says. He moved on as garde manger a month later. In high school, he says a culinary instructor saved his life, caring about him and solidifying his love of food.

Since then, McCrossin has worked at Wesley Street Cafe in Nanaimo as well as Ça Va, Tavola, and several Glowbal Group restaurants in the Vancouver area. Mèreon’s menu is currently very much Joinville’s, but by summer’s end McCrossin will have added his own dishes. Meanwhile, he’s rolling them out as specials.

“I worked with Emmanuel and respect and love him. I’m trying not to stray too far from his style of food,” he says. “My food won’t be pretentious. While I do like pearls and foam and fun, I like it to be accessible, basic and just well done, with good technique.”

He’s working to change suppliers to buy local where possible. “The 100-mile menu isn’t viable but I can keep it in Canada.”

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As so many Mèreon diners are regulars, “we need to keep giving them something new,” says Arida.

On the current menu, I fed my weakness for beef bourguignon ($32), even though it’s not a summery dish. The air-conditioned dining room helps keep it timeless. The meat is a 50-50 blend of hangar steak and trim from the the steak au poivre tenderloin. The dish didn’t disappoint. A house-smoked sablefish ($38) was delicate and nicely cooked with a golden crust and served over celeriac purée.

Foie gras terrine ($26) was 100 per cent foie, except for a wine marinade. It was served with muscat gelée, pickled enoki, and house-made brioche toast. The too-beige dish could use a splash of bright colour — some brandied cherries? A sprig of frisée?

The French onion soup, McCrossin says, is popular, even on hot days. “Nights where I’m sweltering in the kitchen, I’m wondering how they could be eating it.”

Feature dishes, which will make their way onto the menu, include a very nice pistachio-crusted rack of tender lamb with red wine jus and truffle mashed potatoes (which could be lighter and fluffier). A confit duck leg with carrot soubise and Cointreau sauce is lovely but the moulés frites featured mussels too small to enjoy.

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Arida has just added live music on some evenings with North Shore crooner Adam Woodall at the mike. “We’re fixing dates,” she says.

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SIDE DISHES

The fourth annual Light Up Chinatown! festival takes place Aug. 24 (11 a.m. to 9 p.m.) and Aug. 25 (11 a.m. to 6 p.m.) on the 500 block of Columbia Street.

A new feature this year is Hawker’s Lane, where 10 street food kiosks will serve dishes by Boulevard Kitchen, Pidgin, Juke Fried Chicken, DD Mau, and Bao Bei. Also watch for food collaborations between businesses, such as Chinatown BBQ and Beaucoup Bakery, DD Mau and Boss Bakery, Foo Hung Curios and Hype Chocolate, and Kam Wai Dim Sum and Memphis Blues BBQ House.

The festival includes live entertainment, a kids’ zone, interactive activities, walking tours, music performances, and traditional lion dances. The festival is licensed to serve beer, wine and spirits and Chinatown speakeasy Laowai is creating a special cocktail for the event. Learn more at  chinatownfoundation.org.

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•••

The “small but mighty” Audain Art Museum in Whistler held the first of its summer Artist Dinner Series. This year, it’s centred on Canadian painter Tom Thomson’s paintings. Many are his sketches in oil, created in the wilderness that was too hostile for leisurely easel painting and the basis for paintings he would later complete in his studio. They’re very expressive, full of energy and rawness and really hit a deep Canadian chord.

Curtis Collins, director and chief curator of the museum, who led a group through the exhibit, Tom Thomson: North Star, said the paintings and sketches were done over a five-year period in the artist’s life when he “was bursting with creative energy,” shortly before he died in a mysterious canoe accident.

“What’s fascinating about the paintings is he captures colour at night,” he said. “And you can see the texture of the surfaces of the paintings, which was radical at the time.”

After a cocktail and a tour of the exhibit, guests are treated to a three-course “backcountry” dinner with wine pairings from Mission Hill Family Estate. The next dinners are on Aug. 9 and 23. The event costs $199 per person with options for VIP tables.

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