Restaurant Chains in Surrey Canada

Stan Fuller is already looking forward to a grand opening scheduled for this fall. His Earls restaurant on Edmonton’s Jasper Avenue will have had a facelift costing in the order of $5 million by then. Maybe that’s not such a huge deal for a company with 60 restaurants in five provinces and two states, and annual revenues in the $260-million range. Yet this particular opening figures to be attended by not just everyone in Earls’ own corporate universe, but also by honchos from Joey, Saltlik and Cactus Club Cafe—arch-competitors in a burgeoning new restaurant category known as “premium casual” that’s pretty much unique to Canada. The gathering of rival clans is fitting when you consider this Earls location nestled amid uptown apartment towers happens to be the cradle that rocked the baby way back in the 1980s.

A lot of things change in three decades—except in the restaurant industry. Across North America, mostly the same chains are beating each other up over the same share of the consumer dollar, and doing it with surprisingly static concepts, menus and physical plants. That’s not the case, however, with Earls and the brace of mostly Vancouver-based chains it helped spawn. “We were pretty close to Applebee’s or Chili’s, ” says Fuller of the original Edmonton location. “They’re still like that. But if you walk into an Earls today, you wouldn’t recognize it came from those humble beginnings.”

Still further from those humble beginnings is the Cactus Club Cafe location that opened this spring overlooking Vancouver’s English Bay, the latest laser cannon in a mounting arms race among the premium-casual chains. Opened at a cost of $7.5 million on a one-of-a-kind spot leased from the city’s parks board, the glass pavilion seats almost 300 people on two levels and a patio that spills out toward the city’s most crowded beach. (Another recent Cactus Club opening, overlooking the Olympic cauldron, seats 700.) The special menu from “Food Concept Architect” Rob Feenie, an Iron Chef America winner and Canada’s most famous celebrity chef, features dishes like sake-soy marinated sablefish, and there’s a wine list specifically tailored to the location. Since it opened in early March, Cactus Club’s signature hostesses—clad in the tiniest of dresses and rumoured to be recruited by mall-cruising talent spotters—have graciously dealt with hours-long lineups almost from the minute the doors open at 11 a.m.

Cactus Club skews younger than its competitors, captivating the 20-something condo set, says Vancouver-based market researcher Steve Bengtson. Its 22 restaurants are all located in B.C. and Alberta, but the chain is now scouting locations in Ontario, where its premium-casual competitors have a head start. If Vancouver is the model for what might happen, eastern cities can look forward to a dramatic reshaping of the restaurant environment. Over the past few years, several of the B.C. city’s most prominent street corners and property developments have been snapped up by one or another of the chains, pushing many other national and international restaurant names off to the sidelines or right out of town.

In a small way, the eastern invasion has already begun. When Earls began opening locations in Greater Toronto in 2008, the restaurants were instant sensations, combining unexpected menus and happening bar scenes with what analyst Robert Carter, director of food services for restaurant industry consultant NPD, terms a “great server experience.” The arrival also provoked alarm from some people, including Toronto Life magazine’s restaurant columnist, James Chatto, who didn’t dislike the food, but rued the dawn of “gigantic, expensive, systematic, mass-produced fuelling stations that feign an individuality and an artistry they don’t really possess.”