Why Is It That John Bishop Never Opened A Second Restaurant?

by Sean Sherwood - When I was a kid, romancing the foolish notion to one day open my own restaurant, I spent a lot of thought on who would be the best to learn from. At the time, I’d washed some dishes, bussed some tables, cooked and served. It was a simple craft that demanded hard work, personality, and a strong enough liver to survive a late night game of ‘I never’. Damn, I miss those days sometimes. If you don’t know the game, don’t ask, but rest assured it was the only way a young punk like me was going to see some alcohol induced random nudity. Either way, the restaurant business seemed simple, honest and completely straightforward.

Back in that day, ‘concept’ restaurants were rolling out 18 different kinds of hamburger or nautical themes with fishnets on the walls and waiters doing pirate talk (wouldn’t we kill to work there now?). I couldn’t see any mentors out there, except for two. John Bishop and Bruno Marti.

Seeing as drunken ‘I never’ games weren’t currently en vogue at Bishops at the time, and Bruno’s place was almost a plane ride away from the Shore, I took the next best thing and joined up with a couple of young punks who were trying to start up the next big chain. Turns out I got lucky, and learned a tonne about restaurants and the mechanics of them, as I spent the next few years with Scotty and Ritchie (Cactus Club), and then later with Jeff Fuller at Earls. These young and fresh groups were aggressive, quality minded, and ran their operations like a stopwatch. I learned numbers, systems and controls, I watched them roll out new restaurant after new restaurant, promoting from within, empowering and motivating otherwise directionless people like myself.

At that point I think John Bishop had been in business for around 15 years. He had one restaurant, in the same location, of the same size. The quality, consistency and success he enjoyed had been unprecedented in a city that demanded a hamburger on every menu. I’m sure he had multiple people offering bags of money to open a second, or a third, or to start a chain. He never did, and that always baffled me.

I was going the other way, becoming a chain guy, moving around to learn every bit I could. I worked in wineries, breweries, did a stint with Starbucks, pretty much any chain in pretty much any position. I even fancied myself a bit of an expert, as I helped independents sort out their costs, operations and systems using all the things I’d learned from my Earls indoctrination. I started studying design, concepts and layouts. My mentors became food magazines, design books, cookbooks, really anything I could get my hands on.

I remember the day I opened my first restaurant, knowing Bishops was just a few blocks away. I remember feeling the rush, the joy, the exhaustion, and thinking, I wonder if John Bishop felt these things too, I wonder if I’m on his path, following his footsteps now.

I wasn’t.

The truth was, I hadn’t learned the secret, the answer to the riddle which had always bothered me. Why did John bishop, 20 years successful, never open a second venue, or expand, or anything? I hadn’t learned what he, almost alone among Vancouver restaurateurs, knew all along.

I’ve never regretted opening the second or the third restaurant, but I’ll always regret the compromises that were made to do it. Thoughts of the city’s greats started to permeate my thoughts more and more. How were they doing it? What tricks did they have that I hadn’t figured out yet? But people like Michel Jacob, John Bihop and Vikram Vij started fading from my mind while I focused instead on what Emad (Global Group), Gord (The Bins) and Jack (Top Table) were doing.

I don’t know whether it’s ego, ambition or just plain blind optimism, but a whole new generation of restaurateurs seems to be caught in the excitement of fresh success. And like a bunch of ADD-addled toddlers, we’re off to the next sandbox leaving our toys in a pile at the last.

Bishop has tried to teach us. He’s been here the whole time, like Ghandi, who said famously “I have nothing to say, my life is my message”. We’ve been chasing every new concept, new room, new neighbourhood. Hell, we’re so out of new ideas that the newest thing is to put the oldest concept in existence (meats, cheese and wine) into the oldest neighbourhood (Gastown). We’re actually running out of envelope to push so we’re recycling the old ones.

I have a friend, an unforgivable wine snob with the wherewithal to shamelessly build a cellar to make me drool. One day after we’d polished a bottle of Bordeaux, he pulled out a pen and wrote our names and the date on it, and put the empty in a cupboard, where many other similarly treated bottles sat. Obviously perplexed at the practice, and expecting some ridiculous wine geek answer about cataloguing the aging characteristics, I asked him what this was about. His reply changed the way I’ve looked at dining henceforth. “When I drink wine,” he said, “it isn’t for the wine or the winemaker or the region, but for the company. When I remember those powerful smell and taste memories, I’m taken back to our great conversations, the real life memories attached to them. So I keep these bottles like an album, and every now and then I’ll browse them to reflect on some of the great people and memories in my life.”

It made me realize that food and wine aren’t there for us cork dorks and food nazis to analyze and critique, but rather to serve as foils for our conversations, signposts for memories and excuses, sometimes, to change the venue and gain new experiences to share. Restaurants have become shrines to food and wine, and we’ve forgotten about the people. Perhaps this was Bishop’s secret?

So who is the next John Bishop, Vikram Vij, or Michel Jacob? Who is the city’s next great restaurateur, the next icon and leader for future generations? Has someone out there learned from my mistakes? Is the next one slaving away in Durbach’s kitchen, schlepping wine for Jack, or maybe even now, operating quietly, honestly and consistently with a resolute focus on sophisticated service, disarming charm and a timeless approach to cooking?

We don’t need them just yet, with some of the city’s greats clearly still setting fine examples to follow, but one worries if their’s is a lost breed, and wonders what would be lost without them.

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Sean Sherwood, an accomplished classical, jazz and blues pianist, worked in all aspects of the restaurant industry over two decades and spent 3 years as an operational consultant. He owned three dynamic restaurants in Vancouver: Fiction, Lucy Mae Brown, and Century. After 9 years, he sold his businesses to pursue other ventures.

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