Vintage or modern? New Mount Pleasant bar is both

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Mount Pleasant Vintage and Provisions

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Where: 67 West Sixth Ave., Vancouver

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When: Open 3 p.m. to midnight weekdays; noon to midnight on weekends

Info and reservations: 604-416-2830. mtpleasant.bar

Cameron Bogue’s food and drink journey began with snow. He’d moved from Portland to Whistler to be a ski instructor, then turned to bartending so he could ski during the day. 

“I just fell in love with the industry,” Bogue says. “I have a short-term memory and was a terrible server, but a better bartender.”

Better turned to pretty damn awesome, and three months ago he opened his dream bar, Mount Pleasant Vintage and Provisions in a semi-industrial neighbourhood. It’s currently licensed as a restaurant but is awaiting a liquor primary licence for late night closings.

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There’s a flash of Alice in Wonderland as you enter through an A-listed heritage house, hollowed out and serving as a reception and chill-out area, then pass through to a high-ceiling modern room with patios winging out from side and back, all part of a four-storey commercial unit built by Conwest Contracting.

The theme throughout is retro, vintage and early Winnipeg — Bogue found a trove of vintage furniture and campy household stuff like fondue pots, lighting, signage and dishes in the prairie city, where folks aren’t so big into vintage. When he can catch a breath, they’ll all be for sale as he rolls out more.

“It’s really out-there stuff. I was born in the 70s, grew up in the 80s and 90s and this is like the leftovers of all our friends’ basements.” 

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Bogue’s love of cocktails goes deep. He most recently helmed Earls’ beverage program, previously worked in Toronto, opened nightclubs at Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas and a bar in Miami. When he won a national Diageo cocktail competition and became Diageo’s brand ambassador in 2006, New York culinary nobility Daniel Boulud hired him to run his bar programs, just as fine dining was latching onto cocktails. He worked for Boulud for three years.

“I was so naive when I left,” Bogue says. “I thought the cocktail culture had peaked.”

When the West Sixth heritage house became available, Bogue thought it the perfect spot for his dream bar. The Fuller brothers behind Earls and Joey considered a partnership but they were busy with a deal to take over Cactus Club. Bogue found four silent partners, retained majority interest and created the vintage bar concept.

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His chef, Christian Chaumont, previously head chef at Cuchillo, cooks almost entirely on a Grillworks Infierno, the Rolls-Royce of wood-fired grills. Food is likely charred, blistered, caramelized or smoked.

“I come from the barbecue capital in Monterrey, Mexico, and have been immersed in it since I was a child. I understood it, the need to wait for mellow embers, raking them for clean aromas. Food was the centre of everything.”

He’ll be changing up the menu weekly, he says. The dishes are rustic, simply cooked, with interesting sauces and garnishes. I really like the Fire Blistered Radishes ($14). Grilled over embers in a basket until blistered, served over hummus-like cannellini beans, and drizzled with chili miso oil and strewn with crispy shallots.

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Two Rivers Snappy Dog ($7) arrives as a plain hotdog, accompanied in a square child’s lunch box holding containers of Heinz relish, mustard and ketchup. I’m always open to a Two Rivers dog.

Butterfly tiger prawns ($14) are marinated in chermoula sauce — North African and chimichurri-like — then grilled in their shells and served with sesame salsa macha with chili, pumpkin seeds, sesame seeds and olive oil. Flame-seared tuna tataki ($15) was the lightest dish, quickly seared, sliced and served with yuzu ponzu.

Skirt steak ($25) was marinated in a black garlic, pomegranate molasses and arbol chili mix and served with chimichurri sauce and fingerling potatoes.

“I like this outside skirt-cut best cooked to medium rather than medium rare. There’s a stigma about (cooking to) medium that truthfully, isn’t the case in so many other cultures,” Chaumont says.

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An eight-hour rib is available on Fridays and Saturdays.

“It takes time and patience. I treat it the same as Argentine barbecue, which is hung. I spray the beef with salmuera (aromatics infused brine) while it cooks over mellow embers. I keep flipping and spraying until the jelly and fat are rendered.”

