When Justin Taylor, founding bar manager at Boulevard Kitchen & Oyster Bar, resigned from his post in April of this year, his loyal clientele was perhaps less surprised about his departure than about his destination: the Cascade Room. Combined with his previous, seven-year tenure at the Four Seasons’ Yew, he was approaching veteran status as a fixture at fine-dining rooms ensconced within five-star hotels. For whatever reason, he decided to exchange the city centre, seafood towers and celebrity VIPs for Main Street, cheeseburgers and the young aspiring middle class.
Taylor’s shoes would not be easily filled: His tireless sociability and mad skills behind the wood (the Gerard, a cocktail he invented for Boulevard prior to its opening in Summer 2014, was named one of the best in the world by renowned spirits authority Gary “Gaz” Regan) had made him, for many, as much a reason to drop in to Boulevard as the food and hyper-glamorous dining room.
JS (Jean-Sebastien) Dupuis, who succeeded Taylor barely six months ago, clearly was a shrewd choice. Westender readers have voted him Vancouver’s best bartender.
Tall and broad-shouldered but soft-spoken and unfailingly polite, the Quebec-born Dupuis arrived at Boulevard in a trajectory somewhat opposite to Taylor’s. After more than a decade in upscale rooms including Bearfoot Bistro and Tableau Bar Bistro, he stepped away from restaurant roles in 2014 to work in sales and promotion for a wine-and-spirits distributor.
“It was good,” he says, “but not as great as bartending. I heard the call to come back. I wanted to.”
For a less experienced bartender, the demanding responsibilities and luxe environment of Boulevard – which, in addition to being huge (its capacity is almost 250), is open 20 hours per day – would be daunting. For Dupuis, it was like coming home. “I came from fine dining,” he explains. “It’s the style of bartending and service I love most. It’s not for everybody, but I’m very demanding.”
Initially, he continues, his goal after leaving sales was “just to be a bartender: punch in, punch out, go home.” But the opportunities and freedoms Boulevard offered him under the official title of Beverage Director were too good to pass up. “I’m a big spirits nerd, cocktail nerd, beer nerd,” he says, disclosing at another point in the conversation that he has a fridge at home exclusively for his vermouth and amaro collections. “I couldn’t say no to taking over such a beautiful program. It’s the attention to detail, the quality of products we get to work with, the selection I get to use at the bar. I can order more or less whatever I want – if I think an ingredient is cool, I get to use it.”
That said, he arrived at Boulevard with caution and humility, knowing he needed to respect the achievements of his predecessor and what the restaurant’s customers still love about them. “I didn’t want to be the guy who comes in and says ‘This is my program now!’ and scraps everything. It was already a great cocktail program.
“Of course, I want to be able to offer my signature cocktails,” he continues, “but I want to please the clientele as well. I know that if I made a menu only with the drinks I personally enjoy, most of them wouldn’t be popular – and a lot of people would get drunk really, really fast.” (Always in favour of simplicity and letting spirits play the leading role, his go-to drink is “an Old Fashioned, but without the sugar, the bitters and the ice.”)
He acknowledges that the Best Bartender accolade validates his instincts. But, being a gentleman in a gentleman’s profession, he insists upon sharing the glory. “The award can’t just go to me,” he states emphatically. “It has to go to the whole team. I’ve only been here for half the year. A lot of great work was done in the six months prior.”
