Malcolm Parry’s Trade Talk
General manager with a cycling background steers revamped downtown hotel into the racing, touring and charitable worlds of two- wheeling
With a major facelift, and guests that have included Sting, small wonder travel magazine readers voted Wedgewood Canada’s top city hotel.
BIKING FROM BACCHUS: Many hotels have revolving front doors for patrons and symbolic ones for their general managers. The Hornby- off- Robson Street Wedgewood has neither. Britishborn GM Philip Meyer has been incumbent since 1998 at the 85- room boutique hotel that was a lodging house until Eleni Skalbania acquired it from Joe Segal in 1984.
Today, with Skalbania’s daughter and UBC law graduate Elpie Marinakis Jackson as operator, Meyer remains in the saddle — literally. That’s because the former professional bike racer founded the Wedgewood Cycling Team that recruited many of downtown Vancouver’s more- athletic professional and corporate types. Not to participate in the genteel touring Skalbania and husband Nelson enjoyed with friends in France and Italy. Instead, they are yellow- jersey aspirants whose four nine- person teams — two male, one female, one mixed — ran in Meyer- pal Axel Merckx’s recent GranFondo Okanagan on July 7. The women won their division, and Meyer posted a blistering 4: 04 time over the 160- km Penticton-Summerland- Oliver- Road 22- Penticton course.
Team members also raised $ 465,391.39 participating in the Vancouver- Seattle Ride to Conquer Cancer run June 15- 16. Meyer sometimes leads Wedgewood guests who ask for them on strenuous rides around town and the North Shore.
Such hard pedalling is good for business, said four- year cyclist Marinakis Jackson, who rode in the Seattle cancer benefit and who will join Ryder Hesjedal’s Tour de Victoria Sept. 22.
“Look at this room,” she said, waving toward the busy Bacchus restaurant and lounge at lunchtime. “Men in their forties, fifties and sixties who are cyclists. It’s a huge benefit to Vancouver and to us.”
As for benefiting her: “It gets you out of your comfort zone; you do something you wouldn’t have done.”
What she and Meyer did recently was entirely replumb the hotel, put a Bechstein grand piano in the lounge, double the gymnasium and spa space, renovate many rooms and spend $ 2 million on the penthouses where Meyer’s fellow countryman Sting requested an extra patio umbrella to mask folk goggling from nearby officetower windows. As for Ellen DeGeneres and Portia de Rossi’s recent honeymoon in one, “we want sexy rooms,” Marinakis Jackson said, further spurred by Travel + Leisure magazine readers voting the Wedgewood Canada’s top city hotel for 2013.
What she wants even more is for mother Eleni, who recently donated $ 1 million to BC Cancer Foundation programs aiding lung- cancer research, to recover from her own ailments and start bike- riding again.
• READ AND SERVE: Viewing the 7,000 volumes and 5,000 titles shelved at BarbaraJo McIntosh’s Books To Cooks store and her 100- eventayear demonstration kitchen can be as appetizing as the scent of sautéing garlic. Books from every cuisine include My Sri Lankan Kitchen, Tea & Cake London, The Whole Goat Handbook, Victoria Moore’s How To Drink, and even Irma S. Rombauer’s Joy of Cooking, which has sold close to 20 million copies since 1931.
“Molecular gastronomy” fans may spend $ 625 on Nathan Myhrvold’s five- volume- plus Modernist Cuisine, or $ 150 on what McIntosh calls the “Coles Notes version.” Elizabeth Driver’s $ 185 Culinary Landmarks: A bibliography of Canadian Cookbooks 1825 to 1949 “will never sell, but it is good to have,” said McIntosh. Viewing her store as an embryo culinary library, she’s endowed a scholarship fund by which the Chefs’ Table Society of B. C. directs books to young professionals.
Informally calling her place Libraire Bar- Jo, McIntosh knows that barjo means “nutcase” in French. That’s hardly her, even though she once planned to be a journalist and did wrote the best- selling Tin Fish Gourmet. Closing her own restaurant, she opened a Yaletown store in 1997, and in 2005 paid $ 300,000 for an 1,100- square- foot strata property that may be worth three times that today. She shuttered a Granville Island satellite in 2010, “when it didn’t owe me anything but didn’t make enough for the pain.”
Chefs make up 18 per cent of her 7,000 listed clients, who spend $ 50 to $ 150 on most titles. Some of the 700 new ones she stocks each year are bought at retail in Europe and Asia. Even in New York, where friend Nach Waxman owns the 13,000- title Kitchen Arts & Letters, specialist stores like hers have the market to themselves.
Why did she do it? “I love books, I love being in the kitchen, so here I am.” As for older folk who don’t cook, or buy cookbooks: “It’s never too late to learn, and you’ll be happy you did.”
• A GOOD ONE GONE: Many will mourn the passing of Michael Lambert, the everurbane former Hotel Vancouver general manager and VP who died in his sleep Wednesday.