Interview by Rosanna Caira
Rosanna Caira: You opened a new restaurant just as the pandemic was landing on our doorsteps. What fuelled your decision?
Simon MacRae: We were both looking to put a restaurant in the city of Orillia (Ontario). We both felt that it really deserved a restaurant of this calibre. That was towards the tail end of 2019, before COVID was a thing. So, it was already well underway and about to be open before that hit.
Darcy MacDonell: Like all openings, we had some delays, and delays pushed it into the end of February, when we had nine business days before we got shuttered [due to COVID]. So, it was as bad as it gets in that sense.
RC: How did you handle that as a new restaurant?
DM: We got very lucky. The community saw us opening and had a hunger for it, really so we were very supported. We did a lot of crazy and innovative things throughout the lockdowns, and no matter what it was we tried, people came and bought it or supported it. We were doing fondue dinners outside and people were coming in their snowsuits. And those dinners sold out in three minutes. We had a line around the corner for Sunday night roast takeout. We were very lucky with the support we had from the community. Without that, it wouldn’t have worked.
RC: Darcy, you’ve operated some great restaurants in Toronto. What made you move your concepts to Orillia?
DM: I was told by my wife that we were moving to Orillia [in 2017]. Simon’s wife, they met in the U.K. but she’s from Orillia, so he was dragged here by his wife as well. And I commuted back and forth [to Toronto] for four years, while looking around and really trying to find the right location and the right idea. Unbeknownst to me, Simon was working on something in Orillia and people put us together. We joke that we speed dated for two months or so; we didn’t know each other but he had a nugget of an idea and an opportunity and I was able to come in and help.
SM: There were two things that really attracted me to the way that Darcy looked at restaurants. One was they had a big book in front of him with a dozen boxes also laid out and in those boxes were all the kinds of things that I cared about in restaurants, too. They were all things that would really delineate how the restaurant would look. And secondarily, I’d been around a bunch of different restaurants and different banks looking for money to set this up. Here was someone who also thought, ‘Oh, my goodness, yeah, this city needs a restaurant like this, this city needs a restaurant of this calibre,’ and didn’t have any of the same concerns that all of the banks had about where the nearest parking lot is, or how you’re going to turn operational profit within X period of time.
RC: Tell me a little bit about your food philosophy and what is it that you’re trying to promote through your food.
DM: First and foremost, we’re not chefs. We have a very talented chef (Ben Kersley) who has been with us since Day 1 and he’s now a minority partner in this restaurant. The three of us are equal partners at our new pub, the Hog and Penny. So, it’s a chef-driven restaurant. By and large, I would say it’s a farm-to-table bistro menu. We’re Feast On certified and other than some of the seafood, everything’s from Ontario. The menu is divided between vegetables and proteins and it’s one of those small independent menus that changes a little bit every month, printed in house. Chef sticks to some basics, but we let him be creative. And he’s really grown in the role he’s in and it’s made us a better restaurant.
RC: How are you finding the supply-chain dynamics changing in recent years?
DM: It was very difficult at the beginning to get the ingredients we wanted up to Orillia because we were the only restaurant up there buying the food we wanted to buy, so, to be fair to suppliers and vendors, it maybe wasn’t worth their while at the beginning. In the early days, I would get deliveries at Farmhouse Tavern in Toronto on a Thursday, load it in my Jeep and drive them back to the restaurant because they weren’t delivering here. Fast forward four years, there’s more restaurants in and around the Orillia area that are using some suppliers that we want to be using so it’s gotten better for us.
RC: How are you marketing your restaurant?
SM: There are two key things that we focus on. One is making sure [customers] leave the restaurant having had a great time. The best marketing we can have is if someone has a wonderful experience here then they’ll tell like-minded people to come up and see. We also focus on making sure our social media and our online presence is a good reflection of the story of the restaurant and the experience one could have here. So, making sure there’s good photo content, reliable menu content and detail on the website on social media so people can get a realistic interpretation of what the restaurant experience is going to be like.
RC: With labour shortage being such a big issue today, are you limited being in Orillia in terms of finding staff or has it been easier for you to find people?
DM: It was hard in the beginning; the calibre of people we attract now is drastically different and much better than it was four years ago. What we’ve worked the hardest on, and are the proudest of, is that we strive to be the number-1 choice as a hospitality employer in the area. We have people driving in from Gravenhurst and Barrie (Ont.) to work for us — people that are real industry pros and want to be in this industry because they love it and are looking for the best place to work. We’re putting strategies in place to recognize and train employees and we spend a fair bit of time and money on the hourly staff.
RC: What are you doing to ensure that your staff are treated well, paid well and motivated?
