When Kevin Munroe and partner Shelley Bouchard opened the Mad Chef Café in Downtown Courtenay last November, their mission was nothing less than to shake up the Comox Valley dining scene. Barely two months after opening their doors, they’re already off to a good start.
The Mad Chef Café has quickly become popular with those looking for a casual dining experience with a bit of an edge, or at least one that’s different from what’s currently available. Its menu features such original creations as “The Boom! Boom! Steak and Prawn Stack,” a hearty soup known as “Sweet Curry Meets Fruit Fury” and, for those who don’t mind a little spice, “Rectum Sensation” chicken wings.
Even more controversial is the name of Munroe’s most popular sandwich: “Animals Taste Good.” But while the name may be as offensive to the militant vegan set as a leather-clad Republican cowboy on a dude ranch, Munroe insists that he’s not out to offend.
“It doesn’t matter what it says on the menu, as long as it tastes amazing,” says Munroe. And besides, when grilled chicken, crispy bacon and piles of shaved ham are topped with pepper smoked Brie and “crazy” mayo, animals really do taste pretty good.
“It’s insane food with attitude,” declares Munroe, a red seal chef who’s worked the kitchens of Valley hot spots like Atlas Café, the Kingfisher Resort and the Pier Bistro. “It’s not your ordinary menu. It’s not Italian, it’s not Mexican; it’s just awesome food with no pretension.”
Almost as popular as the food itself, says Munroe, has been what he calls the “attitude.” Each item description on the menu is followed by a clever quip, like “Welcome to the jungle,” “Who’s your Mad Daddy?!” or, in the case of Animals Taste Good, “Snort, growl, bark, moan or just do whatever it takes to get this one down!”
“Everybody’s been loving the attitude,” says Munroe. “With so much negative going on in the world today, this is a place where even the menu can make you laugh. No one laughs as much as they should.” That, perhaps more than anything else, is what the Mad Chef Café is really all about.
“We believe in fun dining,” says Bouchard. “There’s nothing worse than going out to a restaurant where you just don’t feel comfortable; where you have to watch how you sit and which fork you use. This isn’t that kind of place. It’s a place where you can relax, be yourself and just enjoy great food with great friends.
And the Comox Valley certainly has been enjoying it. In its first month of business, Bouchard says the Mad Chef Café was consistently feeding more than 100 hungry customers a day. In a cozy space that only seats 26, tables were being “flipped,” or re-sat, as many as five times during a single lunch service.
“Business has been phenomenal,” says Munroe. “So far we’ve done much better than we expected we would do.
“A lot of people have been coming in from out of town,” he continues. “We’ve had so many questions about whether we’re a chain, and everybody wants to know if we’re in their city. Even the Mad Chef Wear has been taking off!”
Munroe’s Mad Chef Wear clothing collection, available exclusively at the Mad Chef Café, includes toques, hats, onesies (in “Chick Pea” and “Bean Sprout” varieties) and t-shirts featuring memorable captions like “Tofu Ninjas Kick Ass” (the graphic depicts three SpongeBob-esque tofu nuggets kicking, punching and hurling carrot nunchuks at a defenseless donkey).
“We had 20 Animals Taste Good t-shirts made and only three of them were left after Christmas,” says Bouchard. “We’ve had a lot of people buying them for their vegan friends or vegetarian friends.”
So what’s the secret to the Mad Chef Café’s early success? Part of it surely has to do with its feisty and slightly irreverent brand, and opening up just in time for the Christmas rush likely didn’t hurt either. But what some may be inclined to chalk up as fortunate timing is at least partly due to the buzz generated by an incredibly effective publicity campaign before the restaurant even opened.
For starters, Munroe and Bouchard had been driving around the Comox Valley for months in trucks emblazoned with “Mad Chef Café” in a vibrant green font, with “Coming soon” printed just below.
“I’d have people stopping me at red lights and yelling at me, asking when we were going to open,” recalls Munroe. “People were so excited by the name; they were like, ‘What is that?’”
Young and web savvy entrepreneurs as they are, Munroe and Bouchard were also quick to take their budding venture online with a Facebook fan page. On the world’s largest social media site, the duo posted updates, photos and teasers as their building was being renovated, attracting more than 400 followers before they even opened. (Munroe and Bouchard just awarded a free cheesecake to their 500th fan last month.)
Now that they’re open, Munroe and Bouchard continue to use Facebook to share photos, stories and, perhaps most notably, their daily specials.
“We’ve been getting lots of orders for our free downtown delivery, and a lot of it is because of Facebook,” says Bouchard. “There are so many people working downtown who call or come in for our specials. We don’t even have to tell them what the special is, they already know.”
The budding realm of social media marketing is one thing, but isn’t this the ultra competitive restaurant business, where the cardinal marketing rule of “Location Location Location” rings truer than ever? Maybe so. Either way, the owners of the Mad Chef Café, which sits on Fitzgerald Avenue just an aggressively flipped burger away from Fifth Street, feel they’ve got that one covered too.
