Chef Morris Fenton is learning it’s hard to be different.
Fenton opened Vesta Restaurant and Wine Bar in East Vancouver in March. The constantly changing menu is sophisticated and worldly – delivering flavors not often found in Clark County.
Last week, monkfish, buffalo, foie gras and Kumomoto oysters shared space on the menu, mixed in with plenty of seasonal flavors from across Oregon and Washington.
In crafting Vesta’s menu, Fenton and his Chef de Cuisine Gywn Manney set out to provide an experience.
Diners are treated to an amuse bouche before ordering, palette cleansers between courses and a petitfore after the meal. Cheeses from around the globe are waiting to be sampled, hand-selected by in-house Maitre Fromager Nathan Poppelreiter.
The experience comes at a price, and it’s not necessarily for everyone.
Business has been OK. The summer was hard, Fenton said. He’s not making money, but expects the next two months to make up for the last three or four.
The one constant has been Vancouver businesses.
Big name businesses, which may have previously wined and dined clients or investors in Portland – such as Hewlett-Packard, Ameriprise, Byrd Financial Group, Sharp Labs and The Vancouver Clinic, to name a few – have become big business for Vesta.
A 10-person dinner event can mean $1,500 for the restaurant, and by and large, they’re return customers.
“We wouldn’t be here if not for people like that,” Fenton said. “It takes time for the word to get out.”
Fenton took the long road to the culinary arts.
He started as an accountant in the United Kingdom, (quitting on his second day because he loathed it), founded a computer company in 1981, which he sold and went to work as an administrator of a “billion-dollar group of hospitals” in London.
His wife Diana was born in Vancouver, and together they moved to Vancouver 10 years ago.
Food is his passion, and it was five years ago he decided to take the plunge.
“I wanted to see if I could or wanted to do this,” Fenton said, sitting in his calm, contemporary wine bar.
He took the “dirtiest job he could find” in the kitchen for the Hilton Restaurant Group. There, he met 26-year-old Manney, and more than a year and a half ago, the two began crafting the menu for what would become Vesta.
When Fenton was in the development stages of the restaurant, a number of people – colleagues and friends – told him he was crazy to try something like Vesta in Vancouver.
But Fenton, an enthusiastic Scotsman who truly, truly loves good food, had a feeling Vesta is just what Vancouver needed.
“I knew people don’t want to have to go to Portland,” he said.
Fenton foresees an explosion of activity in Vancouver as the city continues to grow.
But he has been overwhelmed by what a small town it still is.
“One of the most surprising things is (that there is) an understanding of how difficult it is what we’re trying to do in Vancouver, and that they can help,” Fenton said.
There are regular customers who have vowed to come in once a month for dinner, email all of their acquaintances and regularly bring their friends – and most surprisingly, they’ve actually done it, he said.
The restaurant keeps detailed notes on regular customers – what they eat, what they drink, what they like, what they want to see on the menu.
“The comment I hear constantly is that Vancouver needs what we’re doing,” Fenton said. “I have been so humbled. They say things like we’ll come back because we want you to be here when we need you. I did not expect people to be like that.”
Fenton estimates 15 percent to 20 percent of his customers are from Portland. Since opening, Fenton said he’s had to “dumb down” the menu a bit and steer clear of more complicated dishes.
“There’s a learning curve of what people want,” he said. “We have to find a balance of what we’d really like to do and what will keep people coming through the door.”
And while the restaurant has started to develop a following of regulars, the extremes in unpredictability have been surprising.
Some weeks the $24, three-course menu is incredibly popular, and the next, nobody wants it.
Some nights, a handful of reservations are the only customers who come through the door. Others, all of the tables will be full.
“Just when I think there’s a trend, it reverses,” Fenton said.
Vesta’s competitors are the very restaurants Fenton credits for raising the bar for dining experiences in Clark County. Offering a similar aesthetic on the east side is Roots Restaurant and Bar, and on the west side is Gray’s at the Park and, to an extent, the Restaurant at the Historic Reserve.
But Fenton said his base of return customers is growing, and when they arrive and instruct him just to fix them something, that’s a chef’s playtime. He also takes great pride in the educational aspect of introducing diners to foods they may never have experienced.
It’s not often people get to see or taste a wild plum or wild asparagus, and this summer, a supplier was able to deliver rare salad greens hand-picked by American Indians.
“I’d never heard of the stuff, but I made sure every person through that door got to try it,” Fenton said. “It didn’t cost us anything extra, it didn’t cost them anything extra. It was just to experience something new and say isn’t this stuff fabulous?
“How much fun is that?”
