A family business is shocked that their landlord wants them out after decades. Their landlord is the City of Vancouver

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When the restaurant opened at the city-owned VanDusen Botanical Garden in August 1984, the original managing partner, Chris Chatten, recalls a steak-and-crab entrée cost around $12, female diners were decked out in jackets with huge shoulder pads and special ceiling fans were installed to extract cigarette smoke from the bustling dining room.

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It was a different era.

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Back then, the restaurant was known as Sprinklers, and it was Chatten’s first time running his own restaurant after 14 years in the local hospitality industry. He sold his Sprinklers shares in 1990 and ran a West End jazz club for a few years but returned to VanDusen in 1998 and took over the restaurant lease once again.

Chatten’s been the owner-operator ever since, paying annual rent to the city (more than $265,000 last year) and investing more than $1 million in capital upgrades to the restaurant by his estimate, and renewing the lease with the city four times over the past 20 years. Chatten ran the restaurant with his wife, Amandah Delain, who died in December 2023.

Years before the most recent lease’s expected end in 2025, Chatten tried to talk to the park board about the next extension, he said this week. Over 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023, Chatten repeatedly tried to reach his contacts at the park board to discuss the lease beyond 2025, he said, but they would often take weeks or months to reply to emails, if they replied at all.

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The lack of progress was frustrating, Chatten said, and it seemed much more difficult than the first four renewals he had gone through. But he was reassured, he said, that park board staff repeatedly told him the lease wouldn’t need to go to a public procurement process because Shaughnessy Restaurant was such a long-term stakeholder and the park board understood they needed to be able to book weddings years in advance.

That was his understanding until April 2024, he said, when he was “blindsided” to learn that the lease would indeed go through a procurement process, and he could compete with other bids if he wanted to stay at VanDusen.

Over the rest of 2024 Chatten’s conversations with park board staff left him and his daughter Carlle, who started working at Shaughnessy as a teenage hostess and server assistant in the early 2000s, feeling increasingly pessimistic about their future there.

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After the city issued its request for proposals, the Chattens submitted their application in February.

“We were nervous,” Chatten said. “Waiting with bated breath.”

They received no updates from the city or park board staff over the next five months. Then in July, the Chattens read on the Vancouver news website Daily Hive that city staff had chosen the only other applicant in the procurement process over their bid, a local company called Truffles Fine Foods.

Distraught, Carlle reached out to her contacts at the city to ask if what she had read online was true. They confirmed it was.

Next, the elected park board commissioners and city council would each need to decide on staff’s recommendation.

On July 21, the park board voted to support staff’s recommendation to choose Truffles. Because that was in an in-camera meeting, held privately, there was no public discussion about the merits of each application, and park board commissioners aren’t allowed to discuss details of that decision or the debate.

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The VanDusen restaurant lease was also on city council’s agenda for July, but was withdrawn at the last minute. It has now been rescheduled for next Wednesday, Sept. 17.

The city declined to share details of why staff recommended Truffles over Shaughnessy, only that the selection criteria included “proponent experience/ability to meet requirements, sustainable and ethical procurement factors, financial return to the city and the ability to operate without city funding.”

Next week, if council disagrees with staff’s recommendation and the park board’s approval, a new procurement process would need to be initiated, a city spokesperson said.

Truffles president Nin Rai declined to discuss the procurement process.

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In an emailed statement, he said Truffles is a locally owned, independent company, with a “long track record serving public venues and community events.”

The Truffles website says the company does weddings and corporate catering, and runs two cafés, including one in VanDusen Gardens. Rai is also an owner of the Michelin-recommended Gastown restaurant L’Abattoir.

Rai said he has “great respect for the Shaughnessy Restaurant’s legacy” and if council approves staff’s recommendation, “our focus will be a respectful transition that carries the Shaughnessy legacy forward,” and they would invite existing Shaughnessy staff to interview first for positions, “with the aim of retaining as many as possible.”

The Chattens say they’re mystified as to why they weren’t recommended and, more fundamentally, why they’ve been treated in such a “ruthless” manner by their landlord.

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“It’s gut-wrenching,” Chatten said. “Devastating.”

An online petition calling on city hall to save Shaughnessy, “a beloved Vancouver institution,” had amassed more than 4,500 signatures as of this week. Many of those who signed described it as their family’s favourite place to mark special occasions or a destination they bring out-of-town visitors to.

Shaughnessy’s business has been growing, with sales doubling from $2 million in 2021 to more than $4 million in 2024, Chatten said. The event side of the business has boomed since Carlle started as Shaughnessy’s wedding and event director in 2017, tripling from about 30 large weddings and corporate buyouts a year, to around 100.

Coun. Rebecca Bligh is also unsure exactly why city staff recommend ending the city’s relationship with Shaughnessy.

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“For no apparent reason, rather than allow them to renew, they had to go to a competitive process … only to find out that their proposal was not accepted, out of only two proposals,” Bligh said. “You have to have a pretty compelling reason to kick out a tenant that has been operating very successfully for decades, and take a chance on a new operator … Is the juice worth the squeeze?”

There is no indication that Truffles has done anything wrong, Bligh said: “I don’t think Truffles is the problem here at all.”

But she worries about the message this could send to the many commercial tenants — small businesses, restaurants, non-profits, retailers — spread across the city’s multibillion-dollar real estate portfolio. Some of those operated inside civic assets like inside parks or community centres, but many others are in commercial properties that most of the public wouldn’t realize are city-owned.

City hall’s real estate department isn’t a charity, and it needs to manage its assets on behalf of all taxpayers.

But, Bligh asks, as the city negotiates with all of its many other commercial and non-profit tenants in the future, how will their value to the community be weighed against maximum revenue potential?

“This is not the kind of precedent that I think the city wants to be sending to other small businesses that occupy city buildings,” Bligh said. “Is this how we’re going to treat people now?”

dfumano@postmedia.com

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