Having opened to the public on Monday the 5th, the long-awaited beer-oriented addition to Sean Heather's Gastown hospitality empire completes a project that began with the Shebeen whisky tasting room hidden behind the original Irish Heather. Bitter, at 18 West Hastings Street, is to beer as Salt is to wine and the Shebeen is to whisky. Like its siblings, it puts the booze first, offering a broad but well curated selection of bottles, and eight taps pouring what I was told would be a rapidly rotating cast of draughts. The food complements the drinks, not the other way around. But before I get into describing this new haven for hop-heads, I'd like to first dispense with two disclosures.

The first is that I'm a gentrifier. I live and eat in the Downtown Eastside, spending much more on both than most of my neighbours can afford. I've also worked in the neighbourhood, making more than the $610 that most Downtown Eastsiders subsist on. Most recently I worked for the Portland Hotel Society, a health and housing non-profit that, among its many missions, works to create safe, stable, long-term homes for low-income people in the DTES and ensure that they are not displaced from their community by gentrification. The PHS headquarters is next door to Bitter in the Portland Hotel, a building that houses some of the most vulnerable people in the neighbourhood.

My second disclosure is that I'm a fan, and not much of a restaurant critic. So while I can offer what I think is a fair and nuanced assessment of the social and cultural implications of this newest addition to the block that currently marks the border between what realtors are now calling the "Woodward's District" and the DTES, I won't pretend to offer a fair review. As a beer-lover and a faithful patron of Sean Heather's other restaurants, I've been waiting a long time for Bitter—almost a year, in fact. I knocked on the glass early last week, noticing that the crew inside seemed to be putting on the finishing touches, and learned to my great excitement that Monday was the day. I even emailed general manager Mike Mitchell to see if I could get on the friends-and-family list for Friday's "soft open," but no luck.

All of the action at Bitter centres around the bar.

It was worth the wait. Ceremonially, I decided to start with a  bitter. On Mike's advice, I went for the St. Peter's Organic, which is subtler and sweeter than I was expecting and a nice way to ease my palate into the bolder beers on the list. This I paired with the duck rillette ($7), which is topped with a thin layer of duck fat and salt and served with baguette. This dish is described as traditional French bar food—and the French are certainly on to something—but like a bowl of American bar nuts (also on the menu), you finish it wanting, above all,  more beer.

To satisfy my craving, I turned to the draft list. This is where the locals live. Simon, an impeccably knowledgeable bartender who told me he was putting off his dream of opening a brewery to work at Bitter, explained that the Crannog Back Hand of God stout was the only one guaranteed a consistent spot on the row of modest, industrial-looking stainless taps. The farm brewery, "run by a bunch of hippies" in the Interior, he says, is the closest to a closed system beer-making can get, with the pigs on the property eating spent grains from the brewing process and producing fertilizer that feeds the hops. I opted for the Dr. Funk from Victoria's Phillips, a smooth Dunkel lager with the complex malty chocolate flavours of a porter. I'm an IPA drinker, so I was tempted by Driftwood's Fat Tug (a staple in Vancouver), but the funkel is a rarer find.

Returning to the food, the bar snacks section of the menu is likely to be the most popular. Consider, for instance, that the least expensive thing on the menu, the $3 sausage roll had sold out by 9:45pm on the night of my visit. And the proprietors should be quite comfortable with these low-cost bites constituting a significant portion of the food orders. It's the oldest beer marketing trick in the book, after all: 'here, have something cheap and salty!' But in Bitter's case, it also reflects the weaker value proposition at the pricier end of the menu.

Like Salt and Judas Goat, it lacks a full commercial kitchen, which means savings for Sean Heather, but also that there's no real cooking going on at Bitter. Dishes like the cassoulet ($18) are mostly prepared off-site. And as impressive as it is that they can produce all the menu's delights without much more than a high-end toaster oven and a few hot plates, I can't see myself ordering the $17 ling cod. Nor can I imagine many of Bitter's neighbours ordering it.

Looking out toward Hastings from the bar, my neighbourhood is like I've never seen it. First, the foreground is dominated by the bar itself, an arcing masterpiece crafted of wood reclaimed from the building itself, and the elegant original tile floor, which dates to 1905. In the window the city looks new. Because it is new; the glass is covered in a semi-transparent archive image of Vancouver before black tar heroin and Hep C.

Diners don't see Hastings Street from inside the restaurant, but from the outside, Downtown Eastsiders see Bitter. And the juxtaposition is stark. Next to the entrance to the Portland Hotel, the window glows like Russell Blood Alley Bitter in front of a flashlight. Incidentally, that's one of my local favourites not on the list at Bitter. But as Mike reminds me, I can have it just around the corner at another Heather restaurant on the iconic lane that gave the beer its namesake.

Salt had a similar effect on Blood Alley when it opened in the summer of 2006—albeit with a subtler image, announcing its presence only with its small black and white salt shaker flag. The alley has changed a great deal since then, thanks in part to the addition of a second Sean Heather Blood Alley small plate restaurant in March 2010, Judas Goat. It's now possible to go from Salt to Judas Goat, to the Irish Heather, to The Shebeen, to Bitter while holding your breath between stops. (Ok, maybe the last trip is a stretch, but you get the point.) And ou'll be able to experience an extraordinary range of quality tipples by doing so. This feat would be harder if you were stopped and asked to spare some change, but that now feels less likely than it has been in recent memory.


View Sean Heather Restaurants in a larger map

It's not that low-income people no longer live in the Portland or hang out in Pigeon Park; it's that the corner is now dominated by the amber glare of a restaurant that serves (very good) $19 Oregonian ales. The Stanley Hotel is on Blood Alley, opposite Salt and Judas Goat, and its residents smoke on the stairs watching the diners come and go, but its not their alley anymore. Sean Heather's group of restaurants have helped push the perceived boundary between Gastown and the Downtown Eastside, the entertainment zone and the poverty zone, one block east. And maybe more than any other business.

In March of 2006 18 SRO residents of the Burns Block, where Bitter is located, were evicted with just an hour's notice. Sean Heather didn't evict those people; the fire department did. And there's a convincing case to be made that developers like Reliance Properties, which bought the Burns Block and built "micro lofts," are the real force behind gentrification. But gentrification isn't just an economic process; it's a cultural process. And in this city restaurants are a big part of the street level of our culture.

Sean Heather's business has contributed significantly to a shift in the cultural landscape of the neighbourhood. As a beer lover, I'll keep going back to Bitter. But not without some regret for my part in displacing the low-income people who feel that this block of Hastings becomes less welcoming to them every time I do.