2006-01-15 - Vancouver Magazine
By: Jamie Maw

Vancouver’s Casual Fine Dining restaurants lead the world

Step inside their ultra-competitive universe.

It’s mid-afternoon—between the service slams of lunch and dinner—in a popular North Vancouver restaurant called Earls Tin Palace. On the production line today is Michael Noble, one of Canada’s finest chefs, looking only a little out of place. A few beads of perspiration—the only sign of the high-stakes game Noble is playing today—have formed where his white chef’s toque meets his long brow.
Noble is quietly exhorting a crew of young cooks, occasionally glancing at a neat three-ring binder of recipes that—with myriad component parts, instructions for preparation and assembly, fire-times and presentation photography—read more like engineering drawings. Noble, whose culinary resume includes stints at The Four Seasons, Diva at the Met and Calgary’s Catch Restaurant, has also led Canada’s Bocuse d’Or team and was the first Canadian to travel to Japan to challenge Japan’s Iron Chef on the cult culinary TV show. What’s he doing here? You might ask.
You’d be in good company for asking. Last February, Noble raised other brows when he signed on as Earls’ new culinary development director, with overall responsibility for the chain’s food and beverage programs. In addition to training Earls’ chefs (a.k.a. “Kitchen Leaders”) in its western Canadian and U.S. restaurants, Noble’s central challenge is developing and introducing new—and hopefully “addictive”—menu items for chain-wide release. That challenge, as we were to find out today, is a time-consuming process; the perspiration that marks his brow today easily supplanting the inspiration that sponsored the creation of each menu item months ago.
But Noble’s addition to Earls’ friendly rooms, award-winning wine list and service programs also sent a signal to the entire Casual Fine Dining sector: the stakes had just gotten higher. A lot higher.
Across the city, at Cactus Club Cafe’s development kitchens in the bowels of their Broadway and Ash location, chef Julian Bond is hatching the plot on his new hamburger. The burger, which competes for attention on Cactus Club’s menus with items such as meal-in-a-bowl won ton soup, steaks, ribs, tuna towers and well-made Asian noodle and rice bowls, is a default—even signature—item on this chain’s menu. Bond takes me through the fastidious process, elaborating on how, component by component, he deconstructed the old recipe, then painstakingly re-engineered his new one, now comprised of all-fresh ingredients.
We eat the result. It’s a fine hamburger—a model for the species really, and in its juicy beefiness, easily one of the best I’ve eaten. The caramelized ground chuck patty bangs through crisp lettuce, tangy melted cheddar, the smoke of quality bacon and the juice of a brilliant red slice of tomato, which threatens to run down my arm. “It’s a legitimate two-fister,” Bond says. He doesn’t have to ask me what I think: I’m trying to smile between bites.
But just after signing on with Cactus Club last summer, after “several months of thoughtful discussion” with owner Richard Jaffray, Bond had reason not to smile. (He had recently left his tenure at Dubrulle Culinary Arts, where he had trained hundreds of young chefs; that had followed executive chef positions at Oritalia and Star Anise when its star shone brightly. Bond, too, is highly respected—by former students, peers and the food media.) Soon after his new appointment, while shopping for fresh ingredients at Granville Island, Bond was confronted by a local culinary personality. “I heard you’re a sell-out,” he said to Bond.
“That took the wind out of my sails,” Bond says today. “But not for long,” especially when Bond recalled that the person in question had consulted to McDonald’s for years. And especially when Bond became fully engaged in the complex challenges of improving an already popular menu to the all-fresh template, evidenced by his better burger.
The Cactus Club test kitchens will be renovated after just a few years, creating test areas more suitable for training chefs (formerly “Kitchen Leaders”; in conjunction with formal chef certification, Bond is also changing the nomenclature). Another part of Bond’s job is testing new equipment—not Aston Martins with machine guns, but their culinary equivalent: shiny, multi-function, high-speed Turbo Chef convection ovens, custom griddles (a small one, which warms the buns slowly, will join the Cactus Club lines as the burger rolls out across the chain) and Bradley smokers.
Richard Jaffray, 41, who founded Cactus Club with then-partner Scott Morrison in 1988, is direct but also disarmingly relaxed in his approach to the science that necessarily describes his sector.
