2007-09-13 - Vancouver Sun
By: Malcolm Parry

Cactus Club founder started career living on a sailboat for 18 months

YOU SAY SAGUARO: Running out of booze would dismay Richard Jaffray if it happened at the Cactus Club restaurant chain he founded in 1988 and that should serve $85-million-worth of food and drink this year.

But it turned out to be a very good thing at a 1984 end-of-year party for 400 he and a pal staged for fellow University of Alberta engineering students.

The sudden dryness kept the gendarmes away. And the profit they made got the party throwers far, far away. To Hawaii, in fact, where Jaffray quickly traded his slide rule for a surfboard. One year short of graduation, he quit varsity and began the quest for the perfect barrel that still takes him to Tofino (where he has a second home) every other weekend, and to the world's top surfing locales for four weeks every year.

Lacking working-immigrants' "green cards" to operate dinner-and-drinks cruises in Hawaii, the Alberta escapees moved to Vancouver. They lived aboard a 24-foot sailboat for 18 months, then sold it and split a $6,000 profit.

That was enough for Jaffray to launch Café Cucamongas at Broadway and Oak Street. When that yogurt-and-sandwiches joint sold for $100,000 plus inventory in 1988, Jaffray put his $50,000 earnings into developing a 2,500-square-foot, 89-seat North Vancouver joint he called Cactus Club. Earls restaurant-chain founder and one-time boss Stan Fuller invested $180,000. The Royal Bank matched with a line of credit. Cash flow has funded developments since.

The name came from a neon cactus president and sole director Jaffray saw in a Seattle store window and figured would look nice beside the Pemberton Street eatery's front door. Sensibly, he shoe-horned a six-seat booth into the odd-shaped space instead, and never bought the ornament. But the name now appears on nine corporate-owned and eight franchised properties. The latter have all gone to senior staffers, who pay $75,000 to be franchises. Two Calgary Cactus Clubs are the only ones outside B.C. But Jaffray expects the 1,700-employee chain to stretch east to Ontario and south to California by 2012.

Before year's end, a 7,000-square-foot Cactus Club at Marine Way and Byrne Road will almost equal the chain's biggest, on Lougheed Highway, Burnaby. And a 300-seat, 6,500-square-foot locale in the Burrard-at-Dunsmuir Bentall Five will be within barbeque-aroma range of David Aisenstat's Keg Caesar's operation. New operations clock in at $4.5 million each, Jaffray said.

The Broadway-at-Ash Cactus Club's test kitchen prepares menu items for clients who pay $15-20 for lunch and $20-30 for dinner. Burgers and rice bowls are the top sellers, but Jaffray's top picks are "pistachio-crusted halibut and a nine-ounce sirloin, medium rare."

As for favourite restaurants, his top three are Wolfgang Puck's Spago in San Francisco, Nobu Matsuhisa's equally tony Nobu in Manhattan, and unrelated Jose Rivas and Paco Rivas' La Bodega on Howe Street at Drake, which defined tapas in Vancouver four decades ago and -- virtually unchanged -- still offers the peerless quality and value it did when Jaffray was living on his boat and, before that, in a 1974 Dodge Dart parked overnight at Jericho Beach.