“If I were to open up anywhere in town it would be this location,” says Munroe. “It’s the perfect size, and we’re visible from one of Downtown Courtenay’s busiest intersections.” The restaurant occupies the former site of Orbitz Pizza, which closed down after a fire ripped through the building and forced several businesses to relocate due to smoke damage.
“I think that more than anything this corner needed to be reactivated,” says Bouchard. “A lot of the businesses that we’ve talked to on the block said that this part of Fifth Street has been dead since the fire. There was no foot traffic; you’d never see anyone on the block.”
While the growing popularity of the Mad Chef Café is certainly starting to change that, Munroe and Bouchard hope to do even more to breathe new life into the block.
Once the weather allows, the Mad Chef Café will feature a long, 18-seat patio along Fitzgerald Avenue that Munroe and Bouchard hope will become a popular summertime hangout for local urbanites. And with the Broken Spoke Coffee House, located just around the corner, planning to open its own patio in the spring, the Mad Chef Café could become the hub of a hip new urban strip.
With all the buzz and anticipation surrounding the opening of the Mad Chef Cafe, I was excited to finally try it out for myself.
As soon as I stepped through the door for my first Mad Chef experience, I knew that this would be a fun place. The vibrantly painted walls, in funky green, orange and grey hues, reverberated with the hum of the lunchtime crowd. My wife and I were fortunate to snatch the last remaining table, and so we hungrily grabbed our menus and began perusing.
If I’ve learned anything about Kevin Munroe, it’s that he doesn’t do anything half-assed. So instead of a simple one-page offering of standard fare like you might find at another brand new restaurant, we got to leaf through seven pages of soups, salads, “clubwiches” and lots more. Luckily, there was plenty of “attitude” to keep us entertained along the way.
Munroe is especially proud of his unrivalled selection of 10 different burgers—er, I mean “Crazy Mental Psychotic Insane Mad Chef Burgers”—which include chicken, duck, lamb, seafood and two vegetarian varieties. Then there are the seven ciabatta-bread pizzas, including the “Hawaiian Hammer,” the “Double Ducker” and the “Chicken Chicka Wow Wow.”
My wife, who’s a celiac, found several gluten-free options and eventually chose two appetizers, the spicy and flavourful Tongue Tantalizing Tiny Tuna Tacos and the Stuffed Alligator Pears (an avocado stuffed with fire roasted red onions, smoked corn, fresh cilantro and three cheeses).
As it turns out, the Mad Chef Café is quite accommodating of guests with dietary considerations, such as celiacs and—despite all the “Animals Taste Good” rhetoric—vegetarians. In fact, since our visit the Mad Chef Café has created a special celiac menu, highlighting items that are gluten-free or can be easily altered to be so.
The restaurant is also becoming a quick hit with kids, who receive a paper Mad Chef’s hat that they can color and wear, as well as a dish of homemade cotton candy with every meal.
As a young boy studiously colored his chef’s hat at the next table over I finally decided to try the Mad Chef Burger. My decision was made partly because of the way the menu dared me to try it (“Are you MAD enough?”) and partly because whenever Munroe talked about his signature burger he’d be overcome by the sort of giddy excitement normally reserved for high school boys who inadvertently discover a Victoria’s Secret catalog in their mailbox.
Once I tried it, I could see why he was so excited.
Several years ago I set out on an informal quest for the best burger in the Comox Valley. If the Mad Chef Burger had been around back then, it would have won hands down. The garlic and green peppercorn all-beef patty would have won the contest on its own. The piles of shaved ham and the ice cream scoop of Munroe’s homemade “kick-ass beer cheese” that slowly oozed across the patty put it over the top.
As we dined, our waitress sauntered past with a massive chocolate brownie laden with sautéed Kahlua bananas, fresh mango and ice cream. It was the Mad Chef’s most popular dessert, the Chocolate F Bomb, and it was unfortunately destined for another table. Even more unfortunate was the fact that, once I’d worked my way through my burger and a side of brick-seared yams, there was no way I could even think about dessert.
The Mad Chef Burger is certainly the best I’ve ever eaten in the Comox Valley, and it rivals the best I’ve had anywhere in the world. But Munroe and Bouchard are getting used to this sort of praise. A local food critic recently recognized the Mad Chef Café as home to the best salmon burger he’d ever eaten, and three separate Facebook fans have voted its caesar salad the best in the Valley.
Nonetheless, the Mad Chef shows no signs of complacency. Every day Munroe comes up with new features for his fresh sheet, and he’s continually experimenting with exotic new creations, much to the satisfaction of his partner.
“The other day Kevin was experimenting with a “cheeseburgerrito,” says Bouchard. “It was a cheeseburger, bun and everything, wrapped in a tortilla and baked. It was so good! Another time he made these taco shells out of asiago cheese and made beef tenderloin tacos. I could have eaten those all night!”
The Mad Chef Café is expected to celebrate its official Grand Opening sometime in February. In the meantime, it’s open for lunch and dinner Monday through Saturday at 492 Fitzgerald Avenue in Downtown Courtenay.
To browse the Mad Chef Café’s menu online, and for other information, visit www.MadChefCafe.net or become a fan on Facebook.