Last year his new Park Royal store placed highly in our annual Restaurant Awards for its stunningly sleek design. But that’s only one component of the $3.5 million investment now required to open a new Cactus Club. With new restaurants averaging 250 seats, including heated patio areas, that breaks out to a capital cost of $14,000 per seat, with some of those seasonal. Although sales in CFD restaurants might range as high as $20,000 per seat per year, due to higher capital (especially construction) costs, “you have to do a lot more volume,” Jaffray says. In other words, margins matter—which explains Bond’s meticulous sourcing and menu costing.
There’s also the enormous cost, both in dollars and logistical planning, for opening a new location, which I witnessed first hand at the opening of Cactus Club’s new Kelowna operation. The same sleek design lines, if slightly obscured by a Wal-Mart sign, spoke to an attractive room. But it was the service, from opening night forward, that differentiated the operation from many competitors—especially a nearby Moxie’s, which has copied Cactus Club design and service elements, but at a less polished and energetic level.
The service secret lay in the “soft investment,” as Jaffray calls it: importing experienced Cactus Club service hands (billeted for two months at motels up and down Highway 97) who were shadowed by local hires. It seemed there were almost as many staff as guests. It was a near seamless performance (chef Bond was also cooking on the line) that so impressed our sophisticated dinner guests they returned the next night. Jaffray confirmed the expense of service training to be as much as $75,000 per opening.
Over a bowl of Bond’s new won ton soup, Jaffray recounted the challenges of his converging sector. “The [food service] market is rushing to the middle ground,” he says. “You have celebrity chefs like Rob Feenie downstreaming their brands with casual offshoots such as Feenie’s, and a great many attractive and inexpensive ethnic dining opportunities,” he says. “At the same time the landscape of our own sector—Casual Fine Dining—is also changing rapidly; it’s heated up enormously,” he adds. “The sector has moved up from a quality perspective, and prices have moved up only slightly to accommodate a more sophisticated customer. We know that consumers will pay a little more for quality, but that means we also have to increase our volumes,” he says.
In other test kitchens around the Lower Mainland, more high-profile development chefs are hard at work. Menu tweaking is happening at The Keg, another of the many Casual Fine Dining concepts that was birthed right here. At Milestone’s, chef Jim Romer is test driving items for his new spring menus, while at Joey’s Global Grill—owned by the Fuller family, who founded the 60-unit strong Earls—Chris Mills, who worked with Michael Noble at Diva before becoming executive chef himself (as well as Canada’s Bocuse d’Or representative), is fine-tuning new items. Joey’s is in rapid expansion mode, especially in Washington state, and Mills will be tweaking his menus to regional tastes. Also in the wings is a brand new Asian concept from Mills and the Fullers: Opm.
At Saltlik, a gorgeous new room (its soaring wooden walls, huge windows and modern light fixtures say goodbye to traditional steakhouse décor) on Alberni Street, yet another concept from the Fullers—this time, steak with seafood sidebars. Development chef Karen Lyons is looking over the training of 18 line cooks. They’re going through their training manuals, item by item, getting comfortable with the meticulous directions that accompany each recipe. Then they sit down to critique each item. With opening day just two weeks away, the focus in the room is palpable and owner Stewart Fuller, himself the former development chef for Earls, says, “This is the calm before the storm.”
It was last summer, when I was eating a platter of exceptional ribs at Cactus Club’s Yaletown outlet, that I wondered out loud how Vancouver became the epicentre of CFD dining—globally. I was hosting Andy Lynes, a visiting British culinary journalist, who was knocked out by the attractive and well-trained servers, and the cleanliness of the restaurant and its styled décor. But most of all, he was bowled over by the lively flavours, and, after the requisite currency conversion, the value on the plate. “You couldn’t even begin to approach this quality and consistency in London at these prices,” he said.
I told Lynes he had a good point, and then we talked our way around the world, examining other concept chain alternatives. Only P.F. Chang’s and perhaps Hillstone Group’s fledgling Bandera and Gulf Stream chainlets come close. But few have the reach of the concepts incubated here in Vancouver, which number hundreds of restaurants; as for the ethic of “Casual Luxury” (as Cactus Club’s calls it), fewer still fulfill this mandate either—which is to be faster (and more fun) than those that are better, and better than those that are faster. But now even that mission—as CFD concepts’ target customer has become more sophisticated—is changing too.
