For me, one of the more interesting parts of my job isn’t eating in restaurants. It’s watching restaurants think and move.

Most diners only ever see the finished version. Not the arguments over seasoning, the subtle adjustments to ingredients, or the cocktail that almost didn’t make the cut. We get the composed plate, the settled room and the drink that works. We experience the performance, not the rehearsals.

A few weeks ago, I slipped into a staff tasting at Les Faux Bourgeois. The restaurant had closed its doors for a few days to recalibrate after some changes in ownership, staff (and direction) and before reopening, the entire team gathered to work their way through the new menu together.

A staff tasting isn’t regular dining. It’s interactive and collaborative. The conversation revolves around ingredients, presentation, service and all of the details that help the team understand not just what’s on the plate, but why it’s there. Dishes arrive one after another. Everyone takes a bite or two. Chefs explain what they’re trying to achieve. Servers ask questions, scribble notes, and share impressions. For drinks, straws are cut in half so coworkers can sample a mouthful at a time, compare thoughts (and inevitably declare favourites). It isn’t a presentation. It’s somewhere between team-building, product development and a classroom, and not only does the kitchen want to make sure the servers have the intel they need to do their jobs, they also genuinely want feedback.

Front-of-house and back-of-house experience a restaurant differently, and a tasting gives those perspectives a place to meet. The point isn’t to get everyone to agree. It’s to listen, question, adjust when something could be better, and occasionally kill an idea that isn’t doing what everyone hoped it would.

I love this kind of conversation. As an interloper, though, I kept quiet. I hid behind my camera, listened to those around me and snuck a few bites here and there. The seafood on the rotating ice plate (pictured above) was fresh and beautifully presented. The bread, as you’d hope from a Parisian-style bistro, was excellent. The moules frites were bang-on, and next time I go as a diner, I’ll be ordering the escargot so I can have the whole serving to myself. But somewhere along the way, I stopped watching the plates and started watching the team, interested in what they were building together.

To be clear: this isn’t menu designed by committee. Somebody has to come up with the initial ideas and make the final decisions. At Fobo, that’s co-chefs David Cassese and Brent Thornton. But at a tasting, everyone else’s input counts, and there’s something encouraging about a room where people can offer ideas, challenge each other, and draw on their own experience without anyone needing to be the centre of attention. In my opinion, that’s how better menus get finished.

I like watching that process in motion. What made this one different was that this wasn’t a brand-new restaurant trying to find its footing. It was a well-loved one trying to evolve without forgetting why people loved it in the first place.

Hospitality loves talking about “the next chapter.” Reality is messier. People build memories in restaurants. Restaurants become part of people’s routines. They have their usual table. Usual dishes. They know exactly how they like the steak cooked and which server remembers their name. Change, even when it’s objectively better, can feel like someone has rearranged the furniture in your home while you nipped out to the store. In hospitality, particularly, that’s a challenge because taking over a beloved restaurant is one of the few jobs where you can improve almost everything and still have people tell you they preferred it before.

In the case of Les Faux – er, ‘FOBO’ – the easiest path would have been to erase the past and announce a bold new vision. The safer path would have been to change almost nothing. What I saw instead was something much harder.

Gaia House (Nammos, Ama, Selene) founders Petro and Yianni Kerasiotis have assembled an impressive team, including Georgio Yacoub leading day-to-day operations, co-chefs David Cassese and Brent Thornton leading the kitchen, and Dylan Riches overseeing the beverage program. But legacy staff remain part of the conversation, and original owner Andreas Seppelt is still involved and present on the floor. That matters.

What struck me at the staff tasting was that nobody in the room behaved like they’d arrived to rescue Les Faux Bourgeois. Familiar dishes had been questioned, refined, and, in some cases, reimagined or even replaced, but very little felt like change for the sake of change.

That’s also a distinction that matters because we sometimes equate change with improvement. Or we become so protective of what already exists that we stop seeing where things have drifted. When you’re inside the same four walls every day, perspective is one of the first things to disappear. Habits become invisible. Strengths get taken for granted. “That’s just the way we do it” slowly becomes an excuse instead of an answer. Sometimes it takes fresh eyes to remember what was worth protecting in the first place.

Watching Cassese and Thornton (alongside a very talented kitchen crew) that balance felt genuine. There was confidence and excitement in the cooking, but also reverence. I heard questions coming at them but reactions weren’t defensive. The same seemed true behind the bar, where Riches appears to be pushing the cocktail and wine program in a more ambitious direction, evolving it rather than replacing it.

As the afternoon unfolded, boxes of freshly printed menus were delivered. The branding had been refreshed, too – somehow striking a balance between being familiar enough to feel unmistakably Les Faux, but simultaneously cleaner, more contemporary and pretty obviously signalling that the restaurant wasn’t planning on standing still. Watching all of this come together also forced me to confront something…

If I’m honest, I was worried.

Probably much like many regulars of Les Faux Bourgeois, I wondered whether new ownership and new talent would arrive with blinders on, make a bunch of cocky changes and bulldoze the charm Seppelt and his team had created.

That concern exists for good reason. It happens all the time in the restaurant world. Admittedly, there are times when dramatic change is what’s needed. But too often, people arrive so eager to leave their mark that they start ripping things out before they’ve bothered to understand what was actually working or why people liked it.

As a diner, you brace yourself for it. Some people even get pre-emptively pissy about it. (I’m sure Les Faux Bourgeois got more than an earful when word got out that ownership changed hands.)

But cocky moves were not what I saw happening.

To my eye, the moves have been considered. The original restaurant is still recognizable. The people responsible for its history haven’t been written out of the story. New talent has been given room to make an impression, but nobody seems interested in bulldozing what came before, and I think that’s exactly why they’ve managed to make a better restaurant.

That’s a surprisingly difficult trick to pull off. But from what I saw at that staff tasting, this team understood that inheriting a restaurant is different from opening one. Your first job isn’t to change it. It’s to understand it.

We don’t always reward that kind of restraint in this city. We like shiny things. New names. New rooms. New reasons to post a photo. But the places that stick around to become institutions usually get there because they stop worrying about that sort of thing. They know who they are.

Looked at in the right light, this approach doesn’t diminish ambition. It creates more space for it. You don’t have to spend energy on posture or shouting. You don’t have to prove anything. You can spend your energy making the restaurant better instead. Maybe that’s the real job when you inherit a restaurant people already love. It’s to know what deserves protecting, where there’s room to push, and how to tell the difference.

Most diners will never see that part. They’ll just notice that the room feels right, the food feels familiar in the best way, and somehow the whole place feels more like itself than it did before.

Les Faux Bourgeois (Fobo) is open for dinner service 5:30-11pm (Closed Tuesdays)
DETAILS

Les Faux Bourgeois

Neighbourhood: Fraserhood

663 E. 15th Ave.

604-873-9733

WEBSITE

** It’s entirely possible I’m projecting something I wanted to see. The people living it may remember that afternoon differently. But from where I was standing, it felt like talented people putting ego aside in service of making something worthwhile together. There’s something pretty beautiful about that, and it’s the kind of collaboration I don’t get tired of watching.