Eight Restaurateurs, One Message: The Math Isn’t Working

The Georgia Straight recently published “8 Vancouver restaurateurs on changes they want to see in the industry,” and it’s one of those articles that sticks with you. Not because any single complaint is shocking on its own — but because when you hear eight different operators, from different parts of the city, running different kinds of restaurants, all pointing at the same structural problems… it starts to feel less like complaining and more like a diagnosis.

My wife and I ran a wholesale bakery in BC, so we’ve had our own taste of the fees, the permits, the feeling of being nickel-and-dimed from every direction. Reading this piece brought a lot of that back. But it also made me think about something bigger — what we’re actually losing when these businesses can’t survive.

The $3,270 Patio That Costs $65,000

Claire Livia Lassam, who owns Livia Forno e Vino in Mount Pleasant, shared a number that tells you everything about how restaurant math works in Vancouver.

Her patio permit costs $3,270.20 per year, on top of the $990 annual restaurant permit. That might not sound catastrophic on its own. But here’s where it gets painful: with margins hovering around five percent, Lassam calculates she needs to generate over $65,000 in revenue just to break even on that patio. Not to profit from it. Just to cover the permit.

And the patio doesn’t even add capacity. City rules require her to remove tables from inside to stay within her permitted 53-seat cap — a number determined by washroom count. So she’s paying thousands for the privilege of moving her existing seats outside.

Then there’s this: if a couple wants to book her 50-seat restaurant for a wedding — a full dinner service with some dancing — Lassam has to apply for a $500 “temporary patron participation license.” The city caps her at five of these per year.

“They are still full dinners, and the majority of the bill is still for food,” she told the Straight. “But I’m only allowed five weddings a year. It’s highway robbery.”

My wife and I dealt with our own version of this kind of thing — fees that felt arbitrary, permits that seemed designed to generate revenue rather than serve any safety or planning purpose. It’s disheartening. You get into the food business because you love feeding people, and then you spend half your time navigating paperwork.

Death by a Thousand Fees

Lassam’s patio story is vivid, but the other restaurateurs in the piece pointed to the same underlying problem: it’s not one fee that breaks you. It’s all of them, stacked on top of five percent margins.

Taxes and levies. Ron MacGillivray of Fable Diner put it plainly: “Changing the fortune of the restaurant industry in Vancouver boils down to government and their policies.” His suggestions include freezing minimum wage increases in BC for two years, eliminating GST on restaurant meals, increasing dining-out tax deductions from 50 to 75 percent, and raising the limit on office gatherings from six to twelve per year.

The liquor monopoly. Teddy Wilkie of Prophecy didn’t mince words: “Right now operators are held hostage by a single supply channel. We’re paying excessive markups, taxes, and even losing product access during strikes.” Iori Kataoka of Yuwa Japanese Cuisine added context — industry groups estimated the recent distribution strike disrupted up to $250 million in liquor sales. She’s not calling for deregulation, but for balance: “protecting public revenue while allowing hospitality businesses to innovate and operate with greater supply stability.”

Commercial rent. Kim Tran of DD Mau in Chinatown raised something that keeps a lot of restaurant owners up at night. Residential tenants in BC have rent increase caps. Commercial tenants don’t. Lease renewals can bring dramatic increases with no recourse. Tran is asking for a commercial rent stabilization program — something that ties annual increases to inflation and gives independent restaurants the predictability they need to invest in staff, infrastructure, and community.

Tipping. Robert Belcham, chef and restaurateur behind Popina Canteen and Monarch Burger, tackled the elephant in the room. “Tipping is a sacred cow that must evolve to revitalize Canada’s restaurant industry,” he said. His proposal: pay employees closer to a living wage, adjust menu prices to offset costs, and reduce tipping prompts to three to five percent. Fairer for staff, easier on diners, and more sustainable for everyone.

Workforce sustainability. Johnny Bridge, president of the Chefs Table Society of BC, argued the industry needs to offer actual careers — not just jobs. That means health benefits, mental-health support, vacation-permitting schedules, and financial incentives for staying in the industry. “The defining resource of hospitality is its employees being hospitable,” he said. “If we can’t offer fair wages and basic supports, the industry isn’t sustainable.”

