Meo: a 1970s cocktail lounge with a kitchen to match

Velvet, wood panelling, curved banquettes, a vintage jukebox and a portrait of a white Persian cat: Meo, pronounced “mee-oh,” looks every inch the cocktail bar. Set just below Kissa Tanto on Vancouver‘s East Pender Street, it was opened by the same trio behind Bao Bei, owner Tannis Ling with chefs Joël Watanabe and Alain Chow. The kitchen is what the team now wants people to discover. “The food is a real sleeper,” says the chef. “I think people in the city need to wake up to the food at Meo.” The plan is to push dinner, especially in the early evening between 5:30 and 8 p.m.

Hong Kong nights, ’70s motel glamour

The look traces back to a series of photographs by Greg Girard documenting Hong Kong nightlife in the 1970s and ’80s, which Tannis Ling used as her starting point. Ste. Marie Studio and Glasfurd & Walker translated it into a dim, plush room that borrows from the love motels of that era, in shades of pink, burnt orange and sage. Among the 70 seats is the “Honeymoon suite,” a velvet booth for eight. Where Kissa Tanto channels a Tokyo jazz café upstairs, Meo plays it looser and more mischievous.

A fisherman’s paella made with pasta

Meo’s menu is developed with chef de cuisine Macià Bagur, previously at Bishop’s and the Naramata Inn, whom the chef calls very, very talented. Asked to pick favourites, he pushes back first: “We wouldn’t put anything on the menu that we wouldn’t stand behind.” Then he names a few classics. The fideuà is a Valencian dish of short, thin broken noodles cooked in lobster stock in a wide pan, the way you would make a paella, then served with aioli and seafood. “Basically, the story is it’s a fisherman’s paella,” he explains. “The fishermen went out to sea and they forgot their rice, and they made it with pasta.”

The burger is another one he singles out, along with the fries, which the kitchen makes from scratch. The yukhoe tartare takes Korea’s raw beef classic as its base and gives it a French treatment, a mash-up that draws on the chef de cuisine’s family life, his wife being Korean.

Sweet as savoury, savoury as sweet

The cocktail list at Meo changes regularly, but one idea has guided it for a while: push vegetables toward sweetness, and take fruit in a savoury direction. The lychee martini is the clearest example. The lychee is lacto-fermented, which makes the drink salty and funky. “Changing people’s minds about things a little bit.”

Written by Fabie Lubin
Photography by Conrad Brown, Charles R. Nasby and Ian Lanterman

Updated on November 09, 2026

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