If you go around 7 or 7:30 p.m. you might score a dish of it.

Bogue was overwhelmed as an owner and overseeing the bar so he hired Kelsey Ramage, who worked as head bartender at the now-closed Dandelyan in London — it topped the list of World’s 50 Best Bars and won the World’s Best Cocktail Menu.

“It couldn’t be more of a big deal,” Bogue says.

Ramage co-owns Trash Tiki in New York but will move to Vancouver. 

In her quest for super-keen sustainable bartending, she’s become something of a trash rescuer and low waste pioneer, using things like day-old croissants, discarded pineapple skins and avocado pits to tweak cocktail flavours. Expect serious cocktails without the pretension.

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Bogue and Ramage have an arsenal of tools and knowledge to transform cocktails into conversation pieces — when I visited, the Long Island cocktail was called Crystal Clear and was indeed crystal clear because he’d clarified the lemon juice in a centrifuge.

 Wines will be from small producers, “cool, hip natural importers,” he says. The bar suffered when the B.C. liquor strike came down like a guillotine cutting them off supplies just as they were opening and they’re just getting on track.

SIDE DISHES: Sunday nights at Bar Gobo

Oh girls, they wanna have fun, say the women of Burdock. That’s the idea behind Joyride, the Sunday evening pop-up at Bar Gobo, Burdock’s sister restaurant.

Katy Cheung or Jiwon Seo — Burdock sous chefs — will curate snack menus to pair with wines from different importers each week.

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When I visited, I had Seo’s nachos, cheeky style — with taco chips, Spam slices, doubanjiang American cheese sauce, soy shishitos and green onions. I also tried burrata with warm n’duja ragu — a spicy Calabrian pork sausage sauce — sandwiched in onion milk buns. And a Korean rice ball dessert, in ginger honey syrup sprinkled with coconut and sesame.

Owner-chef Andrea Carlson will add her magic and Burdock general manager Jordan Westre — who side hustles as a radio DJ exploring alternative music — will spin vinyl at Joyride, hitting up fringe genres from the 60s and 70s blues, progressive rock, jazz and beyond while a disco ball splashes a thousand points of light in the room.

“From Jordan Westre’s magnetic DJ-ing to our kitchen’s innovation concepts, Joyride will show off the talent and creativity of our female-led powerhouse team,” says Carlson.

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Bar Gobo, in its usual format, is a wine bar with a jazzy prix fixe menu. 

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Purdys is at it again, raising money through chocolates to benefit children’s hospitals across Canada. This year, their Dear Santa campaign goal is to raise $400,000, so think of these chocolates as being very health oriented.

Here’s how it works. Purdys will donate $2 from every $5 Dear Santa bar; $12.50 from the $55 Dear Santa Gift Box of assorted chocolates; $8 from online orders of the $100 Dear Santa Gift Basket filled with bars, a chocolate box and more; and $24 from a $60 online order of a 12-bar case of Dear Santa chocolate bars.

The Dear Santa campaign began in 2019 when Purdys learned that the biggest concern of hospitalized children is that Santa won’t find them at Christmas.

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A new Purdys Christmas product is North Pole Caramels, with infused sea salt from the polar region. The polar sea salt garnishes the original 1907 chocolate caramel. It comes in a 16-pack and is available in stores or online for a limited time.

Amarula, a unique liqueur with the African marula fruit, has introduced a vegan, gluten/dairy/nut-free version to B.C. liquor stores in time for the holiday season. Smart, considering Stats Canada reports that nearly 40 per cent of British Columbians under 35 follow a vegan or vegetarian diet.

The drink tastes of caramel, vanilla, coconut milk and marula, which has a nutty flavour with tart undertones. The company works with a women-run, 51 per-cent Black-owned company that makes the tassels for Amarula bottles, crafting over a million tassels each month. The company recently donated $15,000 to Tree Canada, a non-profit organization that has planted edible fruit and nut trees in more than 700 Canadian school properties to help fight urban food insecurity. A third of the donation is earmarked for the Lower Mainland.

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