Restaurant reality
Ottawa couple welcomes TV crews into their now-booming business
LOCAL RESTAURANTEURS CAROLINE Ishii and Dave Loan put it all on the line a little over a year ago when they decided to finally open their own place. In between getting loans, finding a location, missing contractors, electrical problems, a fire, and staffing problems, the couple surely had enough on their plate without risking their relationship or their sanity trying to document the whole process for a series on the W Network—but they did it anyway.
In the fall of 2008, Ishii and Loan sat down and re-evaluated where their lives were at. They’d been running a catering business for several years, since Ishii went to New York for chef’s school to realize her dream of making a living by her talents in the kitchen. “We had been running ZenKitchen as a catering company doing small-event catering, as well as offering a monthly gourmet vegan dinner out of the Chelsea Club,” explains Loan. “We’d done that for a number of years and were wondering about the next step.”
“Every time we did these monthly dinners it would just about kill us,” Loan says. “Friday night I would leave work and go straight to the Chelsea Club, this private club downtown, and work until two in the morning, cooking.
“We’d be back the next morning, cook all day, we’d serve dinner, then at two in the morning Saturday night we’d be packing the car and moving everything home again.”
The experience was enough to show the couple that they needed a change.
“It was really exhausting,” says Loan. “Within a year we [needed to decide] on a new direction for this business or [we would] just give it up.”
They decided they would sacrifice their life’s savings and sanity—and hopefully not their relationship—to finally open their own vegan restaurant. And so, ZenKitchen was reborn.
“While it might seem like a small niche, we’re finding more people are coming to us,” says Ishii. “For example, a table will come and there will be omnivores, carnivores, vegetarians, vegans, and people with dietary restrictions. They’re all coming at one table and they can all eat together and feel satisfied and happy. I really love that fact that everyone can eat together and everybody is respected.”
Ishii does find that sticking to the restaurant’s vegan mandate can be a challenge on occasion, but it is a challenge she finds more exciting than daunting.
“It’s a huge challenge for a chef—to take away your normal crutches like butter and cream. How do you get full flavours from the purest ingredients?” she asks. “That’s always a challenge for me and I love that, so it’s been great. I really believe in trying to change people’s minds through their palette.”
At the same time, they found out from some friends of theirs that Ottawa production company, Mountain Road Productions, had a casting call out for a couple trying to open a restaurant.
“We applied and Mountain Road interviewed us, shot a pilot, and W Network bought the show,” Loan says.
Ishii explains why they decided to document an already stressful process for television.
“I did it [to show] the real story behind what it’s like to really open a business where you don’t have a lot of money—we’re just a normal couple with a dream, a really crazy dream,” she says. “I think it’s nice for people to see what’s really going on [and] I think it was great for the city of Ottawa—sometimes Ottawa gets a bad rap for being a boring, conservative government town. That’s not the case. [There are] a lot of foodies in this city, and a lot of people that are really into new food and new restaurants. We wanted to showcase that.”
The first episode of The Restaurant Adventures of Caroline and Dave aired on Jan. 6 to rave reviews.
“I love the show,” says Ishii, “I think it’s great. I was really worried before—we have no control over editing or anything. It was very fast-paced, and when I saw it I had the same emotions that I had when I was going through some of the stuff [depicted].
“I think [the audience] can kind of relate, in some ways, everybody has human drama and human relationships,” she adds. “That’s what makes life go all around, and people are always wondering how to get through that.”
Even before the show began, business at ZenKitchen was booming, but Ishii and Loan have found there’s been a surge in new customers.
“We’ve had a lot of new diners coming in over the past couple of weeks—customers that we haven’t seen before,” says Loan. “They’re coming in, saying, ‘We’ve been watching the show, we really like it!’
“Somebody [even] joked that his wife had told him, ‘Yeah, this is why we’re never opening a restaurant together’.”
ZenKitchen is located at 634 Somerset St. W. The menu and hours are available online at zenkitchen.ca.
