Batch is packed. Vancouver’s waterfront needs more places like it

On Saturday, September 19, and Sunday, September 20, I saw the patio above Kitsilano Pool busy. Batch is a bar and kitchen in the pool's concession stand, with a deck of tables, live music and the North Shore mountains across the water. Those two visits tell me what this patio looked like on those evenings; they don't establish how busy every Batch site is.

From snack bar to $320,000 in eight weeks

The Park Board opened Batch as a summer pilot in June 2024, on what the City called an underused deck. In a September report, the Park Board said gross sales at the concession exceeded $320,000 from June 15 to August 11, while it operated Thursday to Sunday afternoons and evenings. For comparison, the concession recorded under $100,000 in gross sales over the 2023 summer season, when it was open seven days a week. These are sales figures, not the Park Board's net revenue.

In 2025 the patio added 60 seats and DL Chicken joined the menu. The Park Board counts Batch as part of its "Think Big" revenue strategy, a plan approved in July 2023 to raise more of its own money.

How much of that money goes back to parks and pools? The report doesn't say. I asked the Park Board on September 25 what it received from the Kitsilano concession in 2024 and 2025, and how it splits the money with Batch. It hadn't replied by publication.

It isn't just Kits

Batch started in 2022 as a shipping-container bar at the old Plaza of Nations on the False Creek seawall, a private site waiting to be redeveloped. Its owner, John Negrin, told the North Shore News that one took two years to get approved.

Last summer he tried a third spot, an eight-week pilot on the beach at Ambleside in West Vancouver. The local business association called it a huge success, and more than a thousand people signed a petition to keep it. This June it still hadn't reopened. Turning a pilot into something permanent meant proper sinks and washrooms, health permits and new agreements for the provincial foreshore it sits on.

This August the Park Board tried the idea again at Trout Lake, where Batch and DownLow Burgers ran the park concession through Labour Day.

Ambleside is a reminder of how long a temporary patio can take to become a regular summer fixture.

Why the seawall is so quiet

Uytae Lee made the case for this better than I can in his About Here video How Vancouver's Waterfront Became So Boring, and in a piece he wrote for Daily Hive in 2023. The seawall is one of the city's most celebrated places, but he points out that for most of its 28 kilometres it's a path past parks and condos, with a handful of restaurants and not much else. He holds up Halifax, where businesses, buskers, concerts and a two-storey beer garden sit right on the harbour boardwalk, which is still busy at 9:30 at night, when Vancouver's seawall is dark and nearly empty. A good walking path and busy businesses, he argues, are quite compatible.

He gives three reasons Vancouver ended up this way. Some neighbours have long wanted the waterfront quiet: when the Park Board set out to build a restaurant next to Kits Beach in 2002, the plan drew a petition and a lawsuit that went to the B.C. Supreme Court. Park planning inherited a 19th-century idea of the park as an escape from the city into nature. And as the industrial land along False Creek redeveloped, luxury townhouses facing the seawall paid developers better than shops.

He's careful not to say every stretch of shoreline should be busy. Some places still deserve to be a quiet refuge. His complaint is that the walking path by the sea has become a formula, used whether or not it fits. I think he's right, and Batch is a good test of it. It's one small patio on one deck, and it's full.

What I'd like to see

More of this, and not just at Kits. I don't mean a chain restaurant on every beach. I mean small, seasonal places where you can sit near the water: a patio at a pool or beach concession, food trucks at a beach parking lot, a café in a park fieldhouse. Some of it can be on Park Board land, paying rent that goes back into pools and rinks. Some can be on private waterfront land that's waiting to be redeveloped, the way Plaza of Nations was. And a pilot that works should have a clear path to staying, without starting over.

The worries are real. Noise carries over water, and people who live next to a beach have reason to care about late nights, garbage and parking. Hours, washrooms and good management can deal with most of that. An empty waterfront shouldn't be the default answer.

Why it matters on October 17

The same revenue strategy is behind paid parking. In October 2025 the Park Board approved pilots at the Hillcrest, Kerrisdale and Trout Lake community centres, with the first three hours free for people using the centre. ABC's 2026 platform promises to remove paid parking at Jericho Beach, Spanish Banks and community centres. If the board gives up that money, it will have to replace it somehow, and concessions like this one are one of the few ways it can earn its own.

If you're running for Park Board, here's the question: where should the next Batch go, and what would you change so a pilot that works doesn't have to fight to stay?

Sources and method

Sales figures are from the Park Board staff report "'Think Big' Revenue Strategy, Year 1 Update", September 9, 2024. Opening dates, hours and the 2025 expansion are from City announcements of June 14, 2024 and June 18, 2025. Parking pilots are from the City announcement of October 21, 2025. ABC's pledge is from its September 21 platform. Ambleside and Plaza of Nations details are from the North Shore News, June 20, 2026, The North Shore Local, October 6, 2025, and Daily Hive (August 30, 2022; August 28, 2026). Uytae Lee's argument is summarised from his video and his Daily Hive piece of February 14, 2023. Batch photos are mine, taken September 19 and 20.

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