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The first time I met Lucas Johnston and Devon Latté, I was not interviewing them. I had tagged along for a shoot with What’s Good?! Vancouver—the video series hosted by local Oll Farrell. I was mostly there to be a fly on the wall as the two chefs cooked, joked, and tried to explain what exactly they were building inside their tiny Powell Street restaurant, Nero Tondo.
At one point, Farrell asked how the “dream team” came together.
“Dream team?” the two chefs laughed at the time.
“A couple of degenerates,” Johnston said.
It was a funny line, but also a revealing one. Johnston and Latté do not take themselves too seriously. What they do take seriously, though, is Nero Tondo’s mandate: to celebrate local ingredients with a level of commitment that goes far beyond the usual restaurant language about seasonality.
At Nero Tondo, “local” is not a decorative word on the menu. It’s the point.
The 18-seat restaurant opened in February 2025 in the former Elephant (RIP) space on Powell Street in a bustling stretch of East Vancouver. It’s small and intimate, with most guests seated at the counter, close enough to watch Johnston and Latté—co-chefs and co-owners—cook directly in front of them.
For Latté, that was key from the beginning.
“It was kind of a non-negotiable for the space that we were looking for,” he tells the Straight later. “We were sick of being behind a wall, nobody seeing us, nobody seeing what we’re doing.
“We want [diners] to feel like they’re sitting in our kitchen,” he adds. The restaurant is small enough that dinner becomes part meal, part conversation, part show.
“We are trying to champion local food,” Latté had said during the shoot.
That means produce, seafood, and most of what comes through the kitchen is from B.C. The idea is not new to the pair. Johnston and Latté met at Main Street’s The Acorn nearly a decade ago, during a period when that restaurant helped push Vancouver’s vegetable-forward cooking into more ambitious territory.
Nero Tondo feels like the next evolution of that work; think veg-forward (but not exclusively plant-based), inventive, and tied to the region. But here, the commitment extends across the entire experience, with seafood from providers such as Goodfish and Fanny Bay Oysters; produce from farms including Cropthorne, Local Harvest, Klippers Organics, and Glorious Organics; and a B.C.-focused wine list and bar program.
The point is not just to buy local. It is to know local.
Latté talked during the shoot about visiting farms and getting their hands in the soil. Trips to farmers markets have become part work, part social outing—a place to pick up ingredients for a restaurant with very little storage, but also a place to see people they now consider friends.
“There are a whole lot of restaurants out there that are spewing that kind of, ‘We’re using local’, and a lot of them say ‘as much as possible,’ ” he said. “But there’s a lot that’s possible, and we’re showing that.”
B.C., after all, has a bounty of delicious resources at its disposal.
“What’s possible in British Columbia, compared to a lot of other areas in Canada, is astronomical,” he added. “We’re just putting that on display.”
Johnston, for example, lit up talking about Nero Tondo’s citrus program—something that might seem counterintuitive in a restaurant so committed to B.C. sourcing.
“The citrus program we have here is pretty special,” he continued during the shoot, pointing to growers including the Garden on Salt Spring Island and Local Harvest in the Fraser Valley.
Those ingredients do not stop at the kitchen. Citrus, wildflowers, and other local products move through the beverage program as well, which is led by GM and sommelier Meghan McDowell Johnston, with assistant GM and sommelier Alex Nicassio helping carry the room’s wine and service experience.
The kitchen is not doing one thing while the bar does another. Everyone’s guided by the same set of values. And in a room this small, that kind of ambition only works if the whole team is aligned.
Later, when I press Latté on a favourite local supplier right now, he brings up Richmond’s Flower Day Wine.
“It really encapsulates what we’re doing,” he says, pointing to the way the wine sits naturally alongside Nero Tondo’s food. “Everything’s growing so close to each other that you reach back to that ‘what grows together goes together’ thing. It’s a match made in heaven.”
Over the past year, tariffs and import uncertainty have only sharpened the points Johnston and Latte are making around local produce and forced everyone to keep a question top of mind: what if we paid closer attention to what is already here?
Five years ago, Latté suggests today, that might have felt like a harder sell—more of a chef’s agenda. Now, guests seem to understand it more intuitively.
“I think the majority of people that come in know what they’re coming for,” he says.
Nero Tondo has already earned national attention, including a place on Air Canada’s Best New Restaurants list and a Michelin Recommended designation. But inside, the room still feels disarmingly small and unpolished in the best possible way.
There are jokes, banter, and the occasional self-deprecating aside. There is no grandstanding.
But beneath the looseness is a serious, almost obsessive commitment to place. That might be what makes Nero Tondo so compelling.
It is not trying to make local food feel virtuous or rigid. It is trying to make it feel alive: funny, seasonal, intimate, unpredictable, tied to the people who grow, catch, forage, pour, and cook in British Columbia.
A couple of degenerates, maybe. But ones with a very clear idea of what a Vancouver restaurant can be.
Nero Tondo is located at 1879 Powell Street.