How long did it take five minutes? for the newest Cactus Club Café to become a destination restaurant in Vancouver?
Its steep ascendancy in the city's food scene might have been measured in seconds on March 20, but the wait for a table was measured in hours.
Every one of the 300 seats plus many of the 200 additional patio seats at the coveted Canada Place location was taken shortly after the doors opened for the first time at five o'clock. And, judging by the stylish trilogy of amazing location, lush interior and flavour-packed yet nuanced cuisine, those seats will never be empty long.
I've been at six Cactus Club openings and each one keeps getting better. I don't know how to top this, said executive chef Rob Feenie, his eyes taking in the lively opening night scene.
"When Richard dreams, he dreams big, he adds, his voice full of admiration for founder and owner Richard Jaffray. Every opening we have done just becomes that much more spectacular and its been a magical ride.
The launch of the biggest Cactus Club to date comes on the heels of the Vancouver-based chain's 25th anniversary. In 1986, fueled on youthful enthusiasm and desert images from a five-day frenetically paced road trip through America's west, the 21-year-old Jaffray and some friends opened Cafe Cucamongas, selling sandwiches and capuccinos. Two years later, Jaffray branched out on his own and opened his first Cactus Club, with peanut shells on the floor and Elvis Ice-Cream Pie on the menu.
Fast forward to 2009. The economy was in tough shape. PCI Group, the development company that was creating the commercial space around the Vancouver Convention Centre, had hoped to have something in place on Jack Poole Plaze before the world's spotlight shone on Vancouver, especially since tens of thousands of people would be snapping photos of the Olympic cauldron (which burned again for the restaurant's opening.)
Jaffray says he was not over-leveraged at the time so he was available as dry powder a source of financial investment.
We did a lot of modifications to the building to make it work as a restaurant, he told WE Vancouver. I used to come here when I was driving home to the North Shore. I'd come and get a feel for the space. The more I understood the location, I had a feeling it would work. It came to me that we could re-orientate part of the space to take advantage of the view. The team did an amazing job. It turned out better than I thought.
So, instead of walls, the restaurant has windows, lots of huge, towering windows and, in the case of those facing Coal Harbour and the North Shore mountains, windows that retract, opening up a whole new world to diners.
When those windows open, the whole room changes, says Feenie. (In fact, when the windows opened briefly on Wednesday, the room applauded. And that was on a grey night.)
Feenie was tasked with enhancing the menu to complement so many ta-da moments. New to the Coal Harbour location are fresh tasting sushi cones, kobi-style meatballs and truffle pasta with ricotta. Favourites such as the quinoa salad it's a modified version of the one in my cookbook and sablefish that's marinated 12 hours before baking also allow the menu to wander between casual and fine dining depending on people's whims.
With close to 30 people on the line, keeping up with so many appetites is challenging but fun, Feenie says. The staff has been through an extensive training program that gave them a taste of what diners can experience.
Toronto foodies are also about to get a taste of what has made Cactus Club a perennial gold-medal winner on WE Vancouver's Best of the City awards. Jaffray's in the midst of building four more restaurants: one each for Toronto, Saskatoon and Langley, and a second one for Edmonton.
Jaffray's confident that Cactus Club won't get a prickly reaction in Canada's largest city, where there's not yet much of a middle ground between high-end dining and simply wanting to go out and casually enjoy a good meal.
For me, it's fun, says Feenie. Feeding hundreds of people at a time from the get-go? Bring 'em on.
Design notes, provided by Cactus Club:
Hand-cut and geometrically-laid Brazilian slate anchors soaring custom fir fin ceilings, oak panelling and Carrara marble counters. Like all Cactus Clubs, Coal Harbour features its own unique original art collection, from Omer Arbels custom-designed light installation Bocci 28 Pendants (2012) to Graham Gillmores Willing to Bend (2013), a piece commissioned specifically for the restaurant. As a nod to the locations Olympic history, the collection also includes Andy Warhols Wayne Gretzky #99 (II.306, 1984) and a display of original Olympic torches from Canadas Olympic Games in Montreal, Calgary and Vancouver.
