It's 1:30 on a rainy Tuesday afternoon and milling about the entry to Coast restaurant on Alberni Street is a knot of highly photogenic 30-somethings: a beefy doorman sporting a Bluetooth earpiece, a smiling hostess and a handful of sharply dressed women chatting, hair-flinging and glancing incessantly toward the entryway as they gather purses, coats and umbrellas.
Beyond the departing throng of lunching office workers, the visitor meets a wall of noise and light: conversation ricochets off the white tile floor, accompanied by the thumping beat of electronic dance music; at the centre is the restaurant’s defining feature, a tower of white light rising from a circular bar.
It is controlled chaos, and owner Emad Yacoub wouldn’t have it any other way.
The Alberni Street location is the sixth restaurant opened by Glowbal Restaurant Group Inc. in the past seven years. Each is profitable, and together they are expected to generate more than $32 million in revenue this fiscal year. Yacoub, president and CEO, attributes the company’s success to an in-your-face style that he brought to the staid Vancouver restaurant scene from his native Egypt when he opened his first restaurant here in 2002.
“Restaurants in Vancouver were very . . . I don’t want to call it backward because there were lots of great restaurant owners in Vancouver, but nobody wanted to push the edge. Nobody wanted to raise the music. There was no shouting.” Yacoub explains how he wanted to shake up the image of high-end dining in Vancouver, which at the time was characterized by soft classical music and servers who stood a respectful two feet from the table. “I’m not going to be two feet away from you; I’m going to be sitting in your lap!” he exclaims.
The 44-year-old Yacoub attributes his gregarious outlook to his upbringing in Cairo. As he describes it, his mother and aunt lived in apartments facing each other across the second-floor hallway of a seven-storey apartment building. The doors were always open, and as there was no elevator in the building, the neighbours were constantly stopping by for tea.
A similar approach is at the core of Yacoub’s business philosophy: “Every single person walking through this restaurant is a guest in my house. It’s as simple as that.”
Yacoub was studying to be an accountant at the University of Cairo when he first came to Canada to take a summer job as a kitchen helper in Toronto. He soon ditched his plans to return to Cairo and instead threw himself into a fast-track career in restaurants, rising to chef de cuisine at Toronto’s King Edward Hotel by age 24, and executive chef at Acqua restaurant three years later.
He moved to Vancouver in 1997 to be executive chef at Joe Fortes Seafood and Chop House, and after a brief return to Toronto opened his flagship Glowbal Grill and Satay Bar in 2002.
He opened a second restaurant in 2004, and the growth has continued unabated. In addition to two lounges and a catering business, the Glowbal group today comprises six restaurants: the original Glowbal in Yaletown, Society, Coast, Italian Kitchen, Sanafir and Trattoria.
Each new opening is testament to Yacoub’s fertile imagination; every menu is unique, with themes ranging from Lebanese to Italian to West Coast seafood. While Yacoub admits there’s a limit to the number of possibilities, the well has yet to run dry. He rattles off three more concepts for envisioned openings: Asian, Japanese and Mexican.
As long as the ideas keep coming, Yacoub believes his restaurants will be the place to see and be seen in Vancouver. “We don’t want to be the dinosaur,” he says. “We don’t want people to say, ‘These guys used to have great restaurants in the old days.’