Why Mount Pleasant is Vancouver’s Coolest Neighbourhood

Celebrated by the Michelin guide and splashed with street art, Vancouver’s oldest suburb is its newest hotspot.

I’m sitting by the window at a café on Main Street, opposite the War Memorial building that doubles as a parkour warehouse and 400-seat bingo hall, when a young woman in John Lennon specs rides past on a unicycle. I barely have time to register her presence because the manager is explaining the “pour-over program” that, even for a coffee-literate Melburnian, is a lot to swallow. Beside me there’s an entire wall shingled with pages from Pride and Prejudice, in case patrons fancy a little Austen with their espresso.

Surely, I think to myself, this must be peak Mount Pleasant.

This city-edge village south-east of downtown Vancouver can feel, at times, perversely edgy. Vancouver’s first suburb, founded in the 1880s, it was derelict by the 1980s but today is a byword for urban Canadian cool. Underpinned by craft breweries and coffee, its diverse shopfronts specialise in everything from archery and wild teas to Japanese homewares and hair salons offering both balayage and mullets. The architecture ranges from warehouse conversions to century-old mansions and its green spaces include Jonathan Rogers Park, a popular public drinking spot named after a prohibitionist, and Dude Chilling Park, famous for its abstract sculpture of a reclining figure.

But beneath the hip swagger there’s a genuine character and energy, especially since the arrival of The Michelin Guide in 2022, when Mount Pleasant was anointed a gastronomic hotspot. Chef Andrea Carlson was an early convert, opening her restaurant Burdock & Co on Main Street in 2013 when, she says, the area was very much up and coming. “We wanted to be in Mount Pleasant because it’s a great location, close to downtown, but there’s also a nice neighbourhood out here as well.”

A decade later, Burdock & Co became the first restaurant in Canada owned and operated by a woman to be awarded a Michelin star. The cosy, sophisticated eatery combines the recycled charm of barn timbers, painted brick and vintage lanterns from Amsterdam with a Japanese-inspired open-counter concept where the chef and her mostly female team create memorable evening meals. All the floor staff are also sommeliers so the set menu is thoughtfully matched with biodynamic, sustainable wines, sakes and housemade syrups that complement the hyperlocal Pacific Northwest cuisine.

Highlights include her chewy, crusty arctic sourdough, baked using a culture Carlson nurtured from berry yeasts as part of a creative project for Canada’s 150th anniversary in 2017. There’s a delicate soup of Dungeness crab with Charentais melon, and the textural pleasure of profiteroles filled with cured steelhead trout and dusted with fennel pollen – both paired with a Loire Valley muscadet. There’s also a signature plate of salted, sugar-cured and semi-dehydrated cucumber that manages to make the humble gourd taste meaty and rich via some charcoal grilling and the muscle power of crisp prosciutto and porcini aioli. It’s lovely cooking, every dish so deliciously considered, with producer stories underpinning each ingredient.

Down the road at Published on Main, there’s a similar Michelin-starred professionalism and focus to its innovative, story-led cocktail menu, winemaker collaborations and Gus Stieffenhofer-Brandson’s global-local menu. The standout is a large tile of Wagyu beef carpaccio, turbo-charged with a “super-beef” dressing of bison garum and a carpet of fragrant herbs and fried garlic. The combination is genius.

Between meals, I walk the streets with Vancouver Detours guide Pete Edwards, street-art aficionado and part-time brewer. We bond over coffee at Modus on Broadway then hit the road in search of art.

Mount Pleasant’s creative hub is the City Centre Motor Hotel, a classic Mid-Century motor inn on Main and East 6th Avenue that’s been earmarked for redevelopment. In the interim, its 75 rooms have been converted into artists’ studios and its façade and car park daubed with the city’s largest mural, a multicoloured collage of First Nations’ iconography, graffiti and florals.

On 7th Avenue are two works that capture, for me, the essence of the suburb. Strange Bedfellows by artist collective Phantoms in the Front Yard depicts local characters on a wall of micro-portraits and an adjacent "Where’s Wally?"-style mural where they’re interspersed with fantasy creatures. “It’s kind of this weird celebration of the Mount Pleasant neighbourhood,” says Edwards. Across the road is Presence by the Argentinian artist Graciela Gonçalves Da Silva, aka Animalitoland. Painted in 2020 while she was stranded in Vancouver during COVID lockdowns, it’s a whimsical composition showing a beatific, alien-like figure against a hazy rainbow. The artist asked Vancouverites to share their feelings with her then painted them into the background to create a map of emotions – among them “fragmented”, “awestruck” and “weltschmerz”, a feeling of melancholy and world-weariness. It’s a record of history, humanity and place, and a beautifully comforting work of art.

Edwards and I part at Dude Chilling Park and I wander over to Como Taperia, where a sizable crowd is gathered outside by 4pm on a Saturday. That’s when happy hour kicks off at this blink-and-you’re-in-Spain tapas bar. With free snacks, a G&T menu and discount sangria, beer, vermouth and sherry on tap, there’s always a line at opening time.

Co-owner Shaun Layton, who has a gilda tattooed on his forearm, fell in love with the bar scenes in Barcelona and Madrid and wanted to replicate that buzz at this terracotta-tiled, Miró-bright space on the corner of 7th and Main. The menu, by Filipino chef Rafael Racela, is faithful to the flavours of the Iberian Peninsula: Seville-inspired fried eggplant with spiced honey and rosemary; “bikini” toasted sandwiches of serrano ham and manchego cheese from Barcelona; and a wide choice of conservas, premium canned seafoods, including chargrilled razor clams. Recommended in The Michelin Guide and one of only two Canadian addresses recognised as “official Spanish restaurants” by the Spanish government, Como’s upbeat vibe and commitment to its brief feels very Mount Pleasant. “To us it’s a familiar place, with lots of energy,” says Layton of the neighbourhood.

About a kilometre south-east on Kingsway, I push open the three-metre-high door to Savio Volpe, a former tyre garage reimagined as a family-style Italian restaurant with a central bar and fast-paced kitchen, where chef Andrea Aldridge serves up housemade pastas and flame-grilled meats such as Primrose Farms pork chop with salsa verde and roasted plum. The scene is loud, convivial and quirky – wall sconces protrude from the faces of framed religious figures – as diners feast beneath exposed ceiling pipes or at picnic-style tables on the patio.

During dinner, I discover the restaurant is officially in the suburb of Riley Park, in the rapidly gentrifying area around Fraser Street dubbed Fraserhood. It is, I’m assured by locals, “the next Mount Pleasant”.