Get the best of Vancouver in your inbox, every Tuesday and Thursday. Sign up for our free newsletter.
For anyone who has settled in at one of Pax Romana’s cozy tables over the past two-and-a-half years, news that the restaurant is closing its current location naturally raised a question: what happens to everything that made it special?
The good news is that Pax Romana will live on in a new space, to be located nearby.
“It’s going to largely remain the same—the same heart, the same spirit,” says Janine Spartano, Pax Romana’s interior designer and brand manager. The new spot will feature a better-equipped kitchen, she says, to give its team more freedom without requiring it to abandon the intimate character it has spent the past few years building.
Pax Romana has never needed much room to make an impression. Inside its narrow home at 1670 Commercial Drive, dinner could begin with a few small bites and somehow stretch into an evening of charcuterie, sherry, and cocktails. The room was intimate enough that the person making your martini might also explain the wine, recommend another plate, and return later to see whether you needed more bread.
That closeness was not incidental. It shaped the way the restaurant looked, the way its team worked, and the kind of night it offered.
General manager Prateek Balraj was drawn to Pax Romana for many of the same reasons its regulars were.
“It’s a nice, small, intimate restaurant that is trying to do really good things with great-quality product and great-quality produce, using just simple techniques,” he says. “Not trying to overcomplicate things.”
Its size also allowed Balraj to remain behind the bar, work the floor, and shape each guest’s experience personally rather than manage the room from a distance.
“I’m not a guy to do a lot of pretentious service,” he says. “I’ve always been kind of laid-back, kind of chill, a little bit more personable, a little bit more casual.”
That philosophy runs through the menu, too. Pax’s charcuterie boards are filled with cheeses, cured meats, pickles, and preserves. The en papillote—a dish where fish is wrapped in a parchment paper and baked—has become a favourite, while the Iberico sandwich—once just for staff—proved too delicious to keep away from the public.
“We have people who come in just for the sandwich nowadays,” Balraj says. “It used to be our staff meal, and we were like, ‘It’s way too good to not be on the menu.’ ”
The cocktail list follows the same pattern: recognizable classics made distinct through careful tweaks. The Espresso Martini swaps vodka for dark rum fat-washed with brown butter, while the Pax Martini blends gin, rosé vermouth, and fino sherry.
“They’re dangerously easy to drink,” Balraj says of them.
The restaurant opened in late 2023 as part of Ionian Hospitality, the group behind Loula’s Taverna, Sopra Sotto Pizzeria, and Claudio’s Ristorante, but quickly developed an identity of its own. Pax is smaller, more moody, and more idiosyncratic—a place built as much around the rhythm of drinking and grazing as around dinner itself.
Its design helped establish that identity from the beginning. Before becoming Pax Romana, the space was The Drive Coffee Bar, a bright, white café that Spartano had also designed. Transforming it into Pax meant pushing in almost the opposite direction: darker, warmer, and more lived-in.
The inspiration came partly from the bars and cafés Spartano encountered while travelling in Europe—places tucked into former homes, passed down through families, and shaped over time rather than built all at once.
“I remember we went to Greece, and my husband and I were with our friends, and I was like, ‘Oh my God, that’s such a cool fireplace,’ ” she recalls. “Somebody was like, ‘That was so-and-so’s great-grandmother’s house.’ I was like, ‘What? That’s amazing.’ ”
That sense of inheritance became central to Pax’s design.
“A big part of the concept was keeping fundamental pieces that are in the space,” Spartano says.
For the new Pax, the goal is not to reproduce the current room piece by piece. It’s to carry over its familiarity: the warmth, the coziness, the easy access to the bartender, and the feeling that the person greeting you is never very far away.
“I do hope that there is a sense of familiarity and the same energy and comfort,” Spartano says.
While the new location will be roughly the same size, the biggest change will be behind the scenes. “If anything, it’s going to allow greater ease of service and a little bit more opportunity for creativity,” Spartano says. “We’ll have the means now.”
The move, then, is not about making Pax grander. It’s about giving the restaurant better tools to keep doing what it already does well. The address will change. The room will look different. But if the team succeeds, walking into the new Pax Romana should still feel like returning to somewhere familiar—just one better equipped for what comes next. GS
Pax Romana opens at its new location, which is still under wraps, in early fall.