Labour access. James Paré of Paré Restaurant Group (Caramba, Quattro, Lorette) highlighted the acute staffing crisis in resort markets like Whistler, calling for streamlined access to the temporary foreign worker program. “Whistler’s seasonal fluctuations, combined with record-high labour costs and rising rents, have created an unsustainable environment.”

Each of these issues is solvable. None of them are new. That’s what makes it so frustrating.

Restaurants Are the Cornerstones of Community

Here’s the part that doesn’t show up on a balance sheet, and the reason I think this conversation matters to everyone — not just people in the industry.

We’re living through a strange time for human connection. Remote work means millions of people spend their days alone, their social contact filtered through Slack and Zoom. We text instead of talk. We order delivery instead of sitting down somewhere. More and more of our daily interactions happen through screens — or increasingly, with AI chatbots instead of actual people.

I’m not anti-technology. I build software for restaurants — that’s literally what I do. But when Carly and I ran Kitchening & Co., our literal slogan was “Good Food Brings People Together” – we didn’t have a retail shop, but we provided baked goods for probably thousands of events over the years: weddings, funerals, birthdays, dinner-parties, and more. But my wife and I also saw something firsthand… People. Business owners, restaurant owners, chefs, receivers, buyers – everything we did was about relationships (or at least, the best parts were).

Restaurants and cafes are some of the last real “third places” we have — not home, not work, but somewhere in between where community happens on its own. When your neighbourhood restaurant closes, you don’t just lose a place to eat. You lose the place where first dates happen, where friends catch up over lunch, where strangers become regulars become friends.

Every restaurateur in that Straight article is fighting to keep their doors open. And every time one of them loses that fight — ground down by the accumulation of permits, fees, rent hikes, and monopoly markups — the neighbourhood gets a little quieter. A little more disconnected.

We should be making it easier to open and run restaurants. Not harder.

“Why Would Anyone Run a Business at Five Percent Margins?”

Someone’s going to read this and think it. Maybe say it out loud. “Why are these idiots running a business at five percent margins?”

And honestly, it’s a fair question — if you’ve never thought about what a city actually looks like without restaurants. Five percent margins aren’t a sign of bad business sense. They’re the reality of an industry where the raw ingredients are perishable, the labour is skilled and hands-on, and the product gets consumed the same day it’s made. You can’t warehouse meals. You can’t outsource the cooking to a cheaper country. You can’t automate a chef’s creativity or a server who remembers your name.

The margins are thin because the work is real, legislation is against you, commercial landowners are gouging you, and food costs are soaring.

So the question isn’t “why would anyone do this?” The question is: do we want legislation and policy that makes it possible for talented, passionate people to run these businesses? Or are we okay watching them close up shop — and what, start another online business reselling crap they bought wholesale from Temu?

Because that’s the actual alternative. When a chef who’s spent twenty years mastering their craft can’t make a restaurant work — not because the food is bad or the seats are empty, but because the permit fees and monopoly markups and rent hikes keep eating the margin — they don’t just find a different restaurant to open. They leave the industry. The skills, the passion, the community space they built — gone.

We need to decide what we actually value. Do we want neighbourhoods with places where our friends and families can sit down together, share a meal, and have a real conversation? Or are we fine with another empty storefront, another condo lobby, another stretch of sidewalk where something good used to be?

I know which one I’d pick.

What Actually Needs to Change

What struck me about the Straight piece is that these restaurateurs weren’t just venting. They had specific, practical asks:

  • Reduce patio permit fees and rethink capacity rules that make patios a financial liability instead of an asset
  • Freeze or reduce the tax burden — GST elimination on restaurant meals, better dining-out deductions, a pause on minimum wage increases to let operators catch their breath
  • Modernize liquor distribution — open it to competition so restaurants aren’t held hostage by a single supply channel and its markups
  • Stabilize commercial rents — tie increases to inflation and give long-term tenants some protection against sudden hikes at renewal
  • Rethink tipping — move toward a model with better base wages and lower tipping expectations, so the system is fairer for everyone
  • Invest in hospitality careers — benefits, mental health support, and real incentives for people to stay in the industry
  • Streamline labour access — especially for seasonal markets like Whistler that depend on temporary foreign workers

None of these are radical ideas. Some are policy changes other provinces and countries have already made. What they need is political will.