Have you been to the Opus Hotel lately? The restaurant - formerly Elixir Bistro, now One Hundred Days - looks like it's been attacked by vandals.
The old wood panelling and beautiful marble fixtures are covered in neon graffiti. The stained glass, velvet curtains and plush banquettes have been ripped out, replaced by paint-splattered picnic tables and plastic fold-up chairs. The floors and ceilings are black.
Wait. Someone stop Stephen Quinn before he races over to Yaletown with a padlock. (One must be cautious when sharing the page with a vigilante columnist - remember his confession about tackling taggers in last week's paper).
This pseudo-underground eyesore is actually a carefully conceived business strategy. It's a time-limited, pop up restaurant that expires after - you guessed it - 100 days (allegedly Dec. 31).
Inspired by similar short-lived venues in London, New York and Los Angeles, owner John deC. Evans decided to do something radical with his hotel's mild-mannered Elixir Bistro before turning it into a new, permanent restaurant next year.
"Some people are disgusted when they see what we've done," says restaurant partner and general manager Peter Girges, who was obviously reading my mind.
Mr. Girges isn't worried about the naysayers who don't get it. The place is packed every night. Sales for September were up a staggering 197 per cent over last year.
"Because it's only temporary, everyone wants to check it out," he says.
Now that Gordon Ramsay is serving pop-up meals on the London Eye ferris wheel and a pop-up production company called The Feast has become the toast of New York, we'll likely see more - or at least catch brief glimpses - of this ephemeral phenomenon. Vancouver, however, was already way ahead of this curve.
Due to their fleeting nature, pop-up restaurants are difficult to encapsulate. They are usually short-lived, as we in Vancouver saw during the Olympics when Jet Set Sports dressed up the Sheraton Vancouver hotel's Indigo Bistro and invited a dream team of European and Japanese chefs to cook for international visitors.
Pop-ups often roam. Think Outstanding in the Field, which has several times set up its cook pots and long communal table at UBC Farm. Or the floating restaurant operated by the School of Fish Foundation that was moored to the docks in front of C Restaurant for the month of August and may soon be sailing to New Zealand.
Pop-ups can sometimes be an established restaurant that is briefly borrowed. Such was the case at Delilah's last summer, when Toronto chef Marc Thuet moved in and renamed it Conviction Kitchen while filming a reality-television series.
But they differ from underground restaurants, at least in Vancouver, in that they have health permits and are completely above-board. Food trucks don't count, because pop-ups have seats - even if they're just fold-up plastic chairs.
So why are these dining experiences popping up all over Vancouver, but not in Montreal or Toronto (at least not yet)?
"We're more adventuresome," says Eric Pateman, a food and beverage consultant and president of Edible BC, which, for the past three years, has hosted a dinner series that pops up in the Granville Island Market in its retail store after hours.
Part of the draw, says Mr. Pateman, is that pop-ups are often intimate and informal, offering guests a unique opportunity to interact with well-known chefs. "Whenever we announce a night with Vikram Vij, we usually have about 400 people - once it was 800 - vying for 10 sets of two tickets." (Tickets are sold by lottery and typically sell out six months in advance.)
Chefs like it too. "We did it for selfish reasons, says Taryn Wa, chef and founder of Savoury Chef Foods, a catering company that recently held four dinners with local food and beverage producers in the 560 art gallery lounge.
"We cater for, and to, clients all year. We thought it would be fun to play around and let our cooks be creative," Ms. Wa explained, as I popped another delectable bacon-chocolate truffle into my mouth at the dinner celebrating pork from Sloping Hill Farm and Granville Island Brewing special releases.
Brandon Thoradarson, the new chef at One Hundred Days, is creating some very good novelty bar food that includes duck confit pot pie and a crispy boar bacon grilled cheese sandwich.
But the space is more of a nightclub than a restaurant. And it's a contrived dive, at best. Can a restaurant really be considered edgy when the customers on a recent Thursday night included a group of pin-stripe-clad accountants slouched over a picnic table, working on their second $400 bottle of Patron tequila?
I guess you don't need street cred when you're this successful. And One Hundred Days has been so successful, it's about to pop its weasel.
"It was supposed to end on New Year's Eve," says Mr. Girges. "But now we're thinking of extending it to 145 or 160 days."
Special to The Globe and Mail
Correction: Peter Girges is a partner of One Hundred Days as well as general manager. An earlier version of this story was incorrect.