Le Marché St. George, outlaw-quiche and the battle for Vancouver's soul

Call it the quiche that broke the camel's back.

Amid spiking real estate prices, fear of foreign ownership and pot shops opening on every corner, a threat to the existence of a popular neighbourhood cafe has exposed a raw nerve for Vancouverites.

City bylaw inspectors may be able to contemplate a more embarrassing spectacle than a confrontation with a horde of the baguette-and-crepe-wielding denizens of Le Marché St. George, but it's hard to imagine exactly what.

Echoes of the 'No Fun City' days

The owners of the "amiable cafe and upscale grocery" — the New York Times' words, not mine — claim their Mount Pleasant business is in danger of being suffocated by rigid bylaws.

The city, meanwhile, claims Le Marché — backyard chickens and all — is under no threat whatsoever: as long as they comply with rules apparently incompatible with the existence of a business like the one that actually exists in the middle of the East Vancouver neighbourhood.

Even Mayor Gregor Robertson weighed in directly on Twitter, telling people not to worry, Le Marché's "not going anywhere!' 

But the problem is: This is exactly the type of thing that happens in Vancouver: Rules have a habit of getting in the way of the unorthodox.

Remember the 'No Fun City' days? The pre-craft beer metropolis days?

"It's a hot topic," says Le Marche St. George owner Janaki Larsen.

"It's people's sense of alienation. It's great to build all these condos, and build higher density, but where are these people supposed to go to meet their neighbours?"

Pot shops and laneway houses

Full disclosure, I live around the corner from Le Marché. I'm not a regular customer, but the packed-from-dawn-til-dusk appeal of the business is undeniable. 

The building itself is a weathered old structure Larsen and her husband have restored and transformed into a two-storey home with a European café on the ground floor.

It stands in contrast to the bulk of buyers in the area, bidding a million-plus to buy old homes sight-unseen; they eye properties for land value, and then tear down existing houses with the ink still wet on the contract.

Gap-toothed streets are a mixture of construction pits, pre-war bungalows, bland mansions and 'mortgage-helper' laneway homes.

And that's to say nothing of the unchallenged explosion of marijuana dispensaries. Admittedly, police did raid one for alleged links to the Hells Angels. Just imagine what might have happened if they'd been baking croissants.

Ray Weind empathizes with the owners of Le Marche St.George. He owns his own small neighbourhood grocery: The Mighty Oak.

A bylaw officer forced him to remove outdoor planters which were determined to be a tripping hazard.

"That's ridiculous," he says. "And of course all our customers were up in arms because they've changed something that was in the middle of the community for all the wrong reasons."

Weind says it's not so much that the city is against innovation, it's just that bylaws aren't necessarily for it.

Vive la quiche!

To be fair, Robertson is promising — in a tweet, anyway — that his staff will work with the owners of Le Marche St. George to "resolve food/patio" issues. The devil will be in the details.

But the situation speaks to a bigger problem that culminated in the mayor apologizing to voters last year for not listening enough.

His Vision council has been criticized for paying lip service to public input, drawing up plans which citizens are expected to embrace and then act accordingly.

By contrast, Le Marche St. George appears to have evolved organically, building itself around the community's needs. Coun. George Affleck says he hopes staff can find a way to make the rules fit the business, not the other way around.

"It's representative of a movement that I think we as a city should be encouraging," he says.

"Obviously this grocery store determined there's a desire to turn it into something more than a grocery store — a kind of café, which is very European, very romantic. Why would we want to discourage that? It seems like they have a better sense of what the people in the community need. We should respect that."

You need look no further than the development of Vancouver's craft beer scene and the city's willingness to work with brewers to create tasting rooms to see what's possible when entrepreneurship and community come together.

As they say at Le Marché: 'Vive la quiche!'