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October 2014 Entrepreneur of the Year

With a mission to inform, empower, celebrate and advocate for British Columbia's current and aspiring business leaders, BCBusiness go behind the headlines and bring readers face to face with the key issues and people driving business in B.C.

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bcbusiness.ca OctOber 2014 BCBusiness 53 work visa after a chance meeting with Ivor Petrak, the general manager of the Banff Springs Hotel, in Vienna, where the young Vij was working as a chef after training in Salzburg. "Canada was the only place I wanted to come," says Vij. "It was a young country and I felt as a young immigrant I'd be respected. Ivor told me, 'Guys like you should come to this coun- try because you'll be successful.'" Yet Banff in the late '80s didn't impress Vij, who'd grown used to the dainty European ways of cigar clubs and delicate fussed-over French cuisine. "It was all prime rib," he remembers. "Huge portions and everything eaten so quickly! For six months I just did my thing and I didn't want to be there, but then I looked around and realized I couldn't own property in Europe. It was so expensive, but at least here in Canada I could own something. I'd figure it out." After the death of Petrak in 1992, Vij went west to Vancouver and took a front- of-house job with one of the city's most respected restaurateurs, John Bishop. "I honestly had no sense of his hidden qualities at all," says Bishop, laughing. "I hired him because he had a European hotel school background and a good grounding in service and wine knowl- edge. He joined us as a food expediter, which is a very detailed job in fine din- ing, checking every last detail to make sure it's perfect. He was a very hard worker and people liked him a lot, but he had this burning desire to have his own business." Two years later, unde- terred by Bishop's advice to not risk it and after being turned down by a poten- tial investor who thought the idea of a modern Indian restaurant was "stupid," he left to launch Vij's with a $20,000 loan from his father and $10,000 of his own money. LATEST ADDITION In May, Vij opened My Shanti, a more traditional Indian restaurant, in Surrey.

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