O PE N TH AT B OT TLE
...with
Vince Parent BY LINDA GARSON
V
ince Parent has fond memories of growing up in Estevan, Saskatchewan; his hardworking parents both ran small businesses, and were always looking to make the little town a better place to live. He studied Political Science at the University of Regina, and finished his degree in Toronto, working as a waiter and bartender too. “I was a really, exceptionally bad waiter, and a pretty good bartender, and that was the start of it,” he laughs. After a few years, Parent and his wife-to-be, Janice, moved west to Calgary where he began a career in sales, marketing, and business development, with Rogers and then with Panasonic for Western Canada. A stint with a small environmental company had meant several trips to Calabria in Italy, “where I fell in love with food and wine, and the Italian people, I'm an Italian wannabe,” he says. Their consensus-building way of doing business left a lasting impression, and Parent hopes he carried that over in his management style. “If you can engage (the staff) as more than just an employer - and they're bringing stuff to the table, it makes for a really positive environment,” he explains. Working then in investor relations, the company he was working for bought Symons Valley Ranch, in Calgary. “But just before we closed on the project, the market burnt down, so we closed on it anyway, and I ended up working as a general manager there for a couple years in the old farmhouse with the vendors who got burnt out - it was actually the genesis of the Mercantile Store,” says Parent. They recreated the store, which Janice 42 Culinaire | September 2023
manages, in Avenida Food Hall when it opened five years ago, and then came up with the idea of a wine bar in the food hall, managed to get a license, and created SIPS, followed a couple of years later with a second location at Calgary Farmers' Market. But then COVID hit: “That one really hurt us because going to 25 percent of the seating was really difficult,” he admits. “They close at 5:00 pm, then I was working Avenida at night. It was a tough time for everyone and a tough time for us. We ended up selling everything that wasn't bolted down.” Being at the south market, Parent knew he would get first dibs at the new Calgary Farmers’ Market West. “I'm position ‘A’ there and I'm the only one with a license to sell for consumption. I've got 400 seats I can sell to, and it's been going well. It's stabilized the household in terms of income - all three bars are now almost all in the black,” he says. “I'm not that smart but I'm good at seeing talent, and I've got a lady that works for me at the south market and a lady that now handles Avenida, and they’re amazing. They're invested in the business, always looking at improvements, and the quality control
is impeccable. I've given them the reins; I said, ‘it's your show, you tell me what you need from me and if I can facilitate it, I will.’ They're bringing their ideas and their energy, I'm very fortunate right now to have those folks.” So what bottle is Parent saving for a special occasion? “We used to frequent Caesar's Steakhouse quite a bit before we decided to be entrepreneurs, and we always enjoyed it there. We'd often go there with our two boys, one of their girlfriends, and the mother-in-law, but we've done very little of that for the last five years,” he explains. Parent had planned a dinner for everyone as soon as the store and the bars were back up to speed again, and wanted a champagne to start the evening, so he’d bought a bottle of Gaston Chiquet, the first champagne grower to produce wine instead of just selling grapes. “We did our year end a quarter ago and I was going to wait till the next year end, but we're not going to do that. We're going to do a quarter end, and sometime in the fall we're going to pop that bottle and go to Caesar's. It'll be the whole family again.”
