As much as we adore the cozy hues and brisk air of autumn, we all understand the “The best time of the year is quickly approaching. Additionally, the “It can be a bit stressful most fantastic. Therefore, in the midst of the hectic holiday season, we cordially encourage you to visit Cactus and take a break to enjoy some fun times with the ones you cherish most.
Giving a Cactus gift card enables your friends and family to pamper themselves to our seasonal cocktails and specialties while checking their stress at the door.
With in-store and online alternatives, we’re making purchasing easier than ever this year. The best part is that giving results in receiving gifts. Get a $15 bonus card for yourself* when you purchase a $75 Cactus gift card.
E-GIFT CARDS
Give online instead of physically by sending an e-gift card to their mailbox. Both dine-in and online pick-up orders are accepted when using our E-gift cards (and bonus E-gift cards*).
CLASSIC GIFT CARDS
Our traditional gift cards come in a chic holiday sleeve, which makes them ideal for inserting into envelopes. Gift cards are available for purchase both online and in-store and can be used for both dine-in and online pick-up orders. Only dine-in transactions are permitted with physical bonus cards*.
LARGE ORDERS
We’ll add your corporate logo for no extra cost to every purchase of $1,000 or more. Additionally, on any orders above $500, you’ll receive additional gift cards worth up to 20% back.
The US has Cactus Club, right?
A premium casual restaurant business with Canadian ownership, Cactus Club Cafe got its start in North Vancouver, British Columbia. Since then, the business has grown to include 31 sites across Canada, including additional facilities in British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Ontario. Restaurant chain Cactus Ltd.
Can Cactus Club gift cards be used on Doordash?
Yes, some drinks and cocktail kits are deliverable through DoorDash and Uber Eats (where available). All orders for alcohol must also contain food, and delivery personnel will need to check your ID. If these requirements are not completed, your order can be canceled.
We are sorry if our delivery partners are unable to reach you; their delivery radius is defined by our delivery partners.
No, planned orders are not offered right now. The ordering window is only scheduled to open as soon as possible.
Combos for Health Care Hero can only be picked up in Cactus locations. To place an order, you can do so online or by calling the restaurant directly.
Who is the Cactus Club’s owner?
On Wednesday, a significant transaction in the BC restaurant sector was revealed. Richard Jaffray, the original owner of Cactus Club, has sold the entire business to the Fuller family, who also operate Earls Kitchen + Bar.
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 they sell Target gift cards at Walmart?
You must be familiar with using a gift card when you shop if you are the type of customer who prefers to do it at their leisure without having to go to the store or wait for the cashier to make your payment. Find out if Walmart sells Target gift cards.
No, Walmart does not sell Target gift cards. Given that Target and Walmart are both retail establishments, it may seem a little pointless for Walmart to provide Target Gift Cards given the two businesses are rivals. You may always visit any local Target location or get them from the retailer’s website if you’re wondering how to get Target gift cards.
Joey owns Cactus Club, right?
Beyond sharing similar themes and menu items, Cactus Club, Earls, and Joey Restaurants all have one thing in common: they are currently all owned by the Fuller family.
Following a protracted court struggle, the Fuller family declared it had fully bought the Cactus Club from its president and founder Richard Jaffray.
Leonard Earl “The eateries Earls and Joey were founded by Bus Fuller. He also made an early investment in Cactus Club, which Scott Morison and Jaffray launched in 1988. Morison and Jaffray both used to work for Earls. Because Jaffray sold his ownership part to the Fullers after Morison left the company in 2004, he will vacate his position as president in March.
“We are incredibly proud of what Richard has created. Under his direction, Richard and the Cactus team created and expanded an exceptional restaurant brand and concept, building strong and enduring relationships with customers in the process. We are happy to be assuming 100% ownership of the business because our family has been a partner in Cactus Club from the very beginning, the Fullers said in a news statement.
Since Jaffray claimed he wasn’t properly notified of a transfer of Cactus Club shares in 2018, he and the Fullers have been engaged in a legal dispute. The Fullers disputed the existence of the transfer.
Jaffray also had issues with the way Joey Restaurants was run. Joey competed directly with Cactus Club, and Jaffray wanted to discontinue giving the Fullers audited financial documents because they felt it provided Joey an unfair advantage. The case was ultimately dismissed.
Then the family retaliated, claiming that Jaffray had embezzled corporate funds by charging excursions on private jets and purchases of art for his residence.
It appears the parties are putting the bad blood behind them after Wednesday’s statement.
“The group who turned Cactus Club into Canada’s top casual fine dining brand has my utmost respect. There is no finer team anywhere, and I have no doubt that they will maintain the Cactus Club brand’s success in the years to come, according to Jaffray.
The Fullers expressed appreciation for their partnership with Jaffray and their best wishes for him “only the very best for the future.