VANCOUVER—In the empty parking lot behind Kintaro Ramen, the city’s oldest ramen restaurant, owner Tak Kawashima admits what some are reluctant to say: Every shopkeeper in the Downtown West End is afraid of demolition.

The area’s rapid real-estate redevelopment could threaten his small eatery and the cluster of ramen shops that have opened along Denman and Robson streets to capitalize on the constant flow of customers slurping up bowls of steaming noodles. The streets have gained a reputation for being a haven for ramen lovers.

The possibility of being evicted was something Kawashima’s old boss, Daiji Matsubara, worried about as well, said Kawashima. He worked for Matsubara as a chef for nine years before buying the business in 2017.

Matsubara, now retired, was a pioneer of the ramen movement in Vancouver. He started selling the soupy “Japanese soul food” in 2000 before the craze caught on, sourcing noodles from California and serving them in large bowls with fatty pork slices soaking in bone broth.

“Every restaurant owner is afraid of that all the time. But I heard that the city decided that Denman is still for the commercial area, so in a couple of years, it’s OK. But I don’t know about the future,” said Kawashima.

Kintaro is a few doors down from Motomachi Shokudo, another ramen joint Matsubara opened in 2007. It’s known for serving a type of broth that blends dark miso and bamboo charcoal.

Both Kintaro and Motomachi Shokudo are adjacent to a parcel of land that used to be divided into six lowrise buildings. Each building was occupied by a small business that was evicted last year when the property was sold to Landa Global Properties.

Landa Global states on its website that the site is planned for a “luxury” 21-storey condominium with a mix of “social” and market housing. The company declined to be interviewed.

“Most tenants have a demolition clause in their contracts so that if the owner decides to sell, the tenants have to evict from their building,” Kawashima said.

Up the street on Robson, massive construction and demolition is underway in and around the former Empire Landmark Hotel, where the Cloud 9 revolving restaurant once operated on the top floor. The site is being cleared for a new commercial building and two 30-storey condo towers.

And it’s not just restaurants that have closed down due to redevelopment in the area. In February, Chocolate Mousse Kitchenware bid farewell to hundreds of customers after the land its store was on sold for almost $80 million to real-estate company Vivagrand Developments. The company plans to build a 28-storey mixed-use building on the site.

Michael Gayman is the owner of gastropub The Blind Sparrow, which moved down the street on Denman after being evicted in September from one of the lots sold to Landa Global. Gayman said small businesses in the West End that occupy “outdated” buildings are the most at risk.

Shortly after he took over the business in 2015, the restaurant took a financial hit when a zoning change was issued by the City of Vancouver. The new zoning allowed for more density, increasing the value of the property. That’s when the family that owned the building for 30 years sold it, Gayman said.

Gayman added that before he moved in, he was assured by the landlord that the demolition clause in their contract would not impact his business.

“You see a lot of development happening in the West End, so I definitely think it’s likely that a lot of these older, smaller buildings are going to go, and new buildings are going to be put up. I relate to the small-business owners and how hard it is to deal with that, to be evicted. The city creates a lot of difficulty as well, like how the tenants have to pay the property taxes,” Gayman said.

Not only was his business facing eviction at the time, he said he was obliged to pay an additional $1,000 per month through his triple-net lease because of the spike in land value that increased the property tax.

After 25 years of operating Italian restaurant Ciao Bella, Aftab Khan was evicted from the same lot as The Blind Sparrow in September. Khan is still recovering from a $150,000 loan he obtained to pay off his staff, restaurant bills and suppliers.

“You’d think if a business is there for 23 years, they should have at least some kind of compensation,” Khan said.

Although Kawashima hasn’t been served an eviction notice, the area he operates in is part of the West End Community Plan that the City of Vancouver adopted in 2013. The plan includes rezoning of the area to allow residential development that significantly increased building heights and density.

While demolition is a worry for some ramen shops, all of them are battling a more immediate threat: competition.

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

Sonny Ho can count three ramen shops that have cropped up in the last year near his stall, Hida Takayama, hidden inside a food market on Robson St.

Ho wants to relocate to a storefront outside of downtown, but not because of skyrocketing taxes or a looming eviction. He said Robson St. is too concentrated with ramen shops selling similar versions of tonkatsu, a popular milky pork-bone broth that the most successful restaurants are serving.

“In Japan, each region, even in the same town, you can have more than one style of ramen,” Ho said.

Hida Takayama’s specialty is a clear chicken dashi broth. Some of the negative reviews his restaurant has received come from serving a different style of ramen, he said.

“Here in Vancouver, if you’re not doing tonkatsu, then you are not doing ramen. So that is the one killing the ramen business.”

Jenny Peng is a Vancouver-based reporter covering business. Follow her on Twitter: @JennyPengNow

Read more about: