Au Comptoir: a Parisian bistro in Kitsilano

At Au Comptoir, orders still travel by voice. Servers call them out to the bartender in French, the old café practice known as à l’annonce, which has become rare even in Paris. Guests are welcomed with a bonjour and sent off with an au revoir, and the whole team is French. On West 4th Avenue in Kitsilano in, the bistro keeps the rhythm of a Parisian corner café: coffee and croissants from 8 a.m., lunch for the neighbourhood, brunch on weekends and a full dinner service at night.

Two friends and a shipping container

Behind the room are Maxime Bettili and Julien Aubin, friends since hospitality school in Poitiers. Both spent years working in Paris, then landed in Vancouver for the 2010 Winter Olympics. They worked the floor in the same restaurants for five years, Les Faux Bourgeois among them. When the time came to open their own place, the two friends chose to do Au Comptoir together, with the corner bistros of Paris as their model and Kitsilano as their neighbourhood.

They built it almost entirely by hand. “We had a small budget and we wanted to make a beautiful restaurant,” says the co-owner who designed the room. He drew the plans and filled a shipping container in France with tables, chairs and the centrepiece: a tin bar from Ateliers Nectoux, the French workshop known for its café counters. Skylights brighten the space, the front windows fold open to the street in good weather, and the staff wear the traditional Parisian waiter’s outfit, redone in more modern colours.

Côté cuisine, côté cellar

The goal was to bring over the all-day bistro found on every Paris street corner, with cuisine worthy of a real kitchen. The team at Au Comptoir works with fresh ingredients and makes nearly everything in-house, pastries included.

Some dishes have been there since day one. The bavette with pommes dauphines was first built around a Roquefort sauce from the co-owner’s childhood. Today it comes with béarnaise or red wine sauce at dinner, while the Roquefort sauce dresses the bavette steak frites at brunch. Along with the orange-glazed Fraser Valley duck breast and the ribeye steak frites, it makes up the bulk of the evening’s orders. The saumon à l’unilatérale, king salmon seared on the skin side only, arrives over tagliatelle with lettuce, herbs and a fish velouté. Wednesday evenings have kept the same ritual since the opening, with moules frites served that one night of the week.

At lunch, the co-owner likes to steer guests toward the salade périgourdine, a generous plate where smoked duck ham and gizzards confit in duck fat meet shaved foie gras and a red wine jus, a southwestern French classic revisited to the house’s taste. The burger has become a house favourite in its own right, one that regulars happily come back for, built on a patty ground from rib steak and a house-baked bun, with raclette melting over caramelized onions.

Brunch at Au Comptoir draws a younger crowd, with a pork belly benedict on house brioche with smoked paprika hollandaise and a buckwheat gaufre madame, a nod to the co-owner’s Breton mother. Desserts stay in the classic register, from tarte citron to crème brûlée.

The menu moves with the seasons, and the seasonal plates are the ones the owners like best. Some signatures also return on their own calendar: as the weather cools, the onion soup comes back on the menu and quickly finds its way to most tables. Elvis Sun, who came up at L’Abattoir now runs the kitchen and brings a fresh Asian perspective to the French classics, as in the poached mackerel with miso mustard, radish and sorrel, assisted by the sous-chef, Kyler Quinones.

Every plate leaves the kitchen just as the chef imagined it, and the menu gently invites guests to enjoy each dish as served. For the co-owner, the best way to discover the place is to let the team lead. “What I’d love is for people to come with their eyes closed and trust the chef,” he says.

From the cellar side, the early wine list featured a rotating white and red from an Okanagan winery. Guests coming to such a French room kept asking for French bottles, so the selection now draws on the Loire, Burgundy, Alsace, Bordeaux, the Rhône and Champagne. The cocktail list follows the same line, with a Paris Sour, a Negroni Blanc and an Aperol Spritz au Comptoir.

Regulars, chefs and a petit frère

Over the years, Au Comptoir has won over a loyal and wonderfully varied clientele. Older neighbours come for lunch once or twice a week, some only for breakfast, others only at night, and a growing number cross town for a well-known French address. Chefs from around the city drop in too. The success led to a sibling, Au Petit Comptoir, under the Granville Bridge at Vancouver House, where the menu centres on steak frites and moules frites.

In Kitsilano, Au Comptoir has become the kind of neighbourhood bistro where bonjour is the first word and à la prochaine the last.

Written by Marie-Françoise Malo
Photography by APC photos - Living Room Creative

Updated on November 09, 2026

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