New chef gives Lucia's Vancouver Italian restaurant a pasta-focused reset

Lucia did not need a new address to feel new again. At 3124 Main Street in Vancouver’s Mount Pleasant neighbourhood, the Italian restaurant that opened on June 11, 2025, found its second wind under chef Marquella Uhrig, who pushed house-made pastas and pizza back to the front of the menu.

That shift mattered because Lucia already had the bones of a neighborhood regular. The room, tucked into a stretch of Main Street that has seen plenty of turnover, had been designed as a warm, buzzy place for lingering, with wood tones replacing the darker mood of the previous tenant and a heated patio that could open or close with the weather. The space had once been Smitty’s Oyster House, and briefly Anthem Sound Lounge, but Lucia’s newer identity leaned less on novelty and more on a clear Italian point of view.

Uhrig arrived with a résumé that matched the reset. She had worked at Giusti, Savio Volpe and Fred’s Ambleside, and her kitchen at Lucia was built around familiar, approachable dishes rather than a high-concept swing. The menu emphasized house-made pasta as a main attraction, backed by pizza and a supporting cast of smoked olives, burrata, seasonal greens and meatballs with pomodoro sauce. It was the kind of lineup that asked diners to come hungry and stay awhile.

That made Lucia feel less like a restaurant chasing launch-day buzz and more like one trying to earn repeat visits from the people already walking past on Main Street. The original concept, from the team behind Harbour Oyster & Bar and Social YVR, had been framed as refined yet approachable modern Italian dining. The new kitchen leadership gave that idea more bite, especially for diners who care whether the pasta is made in-house and whether the place around it feels like a room worth returning to.

Lucia also kept the practical details that make a restaurant useful as well as interesting. It operated daily, with hours from 11 a.m. to 11 p.m. Sunday through Thursday and until midnight on Fridays and Saturdays, and it could take gatherings of 10 or more by contacting the restaurant directly. For a restaurant trying to settle into the rhythm of Main Street, the pasta reset looked less like a reinvention than a correction, putting the plate back where the room had always pointed.