Cars driving into Metro Vancouver storefronts have turned into what seems like a monthly occurrence.
The latest one hit Toramasa, the Downtown Vancouver Japanese izakaya, which announced on August 7 that it was temporarily closed after a car crashed into its storefront.
Nobody was hurt.
That is the first line of the restaurant’s own announcement, and it is worth leading with, because the photo that went out with it shows the front window completely blown out from the impact.
Glass across the sidewalk, the frame gone, the room behind it exposed to the street.
Toramasa is part of the Guu group, which runs several Japanese izakayas across Vancouver.
Toramasa is the group’s Osaka-focused concept, and it opened in 2023.
That gives it a shorter track record than most of the Guu rooms around it, and a much shorter one than the group itself.
Then came the part that does not usually follow a crash like this.
The following day, Toramasa posted an update saying it had already reopened.
One day between a car coming through the glass and the doors being open again is fast by any standard, and it is remarkably fast set against what else is on this block’s record.
Because this is not the first time a car has ended up inside a downtown restaurant this year.
On March 20, an SUV went through the front of Pokerrito at 991 Hornby Street, pushed into the storefront after a collision between two vehicles.
Nobody was injured there either.
That was almost five months ago and Pokerrito is still not open, with the Hornby room still in the middle of being fixed up.
Two crashes, two identical announcements, and two timelines that could not be further apart.
Toramasa has not said what the repair involved beyond the reopening, so the specifics of the damage are still unclear.
What is clear is that the room is serving again.
Storefront crashes have hit restaurants across Metro Vancouver often enough this year that the announcements are starting to read as a genre.
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Address: Guu Toramasa, 757 Seymour Street, Vancouver BC