Vish Mayekar (Elem, Vancouver): Refusing to Pick a Lane
Vish Mayekar spent the better part of a decade convincing Vancouver he was an Italian chef. At Pepino's Spaghetti House and Caffé La Tana on Commercial Drive, both part of the Banda Volpi hospitality group, he earned Michelin Recommended status and a reputation for modern regional Italian cooking that made diners in one of Canada's most competitive food cities pay attention. Then he walked away from all of it to open a restaurant where the entire concept is refusing to cook any one cuisine.
Elem opened in November 2024 on Main Street in Mount Pleasant. Within 10 months it had a Michelin Recommended designation and a spot on Canada's 100 Best, climbing from #99 in 2025 to #80 in 2026. Vancouver Magazine named it Best New Restaurant. For a 76-seat room from a chef whose previous job was making pasta on Commercial Drive, the trajectory has been steep.
The Italian detour
Mayekar grew up in Mumbai. He moved to Vancouver and landed in Italian kitchens, not by design but by circumstance. As he told NUVO Magazine: he didn't pick Italian; Italian picked him.
The fit was productive. He ran Pepino's and La Tana simultaneously, competed on Top Chef Canada Season 10 in 2022, and holds WSET certification in wine and spirits. He also serves as Executive Chef and Culinary Program Director at The American Pavilion during the Cannes Film Festival. But the whole time, he felt constrained. He wanted to add cilantro to Italian dishes and couldn't. He wanted to cook from his childhood, from his travels, from everywhere at once.
Most immigrant chefs face a particular pressure: cook your heritage cuisine. Indian-born chef? Open an Indian restaurant. Mayekar did the opposite. He built credibility in someone else's tradition, then opened a restaurant defined by the refusal to repeat any single one. That's not rejecting where he comes from. It's refusing to let it become the boundary.
Better guest experience. Bigger nights. $299. Once.
Two weeks from handshake to lease
The partnership that became Elem started at a bar. While still running Pepino's and La Tana, Mayekar spent his evenings exploring Vancouver's cocktail scene. He became a regular at Zarak, the modern Afghan restaurant where Winnie Sun had built one of the city's strongest cocktail programs alongside co-owner Hassib Sarwari. Sun visited La Tana for dinner, was floored by the cooking, and almost immediately the three of them began planning.
Within two weeks of meeting, they had shaken hands with a leasing agent for the space Elem now occupies. Sarwari brought operational experience, Sun brought the beverage vision, and Mayekar brought a decade of fine dining credibility and a very specific ambition: open the best restaurant in the country.
What followed was a period of relentless research. While still helming two Banda Volpi restaurants during the week (and helping open a third), Mayekar spent weekends on the road. Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, Chicago, Paris. Humble family diners and Michelin-starred rooms. He was building a reference library, tasting globally so he could cook locally.
Ninety dishes in eight months
Elem's menu changes every couple of weeks, following the seasons and the farms. In its first eight months, the kitchen produced over 90 unique dishes. The room, designed by Simicic Architecture Studio, is split into three spaces: a warm white-oak "wood room," an austere grey "concrete room," and a moody blue "curtain room." Each sets a different tone for the same meal.
The signature dish that anchors the whole philosophy is the yellowfin tuna bhel. Bhel is Mumbai street food: puffed rice, puri, onions, coriander, served with chutney on the beach. Mayekar's version adds local yellowfin tuna, grounding a deeply personal childhood memory in his adopted city. He makes a thousand a week and tastes every batch.
The rest of the menu pulls from everywhere. A whole grilled fish inspired by a trip to Mexico. Honey mussels with tamarind rassam and sushi rice balls. Fraser Valley Loong Kong chicken with maple-espresso glaze. Cone cabbage with taleggio fondue, beef nduja, and meyer lemon crumb. The references span Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Europe, and points between, but the ingredients come from within a few hours of the restaurant. BC farms like Glorious Organics and Stoney Paradise supply the raw material. Vancouver's latitude and Mayekar's passport do the rest.
The zero-waste bar
The kitchen-to-bar exchange at Elem is where the sustainability talk stops being talk. When Mayekar confits duck, the rendered fat goes to Sun for a duck-fat-washed cocktail. Prawn shells become the base for the Prawn Fried Rice cocktail. Beet trimmings end up in the Beet Old Fashioned alongside pistachio and shiitake mushroom. Tomato stems get turned into vinegar for dressings and cocktail adjustments. Skins of sun gold tomatoes become powder for garnish.
Sun's cocktail program isn't a sideshow. It's the other half of the restaurant's identity, and the zero-waste loop between kitchen and bar gives both teams a creative constraint that produces drinks nobody else in Vancouver is making. The Chef's Negroni, made with dark chocolate gin, spent mulberry Campari, and Stoney Paradise tomato vine vermouth, has become as much of a draw as anything on the food menu.
What the refusal to choose actually looks like
Mayekar hates the word "fusion." Fair enough. What Elem does is more specific than that. Every dish has a clear reference point, a place and a memory, but the kitchen applies Vancouver's local farms and BC's seasons as the filter. The result isn't a blurred mashup. It's a rotating series of very precise dishes that happen to come from different culinary traditions.
The first eight months suggest the model works. Michelin and Canada's 100 Best don't typically notice restaurants this young. The progression from #99 to #80 in a single year points to consistency, not just novelty.
For independent operators, the pattern is worth studying. Mayekar didn't open Elem on reputation alone. He spent years building credibility in a different tradition, assembled a partnership that covers kitchen, bar, and operations, and committed to a concept that demands constant creativity rather than a fixed playbook. The refusal to pick a lane looks like a risk. The first year of results says it's working.
Sources: NUVO Magazine, Canada's 100 Best, Vancouver Magazine, Destination Vancouver, Eat North.
