The renowned Cactus Club Cafe is one of several Canadian-owned casual chain dining establishments that started on Vancouver’s North Shore. The business’s restaurants are renowned for their lively ambiances, and the corporation has its headquarters in downtown Vancouver. A lot of the Cactus Club restaurants have significantly more upmarket décor and are situated in prime areas.
The Cactus Club restaurants welcome children as well. They’re not “family restaurants don’t have separate children’s menus. But many young families enjoy them, and most places provide high chairs and booster seats in addition to crayons and coloring books. Typically, young to middle-aged adults make up their clientele. However, except perhaps in the bar areas, children are welcome.
22 restaurants are run by Cactus Club in the Lower Mainland. There is a Cactus Club restaurant in each of the following cities: Abbotsford, Coquitlam, Delta, Langley, North Vancouver, Richmond, Surrey, and West Vancouver. Meanwhile, there are three places in Burnaby.
There are seven Cactus Club sites in the city of Vancouver, including two beside the water. For instance, the one in English Bay is situated directly on the sand. In contrast, the Cactus Club in Jack Poole Plaza offers similarly breathtaking views of Coal Harbour. Try your hardest to get a window seat if you want to impress your friends, family, or potential date. These restaurants offer unique dining experiences (particularly around sunset) thanks to their prime tables.
Robson Street, Davie Street in Yaletown, the Bentall Building on Burrard Street, and West Broadway by both Cambie Street at one end and Ash Street at the other are other places within the City of Vancouver.
Depending on which location of the chain you visit, the menu varies a little. However, traditional menu items like burgers, pasta, and steak largely remain the same across the organization.
Szechuan lettuce wraps, tiny burgers, calamari (fried squid), potato skins, edamame, and chicken wings are examples of typical appetizers. Some places, although not all, offer sushi.
Along with more conventional beef burgers and chicken sandwiches, the majority of the restaurants also serve a variety of rice bowls with Asian influences. They often generally provide a few steaks, as well as at least a few fish and pasta entrees.
Dishes might vary, and some menu items are exclusively offered in particular eateries. For instance, when we last checked, some restaurants had a 12 ounce Millionaire’s Cut steak, but just the 11 ounce was offered in others. Why? We are unsure. Perhaps residents of some communities in the Lower Mainland aren’t as hungry as people in other areas!
While some restaurants provide brunch menus, others do not. Most, but not all, take part in the Dine Out Vancouver Festival in January or February. Those who do participate typically offer the same menu options, but occasionally they don’t.
The food is always of a high standard, despite the fact that each menu is both extremely similar and slightly different, and prices on some dishes might vary by as much as 25 cents.
Additionally, Cactus Club has dedicated menu sections for vegan, vegetarian, and gluten-free options. All menu items include symbols to denote dietary restrictions, however this brand’s menus stand out by having separate sections.
Scott Morrison and Richard Jaffray, two former employees of Earls Restaurant, founded Cactus Club Cafe in the late 1980s. The first location was in North Vancouver, which is why it doesn’t appear as modern as most of the others nowadays.
Scott Morrison left Cactus Club in 2004 and joined Browns Restaurants, a comparable locally-based chain dining establishment, where he currently serves as chairman and CEO. It should come as no surprise that Browns, Earls, and Cactus Club are all direct rivals. It’s also noteworthy to note that the family who owns Earls also holds a sizeable stake in Cactus Club.
Cactus Club has grown to include more than 30 sites nationwide since it was first established. These include more than 20 in British Columbia and the remaining in Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Ontario.
Other high-end casual dining franchises including the Keg, Earls, and Browns are comparable to Cactus Club. Given that it was founded by two former Earls workers, it is unavoidably comparable to Earls. It also blatantly resembles Browns (which was started by one of the two founders of the Cactus Club).
How precisely Cactus Club differentiates from its rivals is difficult to pinpoint. It’s possibly a little less expensive than The Keg and has a better reputation for being family-friendly than Earls. Compared to The Keg, Cactus Club has a slightly larger menu with a wider selection of food items. It’s also more “More seafood and Asian-inspired food is available on the West Coast.
Cactus Club: Is it a franchise?
