Drive past The Shops at Erickson Farms on NW Lakeshore Avenue and you will still see the same dark storefront that has sat empty since early May, the one that used to be Los Potrillos. If you have been waiting for a sign to go up, you have been waiting on a moving target. The restaurant slated to fill that space has now been announced under two different names, and neither one has opened yet.
That gap is exactly why a Reddit thread called "Felida business struggle" pulled in 53 comments this spring, and why The Columbian ran a story asking whether businesses in the neighborhood were having a hard time. A vacant storefront in a small commercial node reads as decline. But laid end to end, the actual sequence of events tells a different story than the one that spread on social media, and the plaza's other anchor tenant already proved that a name change at Erickson Farms does not have to mean trouble.
What Actually Happened, in Order
Here is the timeline as it played out, pieced together from local coverage over the past four months:
- Early May 2026: Los Potrillos, the Mexican restaurant that had anchored the plaza's central building since its early build-out years, closed.
- May 29, 2026: The Columbian covered the closure and the online chatter it produced, noting that in a retail center as small as Erickson Farms, one vacancy is enough to make residents question the whole plaza.
- June 9, 2026: WhatNow reported, citing Bridgetown Bites, that a new bistro concept called Silk Nife was headed into the same space, backed by Pearl West Restaurant Group and its founder Jorge Castro.
- July 18, 2026: A roundup from Explore the Couve still listed Silk Nife as "coming soon" with no opening date announced, months after the closure.
- August 16, 2026: A local food blog reported that the incoming restaurant had been renamed again, this time to Lakeshore, based on signage spotted and shared in a Reddit post and a Facebook group.
Four months, two announced names, and as of this writing in early September, still no confirmed opening date. If you only saw the May headline about business struggles, you missed the part where an established, multi-concept local restaurant group spent the summer workshopping its identity for this specific address.
A Long Silence Isn't the Same as a Failure
Pearl West Restaurant Group is not a first-time operator testing whether Felida can support a restaurant. The company already runs Margarita Factory, DOSALAS, and DIOSA, three concepts with a track record in the Vancouver market, and Castro's approach traces back to a family culinary tradition rooted in Guadalajara. Early reporting described the incoming concept as a bistro with a design sensibility similar to DOSALAS, the group's upscale Latin kitchen and tequila bar, which suggests this was never meant to be a quick turnkey replacement.
A struggling landlord fills a vacancy with whatever tenant will sign a lease. A confident, established operator takes months to lock the name, the aesthetic, and the menu before a single sign goes up, because the cost of getting it wrong in a small, closely watched retail node is higher than the cost of waiting. The fact that three separate local food publications were tracking this space through the summer, each one noting a new detail, is itself a signal. Nobody writes four months of coverage about a project nobody expects to open.
The Rebrand Nobody Noticed
Long before the Los Potrillos saga gave Felida something to argue about on Reddit, the plaza's other anchor tenant already went through its own name change with zero controversy attached. Grapes 'n Growlers, the taproom that opened at Erickson Farms in 2017 as the second location of an east Vancouver original, has been operating for some time now under a new name: Mahoney's Public House. Same address on NW Lakeshore Avenue, same patio that lets guests bring their dogs, same tap list rotation, just a different name on the door and the online ordering page.
There was no Reddit thread about that one. No newspaper story asking if the plaza was in trouble. It simply happened, and the people who show up for happy hour between 2 and 5 p.m. kept showing up, the same way they still do now.
Put the two changes side by side and the pattern becomes clearer:
| Business | What Changed | What Stayed |
|---|---|---|
| Los Potrillos → Silk Nife → Lakeshore | Full closure, new operator, name changed twice pre-opening | Address (10722 NW Lakeshore Ave), building |
| Grapes 'n Growlers → Mahoney's Public House | Name only | Address (10714 NW Lakeshore Ave), tap list, patio, hours |
One of these looks dramatic from the outside because it involved a closed door and months of silence. The other looks routine because the doors never stopped opening. But both are the same underlying thing: an operator adjusting its brand at a location it intends to keep running, not a plaza shedding tenants.
Same Street, New Name
There is a small detail in the Lakeshore rename that is easy to miss if you do not know the plaza's layout. Both the incoming restaurant at 10722 NW Lakeshore Avenue and Mahoney's Public House at 10714 NW Lakeshore Avenue sit on the same street the name now echoes. Whether that was the deciding factor or just a fitting coincidence, the name change lands on an address that already carries it. For a restaurant group building its brand around a specific sense of place, tying the name to the actual street it occupies is a small but deliberate choice, not the kind of decision a landlord makes for a tenant that is barely hanging on.
What This Means If You Live Here
If you have been avoiding that corner of the plaza waiting for the vacancy to resolve itself, here is where things actually stand as of early September. There is still no confirmed opening date for the restaurant now going by Lakeshore. Signage changes and permit activity tend to arrive well before a soft open, so a for-lease sign coming down is a better indicator to watch for than a rumor thread. Everything else at Erickson Farms is running as it was: Mahoney's Public House is open on its regular schedule with the same happy hour, StarCycle and the Lakeshore Learning Center are still operating in their buildings, and the plaza itself is not shedding tenants, it is mid-turnover on one storefront while everything around it holds steady.
The next time a business closes at a small retail center like this one, it is worth checking whether the story is actually a story, or just the normal churn of a plaza that has been filling and refilling storefronts since its first tenants opened in 2017. Not every dark window is a warning sign. Sometimes it just means the next tenant is still deciding what to call itself.
We keep tabs on corners like this because knowing Felida well means knowing more than square footage and school boundaries, it means knowing which storefronts are turning over and which ones just changed their sign. If you want that kind of read on Felida or any of the neighborhoods we work in across Clark County, Leigh Calvert - Oxford Street Partners is happy to talk it through. Book a Consultation whenever you are ready.
