In the restaurant business, there is ‘front of house’ – the dining room, which is all the glam and ambiance and service – and the ‘back of house’ – the kitchen, which is all heat and toil and ego.

On the set of Godiva’s – a make-believe restaurant and the backdrop for a new CHUM series about the lives of young, bright Vancouver things – there is actually a ‘back of back of house’ – a converted 40-foot city bus that houses a fully functioning industrial kitchen parked in the Boundary Road Studios lot.

That’s where food stylist Jane Hayward works her culinary magic that makes the scenery worth chewing.

On today’s menu – prime rib garnished with strawberry coulis. That’s normally a delicious-sounding entree, unless you’re the piously vegetarian Hindu family of the ambitious chef Ramir (played by Stephen Lobo) and the table is being set for a comedic culture-clash scene in the restaurant. Also sizzling on the stove top are Roma tomatoes. The fresh appetizer in the glass-fronted fridge is tuna carpaccio.

Godiva’s has been the biggest challenge yet for Hayward, who has worked in film and television production since 1998. She must not only come up with fashionable menus for the episodes, but produce the food for multiple takes, plating it artfully for the camera, making it palatable for the actors, and teaching the players how to do it all themselves for the camera.

Wiping the perspiration from her brow, she says simply: ‘They are doing very well.’

Godiva’s is the latest series from B.C., suggesting that, despite the troubles of Canadian drama overall, domestic production continues on a low simmer on the West Coast. Much of it comes thanks to commitments to the CRTC by CHUM, following the launches of Citytv Vancouver and The New VI in Victoria in recent years.

Godiva’s, The Collector and six MOWs by Brightlight Pictures in Victoria are examples of such new production. They join new series Young Blades, Terminal City (see story below) and the seventh season of Da Vinci’s Inquest on the Canadian production roster that is holding its own.

Godiva’s, according to the series concept, is a once-hot, high-end Yaletown eatery owned by the mysterious and world-traveling Godiva, who is never in Vancouver. As tastes change, Godiva’s finds itself in the midst of transition, trading on the energies of the young people who work there to get the buzz back.

It’s just a little something cooked up by producers Julia Keatley – who found elusive West Coast success as coproducer of the long-running police procedural Cold Squad – and Vancouver native Michael MacLennan, one of the busiest writers in Canadian television.

‘Julia was approached to bring a show to CHUM,’ says MacLennan, who spends one week in Vancouver overseeing the creative production of Godiva’s and the next week in Toronto or Los Angeles where he writes the new season of Showtime’s Queer as Folk, also currently in production.

‘She came to me with the idea of setting it in a restaurant. I created the characters and wrote the pilot. I never thought it would get made, so I was kind of fearless. I wrote the show I wanted to see. I wasn’t second-guessing the network,’ says MacLennan.

As a result, Godiva’s ‘tells the truth’ of the lives of people in their 20s and 30s, he explains.

‘It’s frankly sexual, the language is out there,’ says McLennan. ‘People do drugs, make mistakes and get themselves into trouble. It’s not shocking or gratuitous, [but] most television offers sanitized versions of life. I wanted to get under the skin of 10 people and their lives. It’s a kind of storytelling not typical of Canadian television.’

By that he means that the pace is quick and hop-scotches between multiple storylines – the kind of frantic editing that appeals to a younger audience weaned on music videos.

‘It’s extremely challenging,’ says McLennan. ‘We’re shooting lots of short scenes.’

In one scene, Victor, the dishwasher and recent immigrant from Asia, arrives at the restaurant’s back door bloodied and beaten. A doctor in his homeland, Victor has been treating people out of the back door of Godiva’s. In a tender scene free of dialogue, TJ, Godiva’s son and another kitchen helper, tends to Victor’s injuries.

The series got its own lumps in the Canadian funding game – starting as a 13 x 60 series when the original Canadian Television Fund application went in, shrinking to an MOW when the cash ran short, and expanding again to six episodes when new money was found.

While the producers would have done more, the manageable six-episode order has provided an organizational perk.

‘Block shooting buys us the opportunity, under a tight budget, to take advantage of multiple locations,’ says director Gary Harvey, another Cold Squad alumnus. ‘We budgeted it like a big movie. It saves a lot of script.’

Shooting all six episodes simultaneously, he explains, helps create cost efficiencies with locations, allowing producers, for example, to shoot all the scenes at Ramir’s trendy apartment in the Waterfall building near Granville Island together.

Cost savings were reinvested in an impressive set that goes far beyond a six-ep series – an outdoor patio, the lavish, copper-colored main dining room, a large and well-appointed kitchen, washrooms for the patrons, a grimy back lane filled with produce boxes – and is clearly constructed to last multiple shooting seasons. (A second season of more than 13 one-hours is on the menu.)

Erin Karpluk (Taken) plays Kate, the restaurant manager imported from Toronto to shake up the restaurant and breathe new life into it. She clashes with Ramir – who has unilaterally assumed creative control of the restaurant when the previous chef ODs in the cooler – and wants to fire TJ, until she discovers that he’s the son of the restaurant owner.

In a scene where she’s fueled up on two-too-many martinis, she approaches a DJ (Michael Eklund) to hire him for Godiva’s – one of many buzz strategies that fail throughout the first season.

Block shooting is challenging but fun, Karpluk says. She keeps a calendar in her dressing room that reminds her where her character is at in her development so she can work in the right mindset.

‘We end up really having to do our homework,’ she says of her first leading role in a series. ‘[Kate] is a dynamic character. She’s come here to fix her life. I have to remember whether I’m the confident Kate or the insecure Kate.’

The set is a bit like summer camp, she adds. Most of the crew, for instance, moved over from the set of Cold Squad, so they are tight-knit. The actors have all worked together in Vancouver, many sharing apartments on their sojourns to L.A. to test for parts during pilot season. Another actor has a pet Chihuahua named Godiva, in honor of the show.

The initial season features 75 players, including the 10 main characters that drive the action. Other cast members are Sonja Bennett, Leah Cairns, Matthew Currie Holmes, Noel Fisher, Neil Grayston, Michael McMurtry, Carmen Moore and Rick Tae.

‘We hope that we’re doing something a little different,’ says Harvey. ‘The story goes in ways you don’t expect.’

Godiva’s will debut on Bravo! beginning March 12 at 10 p.m. Production on season one wrapped Nov. 24.