It was spring when a half-block stretch of Toronto’s First Canadian Place’s street-level windows were first covered inside with brown paper bearing the Cactus Club Caf emblem. And it won’t be removed until the late summer or even the fall of 2014 to reveal the new eatery hidden behind it. Therefore, the hundreds of office workers who pass Canada’s highest office tower every day on their way to work will have to wait if they want to learn more about the restaurant chain.
However, with 25 additional Cactus Clubs operating in British Columbia and Alberta, it is easy to predict what will happen. Because they consistently reissue the same restaurant concept, although bigger, glitzier, and more expensive, like any other restaurant chain. Toronto won’t deviate from this pattern: “Our first site in Toronto will be our flagship for the Ontario market,” said Richard Jaffray, founder and president of Cactus, about his chain’s eagerly awaited eastward expansion. We are eager to display the exciting restaurant design it will feature.
Such a remark from Cactus HQ might seem absurd if you had last visited a Cactus Club ten years ago, when their locations resembled any other family restaurant/sports bar combination and their hallmark dish was pizza perogies with smoked bacon pieces. Cactus Club has been around for 25 years, but in the last five, it has become somewhat of a juggernaut. And these days, the rest of the business sits up and takes notice when Jaffray uses adjectives like “exciting,” “showcase,” and “flagship.” They picture hostesses in little black gowns who make the Hooters girls look like cashiers at Harvey’s, slick new restaurants built on budgets unheard of this side of Dubai, and high-quality food offered at absurdly low costs.
Toronto-based mid-range chain executives with common sense are shaking. And a lot of owners of reputable fine-dining establishments are rolling their eyes. One factor is the brilliant hire of Rob Feenie, Vancouver’s favorite native chef, by Jaffray in 2008. When Cactus put the previous master of West Coast haute cuisine in charge of menu development, its food program gained respect right away.
But money—specifically, the enormous stockpots filled with fresh, large notes that Cactus has been pouring into its newest locations—is a much more important factor. Industry gossip is that the Cactus flagship in the Bentall 5 Tower on Vancouver’s Burrard Street cost close to $8 million, despite the company’s stated refusal to divulge on build costs. The business then opened another spectacular showcase-flagship restaurant just five minutes away in Canada Place at Coal Harbour, built for an alleged $18 million, as that 300-plus seat eatery proved insufficient to meet local demand.
“I don’t understand the numbers,” remarked a Toronto restaurateur who runs a fine-dining restaurant with sales comparable to those of Cactus (over $12 million annually) and food costs that are comparable (about 25%), but who spent only $3.5 million on construction and thus quickly recovered his investment.
I have no idea how you manage to secure that kind of funding or, even if you could, why you would spend it on a certain eatery. Do you know how many little burgers you’d need to sell to break even?
Even Stan Fuller, CEO of the 61-restaurant Earls chain located in Vancouver, shook his head and acknowledged being perplexed by those figures. He admitted, “They don’t make any sense to me either. Additionally, he is a silent partner in Cactus Club and a competitor whose business invested $7.5 million in a brand-new King Street West location in Toronto.
Reliable estimates place the annual rent for the unoccupied new Cactus space at First Canadian at $735,000, or $70 per square foot. Furthermore, it makes little difference whether Cactus actually spends twice as much on its own Toronto restaurant or rather spreads unfounded rumors to intimidate rivals. In either case, it is evident that the East Coast chains like Pat & Mario’s, the Pickle Barrel, and Baton Rouge, which they are prepared to destroy, are not the main challenge for Cactus. Rather, it is the posh independent restaurants from which they nonchalantly steal customers. Instead, it’s two other businesses from home, Earls and Joey, both owned by members of the Fuller family, who cooperate mostly on the basis of purchasing power.
The three businesses are actually just different iterations of the same idea, with Cactus catering to a little pickier clientele. Each hires the most attractive floor workers it can, whether they are experienced or, ideally, not. They spend the time necessary to train them to become knowledgeable and hospitable waitresses (and, occasionally, waiters). Additionally, they will occasionally engage in the most benign type of human trafficking, transporting victims to new locations while paying for their travel and lodging expenses. (Some people fall in love, get married, and make their new homes their permanent residences. When Earls launched on King Street, Fuller told me, “Your Toronto boys did well,” in reference to the turnover rate of his waitresses.
