The Donnelly-ization of Vancouver Bars
With the Donnelly Group leading the way, Vancouver’s pubs and clubs are taking Canadian bar culture into the future. But is it a future anyone wants?
The unluckiest day of Jeff Donnelly’s life began at about 4 a.m. on August 17, 2003. The phone rang as he sat browsing on his computer in his Helmcken Street condo. A friend was on the line from Loft Six, the Gastown nightclub in which Donnelly was a partner. “He said, ‘Jeff, they’re shooting guns in here,’” Donnelly recalls. “I was there before the SWAT team.” Donnelly ran up the stairs against the tide of fleeing customers, and was told by a police officer to run right back down again. “I remember two of my friends who’d both been shot in the leg coming out on stretchers. I remember talking to them.”
In the aftermath, J.J. Johnson, a former bouncer at Brandi’s strip club, was dead on the floor. Mahmoud Alkalil, whose brother had been shot to death in Surrey just two years earlier, fled the scene despite his gunshot wounds and died the next day in hospital. Bystander John Popovich, a popular DJ from Windsor, Ontario, was killed in the crossfire. Five others were injured, including an L.A. dance teacher who took a shot in the back and faced a future in a wheelchair. Police, who told the media that three gangs were present at the scene, described the incident as the worst nightclub violence in Vancouver history.
Donnelly, just 28 at the time and a partner in three Vancouver nightspots, had thought that he’d found his calling in bars and clubs. But after the shooting he wasn’t so sure. “I thought I’d never do another nightclub,” he recalls. “I thought, ‘I can’t stand this city.’ I couldn’t leave my house. People were assuming I was a gangster, or involved with the Hells Angels.” Two weeks later, he and his partners decided to close the club for good. “It wasn’t much of a decision.”
Donnelly is still rattled by the memories, but eight intervening years have changed his outlook. I meet him in Yaletown’s The New Oxford, where he’s having a gluten-free pastrami sandwich and a Phoenix lager with childhood friend and Donnelly Group director of operations Reid Ogdon. The New Oxford is the latest addition to the group’s dozen nightclubs, pubs and bars, including the Cinema lounge, Granville Room and the slick Republic nightclub on the Granville Street strip, as well as The Lamplighter, Post Modern and Metropole in Gastown. Scattered across the city are Bar None, The Academic, Library Square, Smiley’s and The Calling. In October, he plans to reopen the first of his Vancouver investments, the Kitsilano landmark Bimini’s, which was destroyed by fire four years ago. He expects to open three more new bars by the end of 2011.
Jeff Donnelly's beginnings in Vancouver pubs and clubs
Jeff Donnelly was the face of change in pubs and clubs in Vancouver during the first decade of the 21st century. In that time, he has learned a few things about fortune and timing, front ends and back ends, and the balance between security and risk that defines his line of work. Donnelly has learned that there are two kinds of luck. “In the bar business, you have to have a lot of good luck,” he says. “We’ve been lucky.”
Donnelly’s fine fortune began after Asian investors hired the wayward University of Victoria student to revamp the bar at Victoria’s Red Lion Inn. Circumstances forced them to buy out his contract before his work really started and, in 1999, with $150,000 of his own cash and some additional family money, he bought the Bimini’s Tap House business from its original owner, Peter Uram. Bimini’s began as one of B.C.’s first neighbourhood pubs, under provincial legislation passed by the NDP in 1972 that broke the stranglehold hotels had enjoyed on liquor service.
Donnelly began buying pubs and bars at a time when many owners feared the worst. They thought a new round of changes to provincial liquor regulations, which allowed restaurants to serve drinks without food to 10 per cent of their patrons, were going to be painful for them. And they thought municipal smoking bans were going to hurt even more. Many pubs were moribund as the lucrative private retail liquor outlets the owners had been allowed to open distracted them from their traditional business. Some were for sale on Craigslist.
There was opportunity, and Donnelly knew how to capitalize on it. He’d learned a lot from his father, Brian, an accountant and former B.C. Lions defensive back who bought, fixed and flipped struggling hotels and their bars. As a 12-year-old, Jeff had cleaned up puke at his dad’s Mr. Sport Hotel on Kingsway; in Victoria, he managed his dad’s bars at the Ingraham Hotel. “I learned all the back-end sensibilities from my dad,” he says. But he differed in one critical respect: “My dad hated the bar business. I just love the bar business.”
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