Hello, we hope you are all safe and healthy during these times.
A few months ago, when restaurants were still open like usual, we visited Brix & Mortar, an upscale restaurant in downtown Vancouver. We asked them various questions, and you can watch the video here:
Transcript of the first 5 minutes (starting after the disclaimer):
A= Alyssa
K= Kyla
J= Jennifer
A: Hello everyone and welcome to “Behind the Food”. In this segment, we will go behind the scenes at your favourite restaurants and talk to the owners and the chefs to get you an inside look. Today, we are at Brix & Mortar, an upscale restaurant in the heart of Yaletown with Jennifer, the event coordinator and owner of Brix & Mortar. Let’s start at the very beginning, why did you decide to open a restaurant?
J: So I should say that my husband and our business partner Patrick Mercer, they opened up the restaurant in 1999. They were serving at the time, at Joe Forte’s and David, who is my husband, was debating about whether or not he was going to go back to school. He had graduated from UBC in economics and theatre believe it or not, and then was working and managing in restaurants and was thinking about going back to school to BCIT in marketing. And at that time, they were serving at Joe Forte’s and Patrick said “you know what would be fun? Let’s just open up a restaurant”, so David went and put together a business plan and they started going around the city looking at different spots and just found what was originally a restaurant just called Brix and it was the location up there on Homer street, you know where you walk through the courtyard and it was called Feraggo at the time and they went in and they offered money for the restaurant and they got it.
K: One of the most important aspects of owning a restaurant is the name. It’s what people remember and it defines your brand. Why did you pick the name Brix & Mortar?
J: In 1999 when they opened they named it Brix, B-R-I-X, and brix, it’s a measurement of sweetness of grapes in wine. So, you would say like “degrees brix”, and because the restaurants original concept was like lots of great small sharing plates, and a place where people could come and get a number of wines by the glass, a great variety of wines by the glass, so the theme has always been a wine bar, along with great food. So brix tied into the concept of wine. In 2005, we did a rebrand of the restaurant because the space that we’re actually sitting in now which is the lower part used to be called George Lounge, which was a cocktail lounge, and it was open from 2005 until 2015. In 2015, we decided to close George and combine both spaces as one, and we did a whole refresh of Brix and that time and we thought it was just kind of a fun play on the words Brix, B-R-I-X, vs B-R-I-C-K and Mortar. And also we’re losing more and more bricks and mortar stores so we thought it would be a fun tie in of both those concepts.
A: Your restaurant is on the more fancier side and is known for meat and drinks, so why did you decide to go that route rather than a more casual restaurant?
J: What we like to say is we are “approachable” fine dining. You know, we wanted a place where people can go for quality nice food and nice dinner but at a slightly kind of at that ¾ price point. You know, the concept is you can still dress up and go out, but truthfully actually we have a lot of neighbourhood and community guests coming in, you know people can come in in sweatpants and all that if they want. Honestly, the concept of having nice cocktails and all of that generally is paired with sometimes a little bit of a nicer meal, at least traditionally it was.
K: What has been the biggest struggle of owning a restaurant?
J: Well we’ve been open for now, in April it will be 21 years and the challenges have changed throughout the years. If we were to look at what the largest challenges are currently, would be the costs, the rising costs. So labour costs, you look at rent costs. The governments imposed so many more, like when you look at all these licensing costs. When we opened up, to have a patio permit, so to be allowed to have a patio on the street walkway, was like $400, whereas now is like $8000. You look at your business license when we opened up would be $100 or so, about $100 to renew every year. Now it’s over $3000 to renew. So when you look at minimum wages, which is great for you guys, but it’s gone up even for service and stuff, it used to be a lot lower. It’s now 13/14 dollars. So all of these things for small businesses become very hard to absorb while still providing a quality and affordable product and service for guests. I would say costs are the biggest things, and finding good quality labour. We live in an expensive city, so finding people that are able to live here and work here is a challenge.
Listen to the full episode for the rest of the interview!
After the interview, we were able to try some of their food.
Here are the mocktails (cocktails with no alcohol).
The yellow one was my personal favourite. It was very sweet and had a lemon lime flavour.
The red one was a bit spicy, which makes for a unique and interesting drink.
The orange one was well… orange. It tasted like an Orange Italian soda.
Here is a video of the bartender explaining each of the drinks:
Now for the food. We tried four appetizers.
First were these balls (I forget the fancy Italian name for them). They were coated in breadcrumbs and reminded me of risotto balls.
Next was a pork dish. It was very crispy and tender.
There was also a deconstructed fish and chip, and I had fish for the first time in at least four years. It was very crispy and not too “fishy”. It tasted a lot like tartar sauce.
Finally was the romaine dish. It was really good, crispy and tasty.
I know these comments aren’t very helpful, but I wrote these notes three months ago when we visited.
Thank you once again to Jennifer for allowing us to visit and do an interview, as well as providing all the delicious food and drinks that we tried.
Check out Brix & Mortar here:
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