The Next Course: Reinventing the Modern Urban Restaurant

Since its inception in Paris over 250 years ago, the restaurant has been a welcome, essential element of city life. With urban regions rapidly growing around the globe, today’s restaurants will play an increasingly vital role in sustaining communities. As with other modern necessities, the restaurant’s standard model would benefit from some timely innovation. The best and simplest way to kick-start that innovation is to ask a few good questions.
For The Next Course, sustainable foodservice consultant André LaRivière challenged notable chefs and restaurateurs, suppliers and city planners, with “what if?” questions. For example, what if restaurants were to localize product sourcing as much as possible? What if restaurants were to convert to renewable energy and use less of it? Their answers—and the dialogue they inspire—have the potential to future-proof urban dining. Not everyone agrees on the ideal way forward but, given what’s at stake, they all want to be ready for the next course.

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During his first career at CBC Radio, André LaRivière created, produced and engineered dozens of projects, from experimental late-night series to Juno Award–winning albums to weekly digests of mainstream popular culture. He also accumulated extensive management experience as an executive producer in Montreal and in his hometown of Winnipeg (St-Boniface), and as a strategic planning specialist at the Corporation’s headquarters in Ottawa.

For a second career, André became a professional chef, with training at New York City’s French Culinary Institute and a year’s internship at a Michelin-starred restaurant on the French Riviera. After cooking in New York and Toronto restaurants, he combined his kitchen and media experience as a Toronto-based writer and editor, covering all aspects of the Canadian food and restaurant industries for a variety of trade and consumer magazines.

André relocated to Vancouver in 2000. He has since been a restaurant critic, board member of Vancouver Farmers Markets and founding member of the Vancouver Food Policy Council. In 2007, André founded the Green Table Network, a mission-driven enterprise fostering sustainability in the foodservice industry, with more than 150 operator and supply-side members in British Columbia and beyond.

In 2011, he was instrumental to the success of a “restaurant of the future” project—the transformation of O’Doul’s on Robson Street to Forage, an energy-efficient operation featuring sustainable menus and low-impact design. It was this initiative that compelled him to gain an even better understanding of how the restaurant model needs to adapt to current and future needs.

He is now a principal of fish+river, a progressive foodservice consultancy.