Each company goes further than you might initially think to ensure that their consumers receive a high-quality meal. For instance, each Earls restaurant bakes its own hamburger buns. Joey shops at Toronto’s ne plus ultra Cheese Boutique, an expensive cheesemonger to the stars, for cheese and charcuterie. Additionally, Cactus only sells fish that has been endorsed by Ocean Wise and keeps truffle oil in stock in its larders.
Each then tries to outperform its price range in the elusive category of sophistication. Customers at Earls on King Street, for instance, are able to ask for the reserve cellar wine list, which is shown on an iPad similarly to Thomas Keller’s three-Michelin-star Per Se in New York, if they like their hamburgers to be accompanied by a $200 bottle of wine (seriously). The menu at Joey includes sushi as well as a few French words, including frites and demi.
However, it’s at Cactus—where you may get the greatest food—that you run the risk of falling victim to the trickiest illusion of them all. The concept behind the restaurant is that when you eat there, you are eating authentic Rob Feenie cuisine—food prepared by an Iron Chef—but at a discount price and in a setting you can identify with. It is described as “casual fine dining.” There is no such thing. However, in Vancouver, where Cactus Club is rife, I frequently run into recession-weary chefs and restaurateurs engaged in true fine dining who view Cactus Club as a direct and dangerous threat, one that not only drives away old customers but also causes those who remain to gripe about what they perceive to be exorbitant prices for products they view as fundamentally interchangeable.
Even the eateries at Coal Harbour or English Bay, which boast stunning views of the coast, are a quite different animal, it becomes clear upon closer examination. The Coal Harbour Cactus’ bar reminded me more of a large airport than, say, a restaurant because of its 10,000 square foot plus size when I sat there last summer. And it was actually tough for me to persuade my anxious subconscious that last call for our flight home would not suddenly be yelled out by some ominous PA.
The menu also has an unintentionally humorous defect that is shared with Cactus menus throughout the chain: a seemingly unending list of tiny “RF endorsements that come with Feenie-designed menu items. The program must have made sense when the chef first signed up, but now that it has been five years and 90% of the menu is designated as RF-endorsed, the lingering delicacies from earlier times seem to have been quarantined. If you must, get the fish tacos, but be aware that chef Feenie is not interested in working with you.
No idiot, I placed an order for RF-certified goods. Tuna sushi cones, which were the first course of my lunch, perfectly represented the Cactus culinary experience. On the one hand, you receive premium fresh tuna complemented with vibrant pickled ginger, tiny cilantro, green onion, and ripe avocado for a surprisingly tasty and reasonably priced ($4.50 each) taste of Feenie’s renowned culinary sensibility. On the other hand, you experience the taste of cuisine created by committee. The cones were as cumbersome as ice cream cones since they had been oversized for value-seekers rather than being small and delicate. Additionally, they were rolled in harmless marne nori (rice paper), a type of Japanese Wonderbread, rather than being wrapped in assertively flavorful nori (dried seaweed).
All of this to say, you can make chain restaurants’ food as good as you want, but it will always suffer from being made to please too many different people and from its ultimate goal, which is not to dazzle anyone except for the cautious diner who liked a dish at one location and then had it at another branch five kilometers away and was grateful that it tasted the same. If Cactus transports this east unharmed, it ought to be sufficient to overthrow several venerable regional chains. However, good independent eateries let you unwind.
Restaurant evolution: Cactus Club, like any business, keeps reissuing the same idea, albeit glitzier and more expensive every time.
Chef-approved: The Cactus Club menu features an absurdly long list of tiny “RF” endorsements next to Rob Feenie-designed goods.
Do the US have any cactus clubs?
With an amazing 27 current locations, Cactus Club is the model for restaurant chains that originated in British Columbia. The company is continuing to expand.
In reality, Cactus Club wants to more than treble its footprint south of the 49th parallel as well as in Canada.
Cactus Club founder Richard Jaffray stated in an interview at a recent event, the 26th annual BCBusiness Top 100 luncheon, that the business had only hit a fifth of its Canadian development potential.
60 new Cactus Club sites are expected to open around the country, including at least 20 in Ontario, where the Toronto location is already under development. The Kelowna, British Columbia site is also under progress and will open soon.
Once the chain’s Crispy Yam Fries and other signature dishes (several of which were created by Iron Chef contestant Rob Feenie) have reached saturation point in Canada, Cactus Club will probably shift its attention to America and possibly beyond.