At Vancouver’s Elem, Chef Vish Mayekar Makes Elementally Inspired Global Cuisine
A vibrant new addition to Main Street's dining scene.
For millennia, humans have used the four classical elements—earth, water, air, and fire—to make sense of nature, life, death, and the otherwise inexplicable spiritual realm. In practice, all four elements are also necessary for any good restaurant to function. On farms, they provide the conditions for plants and animals to flourish and grow, and in the kitchen, they make those same plants and animals edible, and in the case of the most talented chefs, sublimely delicious. Vancouver’s Vish Mayekar is one of those chefs, and his new restaurant Elem pays homage to the elements that guide his cooking.
Alongside partners Winnie Sun (who also serves as beverage director) and Hassib Sarwari, Mayekar opened Elem to great fanfare in November 2024. In the heart of the city’s Mount Pleasant neighbourhood, the location, while distinctly metropolitan, is in touch with the natural forces that inspire it, offering sweeping views of the North Shore mountains and sitting a mere kilometre from the waterfront. Inside, the Marko Simcic-designed room employs natural materials to stunning effect, transporting guests through three unique spaces. The “wood room” at the restaurant’s fore invites diners in with its white-oak-clad walls, rich earth-toned upholstery, and warm lighting; the “concrete room” grounds diners with its hard edges and austere grey colour palette; and the “curtain room” whisks them away again in a breezy amalgam of inky-blue tones and moody, subdued lighting.
Mayekar, who was born and raised in Mumbai, has spent most of his career in Vancouver devoting himself to Italian cooking, exciting the city’s culinarians with his modern takes on regional dishes during his tenure at Commercial Drive’s Pepino’s Spaghetti House and Caffé La Tana—neighbouring restaurants that are both part of the Banda Volpi hospitality group. However, while he appreciates his status as a trendsetter for Italian food in Vancouver, he doesn’t let that dictate his appreciation of global cuisines or the direction of his cooking at Elem. “I didn’t pick Italian. Italian picked me,” he says. “What I’ve always dreamed of and wanted to do is never focus on one cuisine,” he continues, reminiscing about times when he wanted to add ingredients such as cilantro to traditional Italian dishes but felt restricted by culinary dogmatism.
But it was thanks to Italian food, in part at least, that Mayekar and Sun’s relationship blossomed. While still at Pepino’s and La Tana, Mayekar, a drinks aficionado who holds Wine and Spirit Education Trust (WSET) certification, would spend his downtime exploring Vancouver’s vibrant bar scene. Unsurprisingly, he began to frequent Zarak, the modern Afghan restaurant that Sun still operates alongside Sarwari and whose cocktail program she helped propel to the city’s upper echelons. Soon after meeting Mayekar, Sun returned the favour by visiting La Tana for dinner, where she was blown away by his contemporary Italian cooking. Almost immediately, the pair began planning to open a restaurant together.
Driven by their shared desire to “open the best restaurant in the country one day,” they wasted no time chasing their dream. Within just two weeks of meeting, they had shaken hands with the leasing agent for the space Elem now calls home. They began R&D immediately, and for Mayekar this meant travel. While still helming the two Banda Volpi restaurants during the week (and helping to open another), he spent his weekends on the road, tasting global cuisines at humble family diners, Michelin-starred restaurants, and everywhere in between. He visited North American foodie havens such as Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, and Chicago, as well as global fine-dining capitals such as Paris, in order to bring the best aspects of their cuisines back to Vancouver and develop a menu that melds them with local flavours for local palates.
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“That’s what Elem is, and that’s what it will be,” Mayekar says. “Constant revelation of different cuisines, bringing them back and giving them the local touch.”
However, while influences from around the world are present on Elem’s ever-evolving menu, it is those from his native India that Mayekar employs most ingeniously. The yellowfin tuna bhel—a tartare-like take on the spiced puffed-rice street food most popular on India’s many beaches—is a dish that, according to Mayekar, will “always be on the menu forever and ever.” The classic recipe calls for puffed rice, puri, onions, and coriander and is served with chutney, but Mayekar wanted to add a Vancouver touch, incorporating tuna to ground it in the chef’s adopted home. Regardless, this relocation is not enough to erase the dish’s heritage. “We make a thousand a week, and I taste it every single time to make sure it’s good,” he says. “And every single time I taste it, it takes me to Mumbai. Having it with my buddies after school, after playing cricket. Just eating that on the street. It’s very nostalgic to my childhood. Very close to my heart. And that’s not going anywhere.”
Because of the itinerant nature of Elem’s menu, Mayekar and Sun decided to make sustainability the north star that guides both the kitchen and cocktail programs. In honour of the four elemental pillars that make fine dining possible, they aim to eliminate food waste wherever possible. Nowhere is this mantra tested more impressively than in the exchange between kitchen and bar, with Sun using the food scraps from Mayekar’s recipes in her astonishingly unique and gastronomic cocktails. “It started with the duck,” he says. “When we opened, I had a duck fried rice. The fat that I was confiting the duck in went into the duck-fat-washed cocktail.” On the current menu, drinks like the Prawn Fried Rice (made with prawn shells and kimchi) and Beet Old Fashioned (pistachio, beet, and shiitake mushrooms) incorporate kitchen scraps to develop flavours otherwise unheard of in traditional cocktail programs, matching the definitively international nature of Mayekar’s cooking along the way.
In just a few short months, Elem has captured the hearts of diners thanks to its translation of international cuisines for the sushi- and dim sum-loving palates of Vancouverites. While he hates the word “fusion,” Mayekar, with his whirlwind weekend trips and deft incorporation of flavours from the world’s far-flung corners, is proving that adventurousness is back on the table in the world of fine dining. “There’s no boundaries, and I don’t want to say no to anything.”
