Ultramar Set to Open in Mount Pleasant This Winter

This winter, the team behind ¿Cómo? Taperia will open “Ultramar” at 592 East Broadway.

I’ve heard ¿Cómo? co-owners Shaun Layton and Frankie Harrington talk about “the next project” for years.

What I’ve never sensed is any hurry to get there. They’ve never seemed interested in filling an empty lease, forcing a concept or expanding simply because they could. I’ve always come away with the impression that they’d rather wait than compromise. Spend the extra year. Take another research trip. Keep refining the idea until it is locked in.

Standing in the future home of Ultramar with Layton and Harrington last week, joined by chef-partner Daniel Kim and ¿CóMO? general manager Sean Grady, who will lead the new restaurant’s front of house, it felt less like a lucky alignment of circumstances and more like the inevitable result of a mindset that doesn’t take shortcuts.

Those trips to Spain, the ones I’d only seen in photos and heard secondhand, had clearly left their mark. Points of reference include the Basque Country, Cantabria, Galicia, Madrid, Barcelona, Cádiz. Different places, different traditions, all contributing something to the final picture. But impressions like that take time to settle. You don’t come home from Spain, sign a lease and open a restaurant in the blink of an eye. Not this team anyway.

As we chatted while I toured the space, it became obvious they weren’t trying to recreate Spain. Nobody was talking about copying a menu or rebuilding a room they’d fallen in love with on holiday. They were trying to pin down something much harder to explain: why certain places had stayed with them long after the trip was over, which of those ideas belonged in Vancouver, which were better left exactly where they happened, and how those ideas might survive the flight home without becoming contrived.

But how do you explain that what stayed with you wasn’t simply the ease and charm of lunch on a metal table, the taste of charcoal, a kiss of salt or the smell of the ocean, but the way those things came together in a single moment? How do you translate a feeling like that into something a chef can cook, a designer can draw, a contractor can build and, eventually, a team can bring to life night after night?

That isn’t something you solve in a weekend. First, a shared language has to emerge. Then it has to be tested, challenged and refined until everyone involved understands it the same way, before a chef starts writing dishes, before a designer starts drawing a room, before a contractor starts building walls.

On my visit, the construction hadn’t even started. Ultramar was just a well-lit concrete shell that created an echo as four people walked around pointing at walls, trying to describe something still mostly living in their heads. But the concept itself was good and dialled in, and by the time they were done explaining their vision to me, I had no trouble seeing it.

The roughly 80-seat restaurant will occupy the 2,500-square-foot, double-height corner space at Broadway and Carolina, with additional seating on a second-level mezzanine. The new development retained the original 1926 heritage house, which now sits just behind Ultramar facing Carolina Street. White paint and black trim visually tie the heritage house to the contemporary building beside it, despite the century separating them. Windows on three of Ultramar’s four walls pull in an enormous amount of natural light while keeping the neighbourhood in constant view. Even with those windows still papered over, the room already felt outward-looking rather than tucked away, the sort of place where the street remains part of the experience.

Ste. Marie Studio has been tasked with translating the idea into a room, while Glasfurd & Walker is developing the visual identity and Harmony Pacific will handle the build (this is particularly good news for the team’s charcoal grill aspirations, as Harmony brings some useful experience to the project. The company installed the charcoal grilling system at Michelin-starred Sumibiyaki Arashi, just down the street, giving them a head start on one of Ultramar’s more technically ambitious pieces of the puzzle.)

The renderings I’ve seen filled in a few of the finer points. Stainless steel will feature heavily, from the tables to the kitchen, nodding to the classic seafood bars of Northern Spain. The harder edges of that functional aesthetic will be countered with leather, linen, wood and mosaic tile, keeping the room from feeling overly industrial. The materials are beautiful, but they never feel like they’re there just to impress you. They’re intended to transport and relax you. That’s a hard balance to strike without clarity. But these guys were on the same page, down to the word. One that kept surfacing during our conversation was “rustic.”

Layton said it. Harrington said it. Kim said it. Grady said it. By the end of our meeting, I’d stopped counting. But the way I heard it is important: it wasn’t being used as shorthand for rough around the edges. More as a way of saying something was straightforward and honest. Not overworked.

Chef Daniel Kim has spent 15 years working in Vancouver fine-dining kitchens, including nearly a decade at Boulevard, where he rose to chef de cuisine. When I asked what excited him most about Ultramar, he spoke about doing less highly composed plates in favour of cooking that is more rustic in style (much of the cooking will revolve around a charcoal grill that will sit behind the bar in the main floor dining room, with whole fish over the fire expected to become one of Ultramar’s signatures). If I’m reading between the lines correctly, this probably means tweezers can stay in the drawer – which felt entirely consistent with everything else I’d heard that afternoon.

But there’s something else worth pointing out too. For all of my talk about the sea, Ultramar isn’t really defining itself as a seafood restaurant. It’s defining itself as a coastal one. That might sound like semantics, but I don’t think it is.

“Coastal” is shellfish and whole fish, sourced both locally and farther afield, but it also leaves room for vegetables, meat, simple salads, conservas, and beautiful wine. It speaks less to a category of ingredient than to a way of eating in coastal cultures, and that is an important distinction that Harrington and Layton both stressed. The culture of coastal eating in Spain involves late-afternoon meals that stretch into dinner. Easy. Familiar. Less “welcome to our restaurant” and more “Come on in. Find a seat. Have a vermouth. Share another story. Stay for another plate.” That late-afternoon-into-evening style of dining isn’t especially common in Vancouver, but it’s a beautiful way to spend an afternoon. Ultramar will run as a dinner service, but that same unhurried, expansive dining spirit is clearly still the goal.

Somewhere between those trips to Spain and signing a lease, this team distilled individual experiences and feelings into something they could actually build. A room. A menu. A way of cooking. That means the hard part is done. All that’s left to do now is finish the space, open the doors and let people in.

Ultramar is currently expected to open in late 2026 or early 2027. For now, take a look at the gallery of images below sent to us from Shaun Layton and Frankie Harrington showing some of the places and dishes that have inspired their vision…