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Besides music and pizza, the Mount Pleasant venue’s menu includes casual snacks, share plates, handhelds, craft beer and cocktails.
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Anthem Sound Lounge
When: Nov. 14 grand opening. Open Thursday and Friday from 3 p.m. to late; Saturday and Sunday brunch from 11 a.m. to late with daily Happy Hour features.
Info: anthempizza.ca
For some reason, oysters didn’t take with the Mount Pleasant crowd.
“It just didn’t resonate with the neighbourhood,” Matt Thompson said of Smitty’s Oyster House on Main Street, a restaurant he ran for over two years. “At 9:30 on a Friday night in the summer the patio would be empty.”
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Thompson has reopened the space into Anthem Sound Lounge. Rather than seafood and white walls, the new joint is pizza, wood accents and brick walls, with a DJ booth, new sound system, and the latest in hipster decor — cubby holes displaying iconic record sleeves.
Located next to Heritage Hall, Anthem occupies a space Thompson is loath to give up. Before he turned the restaurant into a Smitty’s — in collaboration with the original Smitty’s, in Gibsons — it was Five Point, a neighbourhood watering hole that, over 15 years, established a regular clientele
“I find that there are a lot of Five Points in the neighbourhood now,” he said. “Anthem is going to fit into a niche that’s open. I think we position ourselves in the middle, where we have a bit of an edge. We’re not the same as Good Co., we’re not the same as Browns.”
Besides music and Thompson’s Anthem pizza brand, which he started during COVID, the menu includes casual snacks, share plates, hand-helds, craft beer and cocktails.
A serial Vancouver restaurateur, Thompson opened his first bar, Elwood’s, in Kits in 1998, followed by Nevermind and Hell’s Kitchen. Since then he has built and/or opened Marquis Grill, Six Acres, Dunbar Public House, Park Drive, The Charlatan, Cannibal Café, Bingo Taco and Alphabet City. Prior to COVID he owned and was operating four businesses, but the pandemic pulled the proverbial rug out from under him.
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He held onto Park Drive and Five Point. But then he was diagnosed with Stage 4 liver disease and put on a waiting list for a transplant.
It was after the diagnosis that he decided to go in a different direction with the Five Point space.
“I’ve always thought it would be cool to do an oyster bar. And I was tired of Five Point, I didn’t like how it was going. And I was sick. So I was like, ‘OK, I’ll flip this great oyster bar, and then if I die, my wife can sell it. It’ll be worth more money on the market as an oyster bar.’ That was my train of thought.”
Fortunately — after a year’s wait — he received a new organ. He is still recovering.
And though Smitty’s opened strong, business dropped off.
“Two summers ago, we had a great summer. Then October came and sales dropped like a rock. We got through that, and then this summer was kind of flat. So I was like, OK, here we go, here comes our slow season again. And then this October was probably the worst October I’ve ever seen in my career. And I’ve heard that from everybody.”
Anthem Sound Lounge is Thompson’s attempt to turn the space into a neighbourhood hang again.
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“I want people to come a couple times a week,” he said. “I want it to be the go-to spot on Main Street, much like it was when it was the Five Point. It was real local gathering.”
At the time of our conversation Anthem had just opened its doors for three days “just to kind of get our feet wet. And yeah, they’re all coming out of the woodwork. It was fun to see some old faces.”
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