Know your local sandwich artist

> THE TERM “SANDWICH ARTIST” HAS BEEN DESTROYED BY SUBWAY, BUT YOU LITERALLY ARE ONE. DOES THE TERM MEAN ANYTHING TO YOU? DO YOU SEE FOOD AS AN ART?

Oh yeah, for sure. I went to school for fashion design before I was a cook, and was a designer [for] lululemon. So I think about what a sandwich looks like—because we eat with our eyes, that’s very true—every time we’re making a sandwich, it’s not just like what it tastes like, but it’s also what it looks like. How we layer it. How it’s gonna come out in a way that maybe it wouldn’t have if I didn’t have that design background. Cooking is artistry even as much as it is a trade. Even if you compare us to the majority of other hoagie-style sandwich restaurants, a lot of them serve them fully wrapped up and cut in half in that kind of cross-section look that’s really popular on Instagram. When you get a sandwich here, and you’re eating it here, we’re definitely trying to layer and overload the sandwich in a way that doesn’t tuck and hide and push all the ingredients into the bun. Some people are a little intimidated because they’re like, Oh my, how do I eat this? You know, because it’s all sort of pouring out the top.

> WHAT’S THE THINKING OR PHILOSOPHY BEHIND THAT?

My whole philosophy around food is generosity in quantity and in flavour, really. It’s about just being generous with what we produce and what we provide.

We’re just trying to make better food— make something taste more delicious.

> AND THAT FEELS GOOD.

Yeah. I want people to leave here thinking, that was really good, and thinking about it and wanting more. We definitely aren’t afraid to put fresh things on the sandwich, you know? How many times do you get a meatball sandwich and it’s just meatballs and sauce and cheese and bread? And that can be great, but what if you have it with salad on it, like arugula or whatever. I really believe in the power of vegetables—like, they are not only delicious, but they’re really fun to work with.

We also make a lot of our meats and things like that in-house. We make our own roast beef. We do our own roast turkey. We have a pork loin that we do. That in itself is like another way to sort of make something obviously a lot different than something that’s laden with preservatives.

> HOW’S IT BEEN GOING SINCE YOU TOOK SAY HEY CAFÉ OVER?

I like to think I’ve brought my own vision or my own sort of approach to the style of sandwiches that the café had been doing before. I thought it was so sad that it had closed, because sandwiches are like the food of the people. There’s such a delicious thing that we all can kind of relate to a sandwich, and it felt like there was definitely a bit of a hole [in Vancouver] that didn’t really exist when it was originally open.

I think the concept is also really fun and

I think I’ve been able to infuse even more playfulness into it, with the food but also what the space looks like, by bringing in a little bit more of that deli energy to it.

> HAVE YOU THOUGHT ABOUT EXPANSION AT ALL?

It’s hard to say. I lived and worked for eight years in Paris and then around France, so my cooking ambitions are certainly well beyond what we’re doing here. I think this is a really wonderful outlet for flavour and obviously for using all the techniques and things that I have, but I definitely have passions that extend further beyond the little humble sandwich shop that we have. So I’m not entirely cer- tain if we want to maybe do [a] different concept within this space at night, or if we want to focus on expanding this business to other locations.

It hasn’t really been the most important thing right now, either. It’s just been really making sure that what we’re doing works and makes us what we need in order to really, really get by—because as you know, things have gotten expensive with ingredients and stuff like that. It’s a shock for everyone in this industry. So before really leaning into changing or doing too much else, we’re just going to really lean into what we’re building here. GS