DM: We need to sell ourselves to an applicant, right? We’re not interviewing people, we’re showcasing ourselves, always putting our best foot forward and saying ‘we want to convince you there’s no other option.’ If we call people back for a second interview, we’re sitting them down and buying them dinner, letting them try our food and having either a cocktail or glass of wine, and having them talk to staff. So from Day 1, we’re spending the time and money to make it a clear choice for them. We do health-and-wellness benefits such as gym passes, physio and massage therapy for our staff. We’re lucky to be close to two ski hills so they can get a ski pass through the restaurant. Chef snowboards, I snowboard, some of our cooks snowboard, so we’re at Mount St. Louis three mornings a week before coming into work. Some of the team are big runners, a couple of go to CrossFit, it’s a pretty healthy culture in general.
SM: We’ve be lucky recently, as well, to have the vast majority of applicants come to us. We put a piece on our website to say who we are, what we do, how we treat our employees and let our reputation hopefully speak for itself. And therefore, we now get about half a dozen applicants a week at this time. People emailing in to say we want to come work for you.
DM: We’re at a point now, the calibre of the staff is getting so good, the quality of people we’re attracting is getting so high, that if some of these people are still here in the fall, we may need to do something else just to appease our talent pool. To me, that’s a pinnacle achievement when you have to grow to offer more opportunities to your people. And we’re getting really, really close to that, which is exciting.
RC: How do you divide your roles? And how do you take advantage of each other’s strengths, and sometimes your weaknesses?
DM: It’s a long learning curve. We co-exist much better now than we did in the early days. In the beginning, you’re maybe bumping heads more often and pushing back and trying to find where someone stands on something. And we’ve always said from Day 1 that we disagree on 100 little things all the time, but we’ve always agreed on the big, really important core-value decisions. And we’ve always agreed on how we want to be perceived and what we want to achieve. We’ll bicker a bit back and forth, or someone digs their heels in on something that’s really trivial, but at the end of the day, we also understand that that’s getting to a better answer.
SM: There are two great opportunities within that. One is that so long as we don’t dig our heels in too much, you have two sets of ideas. I always joke that Darcy comes up with 90 per cent of the ideas for this place anyway and that sort of that idea generation is astonishing. But a big part of that success also comes from neither of us digging our heels and trying each other’s strategies and plans. The other big part of what makes it a success is when you recognize the talents of each other. Therefore, we get to a solution often a lot faster, despite the fact that there’s more ideas in the pot to begin with.
RC: What would you say is your biggest challenge being in a partnership?
SM: My challenge is probably that by nature, I’m more cautious. I will overthink something and look for the unforeseen and consequences. Whereas Darcy is very much a ‘let’s go; let’s try it’.’ About 90 per cent of the time again, that leads to much better success as a business. There’s those scenarios where we’ll approach something differently, and having the flexibility to think ‘actually, I’m going to follow his lead on this one; I’m going to sit back and follow’ and that can be can be hugely beneficial.
RC: What’s been the biggest lesson that you’ve learned from your past restaurant experiences?
SM: One is the importance of restaurant culture and how that trickles down from ownership through senior leadership to middle managers and shift supervisors to the individuals on the frontlines, be it the servers, the cooks, the dishwashers, the bartenders. The other is work hard and be nice to people, and that’s a thing that I get up in the morning and say to myself, it’s a thing I’d say when I put my kids to bed at night. Because if you’re working hard and you’re being nice to people, then there’s very little that can go wrong. It’s a great philosophy for not just life but also for how one interacts with guests, customers, suppliers.
DM: I’ve had mentors and bosses that I’ve been lucky to work with, but from an entrepreneurial owner perspective, Peter Fowler at SIR Corp., Michael Bonacini and Peter Oliver at O&B and then Charles Khabouth (INK Entertainment) all had two things in common. One is they were always adamant that music be loud. They wanted their places to feel energetic and alive at all times. And the other one that they had in common was the audacity to take risks and to do things, the audacity to sink a bunch of money into something or a new market. And that was a big impact on me for sure.
RC: How would you like to see the industry change in order for it to become more successful and more sustainable?
SM: Much of it is heading in the right direction, but one thing that a lot of restaurant businesses learned as they went into the pandemic in the middle of March 2020, that it should have been seen as an embarrassment, really, to the industry, the number of restaurants that weren’t able to make their rent check on the first of April, or even who weren’t able to pay their suppliers for the food that was in the fridges or their staff for the hours worked the week before. And there’s a certain financial accountability and cashflow awareness that the industry realizes it needs to improve going forwards. When it comes to staff, particularly for those back of house, we need to play our part to realize that these people do a huge invaluable job and adjusting that balance in the industry is huge.