I began to explain to Lynes the distribution logistics and capital investment, and the service training made famous by binders and exams. “I’m convinced,” I told him at the time that “these concept restaurants make better doctors, lawyers and entrepreneurs.” Take the training programs at Earls and Cactus Club, which are formidable, with each server called a partner and responsible for running their own franchise within the restaurant. Just a week into her training, my younger daughter, who worked for a summer at the Cactus Club’s Yaletown location, had studied rigorously, done her floor training, tasted a good deal of the menu and written a couple of tests. “These people take their fun seriously,” she said, swotting through her binder yet again.
Back at Earls, the young line cooks are on their game today. They have to be. For after weeks of preparatory practice, and months of development and food costing, Noble and his young brigade are in another kind of competition today, one with far-reaching commercial implications. Seated at a large round table in the back of the restaurant are some tough, experienced judges—people who will evaluate 13 dishes, plus many saucing alternatives, over the next two-and-a-half hours. In some ways the judging criteria are tougher than in many culinary competitions, because underlying the normal flavour, texture and presentation questions are several more, of equal importance: Can we produce this dish efficiently across the chain? Can we procure and distribute the ingredients consistently? What is the food cost? And finally, and most importantly, if we can execute it, will our customer buy it?
Noble begins the roll-out of the new dishes. The service delivery from kitchen to table is supervised by Noble’s assistant development chef and right hand, Kim Hirji. The judges today—who include Bus and Stan Fuller, George Piper (the chain’s purchasing head), Claudia Owen (his senior buyer) and half a dozen other company executives—pick up their knives and forks. And pens. Working with a carefully annotated three-page grid, like figure-skating judges they’ll soon begin to assign marks under headings called Presentation, Flavour Profile, Portion Size and Value Perception/Price Point. In addition to the overall scores for each dish, there’s plenty of space left for comments. Some of those will be brutally honest.
Picking bestsellers, even when they’re developed by an award-winning chef, is an uneasy process. For every recipe adopted and tweaked before a chain-wide roll-out, dozens will be discarded. Chef Noble begins the service with a “Baha Mahi Mahi Fish Taco,” with crispy battered fish snugged into a soft tortilla with avocado, peppers, onions and grated cheddar. The comments begin to fly around the table. Most agree that the accompanying aïoli is “beautifully spiced” but that the tortillas could use a little smoky flavour to lift them past the ordinary. And while praise for this dish is universal—“maybe even a winner”—most think it needs a higher fish component adjustment, and perhaps the substitution of another white fish less expensive than the Hawaiian mahi.
On to a vegetarian option, which soon has elder statesman Bus Fuller, one of the most colourful characters in the food service industry, declaring, “This might just convince me to become a vegetarian. Until dinner time.” It’s a toasted ciabatta sandwich with grilled portobello and another delicious aïoli (Noble’s expert saucing is showing) and red peppers. The collective opinion: with some further adjustment, this entry stands a chance.
A chicken pasta suffers from under seasoning and uses diced, not the preferred crumbled, feta cheese; butternut squash ravioli, it’s decided, “needs a softer pasta case and more ‘fill.’” “Make it like a pillow,” says Stan Fuller. Chipotle-grilled pork tenderloin is very good, and looks like a solid item for the winter menus. A number of saucing options are discussed. Piper and Owen weigh in gently on food costing and sourcing: fresh versus frozen halibut portions are tested—there’s no comparison, but there are sourcing challenges for the fresh product.
Several desserts stand out and are cost effective. A generous ramekin of raspberry-heightened apple crumble is accompanied by equally delicious mascarpone gelato. Later, Noble would share the experience of evaluating more than 20 gelatos to come up with precisely the right flavour combination. A cost-effective “Nanaimo Bar Gelato Cake” gets thumbs up all around the table, especially when its portion cost is announced.
In the past two months I’ve eaten enough chicken wings to cull a flock. I can recognize good ones—glossy but not gloppy, moderately spiced with at least a 50 percent drumlet to wing count and served with fresh-cut celery and blue cheese dip—almost without tasting them. But I’m convinced that the future of this sector, which truly does lead the world, lies not in default items such as wings, or even carefully re-engineered hamburgers. That’s because these concept restaurants are leading their broadening demographic, rather than sitting back: it’s all about the quality of the dining experience, from the very first greeting through dessert. This little epiphany arrived courtesy of a British ski tourist seated next to me at the Kelowna Cactus Club, who interrupted my survey of the sector’s shifting demographic. “This is a delicious steak,” he said, unbidden. “Quite the best I’ve had in ages.”