The GOODS from LIVIA

Vancouver, BC | With a love for community and old-fashioned hospitality, husband-wife duo Claire Livia Lassam and Jordan Pires opened LIVIA (1399 Commercial Drive) just last year. To mark its one-year anniversary, LIVIA officially launches dinner service, inspired by Lassam’s northern Italian family suppers growing up.

“We’ve been working towards opening for dinner service since the beginning,” explains Lassam, who also supplies bread and baked goods to restaurants around the city. “In fact, I convinced Jordan to quit his job on the grounds that dinner service would feel like the dinner parties we throw at home. Plates of deceptively simple Roman food, magnums of wine, vintage silverware. We really do want our dinner service here to feel the same way, in a cozy room, where you’re never wanting for anything. Though, James’s pasta is a world better than anything I make at home!”

Almost everything on the dinner menu is housemade. From a selection of antipasti, such as marinated Italian olives, fennel seed tarralli, and whipped ricotta with sourdough to burrata with beets, and poppy seeds; country-style pate; and vitello tonnato with wine-poached veal, preserved tuna, capers, and anchovies – the dishes are meant to be shared by candlelit over good conversation.

Chef James Frost’s pastas change weekly and are handmade fresh every day. Examples include gorgonzola ravioli with radicchio, potato, and balsamic vinegar; tajarin with chanterelle mushrooms; and pizzacherie, a traditional buckwheat pasta with cabbage and Valtallina cassera cheese imported from Italy.

The bar menu is carefully curated by Pires and features classic cocktails, wine, vermouth, and amaro. Rare and unique additions include Martini & Rossi Special Reserva Ambrato Vermouth from Torino, and Amaro Nonino from the Friuli region where Lassam’s family originates.

“The bar menu is ever-evolving but we truly love introducing people to new things that we love, especially from our vermouth and amaro list,” says Pires. “It’s been great seeing our neighbours pull up a chair and sit at the bar with friends and family. There is nothing quite like the Drive community.”

LIVIA’s dinner service is currently available Thursdays to Saturdays from 6 p.m. to 10 p.m. The bar is open until late. Guests can further enjoy LIVIA’s northern Italian-inspired menu at breakfast and lunch, from 7 a.m., Tuesdays to Sundays.

For more information, please visit www.liviasweets.ca.

About LIVIA | On a bright corner of Commercial Drive, Livia is the life’s work of a baker and a bartender. Inspired by the kind of cafes we visited in Europe and New York, Livia is a place to grab a loaf of bread and coffee in the morning, to meet friends over lunch and a glass of wine, and to cozy into a date for dinner. During the day you’ll find staff stocking our 13-foot-high bread wall full of blistered sourdoughs and hawking pastries at the counter, as well as serving up bowls of polenta with poached eggs, and mortadella breakfast sandwiches. At night, ceramic bowls of freshly made pastas are brought to candlelit tables, alongside a thoughtfully curated wine list.

With a firm belief that every detail should be cared for, your coffee will be a custom blend roasted up the street and served in a custom mug, and the chili flakes you’ve asked to scatter on your raviolo are sourced from our favourite farm and dried in house. A seat at the bar encourages a peruse of our classic cocktails and lovingly built vermouth and amaro list. Rooted in the warmth of a neighbourhood cafe, and the paired down simplicity of Italian food, it’s the place we want to go to in our community.