Isabelle and Ross Spence didn’t think twice about going into the restaurant industry together.
After all, the husband-and-wife team practically met because of food some 20 years ago when a young Ross was the chef at the Moustache Café on the North Shore, cooking up orders for a younger, French university student.
“I was 18 years old and I was here to learn English,” said Isabelle, who now runs the Chez Mémé Baguette Bistro in North Burnaby with Ross. “I was going back home to France and he was taking a year off from the restaurant business, and he decided to come along and visit me.
“He loved Europe a lot and he proposed and we got married.”
But there’s more to their love story than a flight across the Atlantic and a ring – Ross cooked at luxury hotels and exquisite restaurants in Paris before the couple returned to Canada and set up shop at the corner of Robson and Jervis.
“My background is fine dining,” said Ross, who went through the Dubrulle International Culinary School of Arts, “but when we came back, we wanted to open our own place, something that was a bit more simple.”
That place ended up being a crêperie in Downtown Vancouver named La Bretagne, after Isabelle’s home region of Brittany in France, where crêpes and galettes with buckwheat flour are a traditional dish.
“It was a very small, quaint little place,” she said. “It was busy and it was fun, but the rent was quite high.
“Our life was no life, it was just the restaurant.”
After six years and two kids, the Spences decided they’d had enough working upwards of 12 hours a day, yet they still shared a passion for rustic European food. They started looking for a new place to call home and they found it in a small restaurant in North Burnaby.
“I remember him saying, ‘Oh, there’s this restaurant for sale on Hastings,’” recalled Isabelle. “I’m like, ‘Hastings? I don’t think I want to be on Hastings.’”
But once they realized the location was in Burnaby Heights – as opposed to Hastings’ reputation in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside – they checked it out and were blown away.
“When we saw this place, we fell in love with it,” she said. “We saw the kitchen and we said, ‘That’s a kitchen.’ When we worked at the crêperie, it was tiny.”
With a few helping hands, the two of them turned the eatery into something that felt like Grandma’s house – or, en français, Chez Mémé.
“When I was growing up, my mom would say, ‘Oh, we’re going to Chez Mémé,’ and we knew we were going to have some good food,” said Isabelle of the inspiration behind the name. “It was very rustic and always good, not pretentious.
“You don’t need to be expensive to be a French restaurant. It can be very simple, back to the roots of what it is: the meat, the sauce, the cheese. And when you put them together, it makes it special.”
Chez Mémé serves up succulent sandwiches, rich soups and to-die-for breakfasts (among other menu items) made from fresh foods bought locally from surrounding stores like the Red Apple Market and Cioffi’s Meat Market & Deli.
“It’s an old-style community where it’s all personal owners and they care about their customers and want to know them,” said Ross of the neighbourhood. “A lot of them are second, third generation restaurants and businesses.”
The bistro, which is celebrating its fifth anniversary this November, fills up with regulars around lunchtime on weekdays. That’s because they’re only open Monday to Friday from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m., as well as brunch on the second Saturday of the month.
The Spences don’t run a dinner menu, though they tried before and it didn’t go over.
“Hastings just shuts down at night,” said Isabelle, adding that the customers who did come in for dinner preferred the breakfast and lunch items as opposed to what was on the dinner menu.
“Ross was like, ‘I’m not making breakfast for dinner!’” she said with a laugh.
But people keep coming back to experience “the flashback,” as Isabelle put it.
“They eat something and they have a flashback of what their grandma or mom used to make. It makes them feel good, and they crave it.”
Being able to close in the afternoon affords Ross and Isabelle a less hectic lifestyle than most restaurant jobs, reinforcing their family values as a husband-and-wife operation.
“To be able to be at home at night and here in the day is just fabulous,” said Isabelle.
“We don’t make a restaurant to make money, we make a restaurant to make a life,” added Ross.
“Now if we want to make money,” said Isabelle, “we need to have more than one.”
Chez Mémé is located at 4016 Hastings St.
