James Iranzad wears collared shirts inside tailored suit jackets. His thick-rimmed glasses sit on a head that sports a trendy fade haircut and a full beard. In short, the 39-year-old is exactly the kind of person you wouldn’t expect to find in Kerrisdale.
The sleepy neighbourhood has long been known as a destination for older residents, young families and Asian migrants. But Iranzad and his business partner, Josh Pape, aimed to bring some youth back to the area when they started Bufala, a trendy pizzeria with a liquor license. The two had already established Wildebeest in Gastown, and when they looked for their next location, settled on the West Side.
“We like to think against the grain a little bit,” says Iranzad inside the brick encrusted walls that surround Wildebeest. “If everybody’s saying not to do something and everybody isn’t doing something, well that’s a good time to consider doing it.”
Many regarded Bufala as the exception, not the rule. But since the pizzeria’s inception nearly two years ago, a strange thing started happening: Kerrisdale has started getting trendy. There’s the new ramen place in the storefront that Thomas Hobbs Florist occupied for 23 years.
On the other side of the same street, a new pho restaurant has picked up where the Avenue Grill left off. Meanwhile, Minverva’s sprawled out into the vacated Art’s Place to establish a new wine bar, Barra 41. It all screams a new era for the tree-lined district.
When Sasha Teller-Sawyer and her boyfriend decided to move in together, they weighed their options. Teller-Sawyer, 27, a nursing student at BCIT, was moving from a house on Main Street that she occupied with a few friends. Her boyfriend works in Richmond. Kerrisdale seemed like a good compromise.
“It’s funny because initially all my girlfriends were like ‘Oh Kerrisdale? Why would you choose to live in Kerrisdale, there’s nothing going on there,’” she recalls. “But personally, I live right on East Boulevard, and I’m really into nature and trees and quiet. Like I would never live downtown, that’s not my thing. So to me, Kerrisdale has a little of that quiet, quaint feel to it.
She also appreciates the new businesses, though, in particular applauding Barra 41. “We’ve actually been there, we’ve tried it out a couple times and it’s chill,” she says. “It’s got sort of the old person and young person vibe to it, so it’s really great that way. And it’s sort of a minimalized menu, more burgers and stuff, and it’s cool, they have a young, hip staff and it’s updated. It’s not like Minerva’s where it’s like old-school Greek. Which is still great, I love Minerva’s.”
Boris Zugic and Vanessa Singleton had a similar decision to make. Wanting to leave their apartment in Railtown, the two found themselves considering Kerrisdale. Zugic, who’d grown up in the area was originally opposed.
Singleton, however, had gone to high school downtown, but grown up on Bowen Island. Kerrisdale reminded her of the island life. It’s a little bit like being on an island or in the country,” says Singleton, a UBC student. “All this green space, I really like it. And it’s really close to UBC, so much closer than where we were living before. There’s just so much space here.”
Even Zugic, 27, has come around. “They do have that hipster coffee joint there now, next to Subway. And right next to that is the designer mattress place,” he says. “Kerrisdale is definitely hipper.”
It was also a homecoming for Iranzad. He attended school at Kerrisdale elementary and Prince of Wales secondary. It was about going back and providing his old neighbourhood with some much-needed flavour: “But there’s always been very little there and it’s always been more lunch oriented. Like OK, you go grab a sandwich at [Caffe] Artigiano. You go to dim sum, or you grab some cheap sushi. There’s a million sushi places.”
He continues, his soft voice ebbing and flowing until he makes an emphatic point. “But there’s a lot of people that live there, you know. There are young families, there’s a ton of elementary schools that are full. Which means that it’s not just everyone’s idea of a retirement community. There’s tons of young people around Kerrisdale and it’s the quaint little village that it is and I like that about it.”
It may not be quaint for too much longer. With all the changes and the high rent prices everywhere else, there could be an influx of people into the West Side. There’s also the changing nature of the Arbutus Corridor, which the city announced it had purchased from CP Rail for $55 million. The corridor, which runs right through Kerrisdale, has been designated as a “public thoroughfare” for transportation and greenways for walking and cycling and perhaps light transit. But the lure of condos will be tempting. Only time will tell.
