Articles
Published July 2003
Café Season
With the summer in full swing many of us will seek out our favourite local cafes for a cool drink and good meal. If you're one of the regulars at Halifax's Elephant Eye Café and Décor you just might catch the Premier grabbing a salad.
Elephant's Eye Café is not the type of coffee shop you find on every corner these days. A combination of giftware and small furniture in the front section and a restaurant in the back give customers an opportunity to eat and shop at the same time."A lot of other places have set things and every one of those stores you go into have exactly the same dishes and products. Whereas for us, we just buy the things that we want to buy. Nobody has layed out a list of things we have to choose from. We buy what we like,” says co-owner Daphne Hocquard. Many of the furnishings they sell come from around the country such as Toronto and Montreal, along with the goods that Hocquard picks up a trade shows.
Unique products
So what makes this Acadian business so special? Hocquard believes that it is the furnishings and antique reproductions that bring people in, but it is the food that they stay for.
"People walk into the store and they stop. They get halfway up the store and realize there's a restaurant in the back and they tell me what a beautiful place and a lovely idea that they've never seen before,” says Hocquard. "I know we're not the only ones but a lot of people haven't seen anything like it.”
Hocquard's partner Brenda Critch runs the kitchen, which features a new menu everyday.
"Brenda goes shopping every morning, gets the freshest fish and vegetables available and starts making lunches when she gets here. Everything is bought and made local. She makes tea biscuits and scones to start, so we have that and homemade jam for the local morning crowd that comes in.”
Locals drive the business
While the tourists are a welcome addition to Elephant's Eye Hocquard says that it's the locals the really keep the café going. Having started with a good product and allowing word of mouth to be their advertising Hocquard feels confident that her business isn't about to become one of the many causalities of the competitive restaurant industry.
"When we get a client in the door, they sit down and they're fed, for the most part we keep them. If you can't get that customer to come back a second time, you've lost them. But what happens here is that we're starting to know customers by their name because they come back so often. We don't lose our customers, we become their place. There's a guy, John who's been coming here from the very beginning and his office calls us "John's Place”. They adopt us.”
Challenges
Of course, as successful as Hocquard and Critch have been they face many of the challenges that other small retailers face. Keeping up with regular expenses, and long hours have proven to be difficult at times. Hocquard points out that the pair had to make a conscious decision to open six days a week so that they could have time for themselves. Having been an entrepreneur since her 20's Hocquard knows that riding out various cycles is a key to keeping the business going.
"February is a slow month, but that's how it is in retail and through my experience in the food business I can say it's the same there too. In the retail business you can see pay periods, every two weeks you'll see these little spurts. Every now and then I take a look at my charts to see what's been going on."
