About Vancouver Magazine

Vancouver Magazine

Vancouver Magazine — VanMag to its readers — is the city magazine of Vancouver, British Columbia, covering the city's food, culture, politics, business and neighbourhood life. With roots stretching back through earlier titles including McLean's Guide to the adoption of the Vancouver name in 1976, it has documented half a century of the city's transformation. Its signature franchises, the annual Restaurant Awards and the Power 50 list of the city's most influential people, make it a fixture of civic life as well as a chronicler of it.

Overview

The magazine's editorial mix follows the classic city-magazine formula: ambitious service journalism about where to eat and what to do, long-form reporting on the issues shaping the city, and the list-making that gives readers a shared civic vocabulary. Food coverage is the title's beating heart — the Restaurant Awards are among the most influential culinary honours in Canada — but the magazine also covers real estate, urban development, arts and culture, and the personalities who run the city.

The magazine marked its 50th year with an archival series revisiting classic covers, a reminder of how long it has been watching Vancouver change. Those archives trace the city's evolution from the event-listing digest of the early 1970s — when, as McLean's Guide, it highlighted the Canadian Judo Championship and a hypnotist named Reveen at the Orpheum — through the fashion spreads of the 1980s to the food-obsessed present. The anniversary series surfaced gems: a May 2007 Restaurant Awards issue whose winning rooms — Kingyo, Cioppino's, Vij's, Phnom Penh — remain at the top of the city's dining game, alongside a rallying cry for a then-devastated Stanley Park; a May 1987 cover featuring Rick Hansen and a swimwear fashion story shot at West Edmonton Mall's water park; a May 1976 photo essay on high-fashion bedrooms, where a crochet-draped ceiling lost out to the gold-velvet-enrobed backseat sleeping quarters of a 1976 Chevrolet van; and a May 1970 McLean's Guide that was still just a digest of listings. Together they form a visual history of Vancouver's tastes across five decades.

History

The magazine's lineage runs through several titles before it settled on Vancouver in 1976. In its McLean's Guide incarnation it was essentially a digest of event listings; the modern city magazine took shape afterward, growing alongside Vancouver itself into a glossy chronicler of the city's dining, culture and civic affairs.

The magazine has periodically refreshed its look: in 2014 it underwent its first complete redesign in seven years, led by art director Paul Roelofs, with the January/February 2014 issue. The overhaul broke down what editor-in-chief John Burns called silo walls between sections — unifying colour palette, fonts and photo treatments, banning the magazine's old habit of close-cropped photos with text wrapped around them, and adding more portrait photography to better reflect the city's diversity.

The Restaurant Awards, the magazine's defining franchise, were initiated in 1989 when then-food editor Scott Mowbray dined around the city, consulted widely and drew up winners in 11 categories, from Best Overall to Best Décor. His founding complaint — that too many restaurants survived "by being pleasant rather than interesting" and that it was easy "to be just a little lazy on the coast" — set the awards' mission: to hold sloth accountable, educate palates and celebrate the lesser-known. For the first years the awards existed only in the magazine's pages; the first live celebration came in 1996, when about 150 chefs, restaurateurs and publicists gathered at the Metropolitan Hotel for hors d'oeuvres, drinks and a young pianist who, when thanked as "Michel Bublé," corrected the room: "Actually, it's Michael Bublé. Keep an eye on me."

The awards' longevity gives them a period charm: when they began, Driving Miss Daisy had just swept the Oscars, Sinéad O'Connor's "Nothing Compares 2 U" ruled the radio, and the city's dining scene, in the founding food editor's mournful assessment, wasn't much to crow about — nothing like the vibrant cut-and-thrust of Toronto. The awards were conceived as a corrective: to hold sloth accountable, educate palates and celebrate the lesser-known. The judging panel has since evolved from a single food editor to a corps of professional food and restaurant journalists — about 25 at the program's mid-2000s peak — with judges rotated over the years to keep perspectives fresh. By 2013 one judge had become 19 — writers, reviewers, farmers, sommeliers and former chefs — and 11 categories had grown to 41, with an ever-widening embrace of the city's Asian cuisines. The judging methodology, described by the program's longtime manager, is deliberately rigorous: each year beginning in September, an editorial committee compiles lists of new restaurants and closures, re-examines the categories, and rotates judges to keep the panel fresh. The silver-anniversary edition in 2014 drew more than 600 people to the Sheraton Vancouver Wall Centre for an afternoon-long celebration; by the 26th annual edition in 2015, winners were announced live on social media and honoured across more than 30 pages of the May issue. That year's 47 winners spanned categories from Best French Casual and Best Italian Upscale to neighbourhood awards, Premier Crew, Ingredient of the Year, Green Award, Pastry Chef of the Year, Bartender of the Year and Chef of the Year — a taxonomy of the city's dining life. Trade observers have called the ceremony the largest event of its type in North America after the James Beard Awards.

Content

Food and drink dominate the editorial calendar, anchored by the Restaurant Awards and year-round dining coverage, chef profiles and trend reporting. But the magazine's range is wider: investigative and narrative features on housing, development, civic politics and social issues; arts and culture coverage; fashion and lifestyle content; and the annual Power 50, ranking the people who shape the city.

The Power 50 has run for more than two decades — the magazine was celebrating 24 years of the list at its 2025 edition — and its annual awards party is a fixture of the city's civic calendar, drawing sponsors, honourees and the magazine's orbit of readers and advertisers. The 2025 party's sponsor roster — spanning a college, hospital foundations, wealth managers, Telus Business, Global BC and the Terminal City Club as venue partner — illustrates how deeply the franchise is embedded in the city's institutional life.

Coverage & Audience

Vancouver Magazine covers Vancouver and the surrounding region for an audience of engaged urbanites — diners, homeowners, culture-goers and civic watchers. Its influence is concentrated but deep: a Restaurant Award can change a restaurant's fortunes, and a Power 50 ranking confers genuine civic status. The magazine's editorial team describes itself as obsessed with tracking down great food and good times in its favourite city on earth — a mission statement that doubles as a summary of what the title has done for 50 years: eating, drinking and reporting its way through Vancouver's story. It remains, half a century on, the city's essential dining companion — and its most enduring civic institution in print.

Ownership

Vancouver Magazine is published in Vancouver, British Columbia. (Ownership details are not publicly confirmed in the sources reviewed for this profile.)

Digital Presence

The magazine's website, vanmag.com, carries daily city coverage, dining news, arts reporting and the archives of its signature franchises, including a deep, paginated archive of Restaurant Awards winners by category and year. The site live-covered the awards as they grew into a major civic event, and its throwback series mines five decades of covers for social and newsletter content. The magazine is active on major social platforms, where food photography and list content travel well, and its events — the Restaurant Awards and the Power 50 party — give the brand a live dimension that digital-only competitors cannot easily replicate.