Two decades on Beatty Street.

Chambar opened in November 2004 in a then-quiet corner of downtown Vancouver, across from what would eventually become Rogers Arena. We were one of the first serious restaurants in the neighbourhood. We're still here.

The cooking is Belgian at heart — moules frites, carbonnade, frites with aioli — with the Moroccan accents Chef Nico Schuermans grew up with: preserved lemon, harissa, saffron, the slow alchemy of the tagine. It shouldn't work, and yet it does, and it has for twenty years.

The room is candlelit. The wine list is two hundred labels deep and half price on Mondays. The crowd is whoever's in town that week — a chef from Montréal, the board of a tech company, two people on a third date who don't want it to end.

Civilized debauchery, every night of the week.