 How do we make this takeout work? Like, aside from pizza and sushi, no one's really done it yet. Exactly. So, how do we really get people to want to believe they can get good fried chicken at home? When someone mentions comfort food, first thing that comes to mind is fried chicken. It's juicy, it's tender, it is hot and delicious. Today I'll be bringing you to Juke Fried Chicken, where we get to see how Justin and Brian took fried chicken to the next level. With their trademarked non-GMO gluten-free fried chicken recipe, coupled with a unique cocktail experience. Let's go behind the scenes to check out their secret sauce. Juke Fried Chicken is located just outside of downtown Vancouver, in an area known as Chinatown, known for its specialty restaurants and eccentric flavors. They open from 11am to 10pm and their main clientele are those wanting some quality comfort food on the go. Thanks for having me, Justin. Thanks for coming down. I heard so much great things about Juke. I love Juke, I love the batter, I love the crispiness and I love the fact that it's healthy. Tell me more about the concept behind Juke. So, the concept came about when I was working in a finer dining establishment. My business partner at the time was one of the head chefs in another finer dining establishment. And I kind of had this idea to do really high quality food like that, but in a really casual environment that I could wear whatever I want. Chef didn't have to be in chef whites in a hat and we could just really build the house we wanted people to come have fun in. So I had this idea for fried chicken, dining room, cocktail bar and takeout, but I couldn't really figure out how to make that work yet because I hadn't really seen it been done. So then I went traveling, gathered a few ideas and we came up with this with a lot of people's help. But gluten free. Yeah. That's the part that I'm mixed up. I'm like it doesn't taste like gluten free. Usually it tastes kind of like different. So we had a few recipes we were trying. Some old grandmother's recipes, friends recipes. And as we were taste testing, which was a lot of fun, we kept finding that the more we took the gluten out, the better it tasted and the better it held. We heated the next day and we just found it more delicious. And then I think that kind of struck a chord with Vancouver being a bit of a healthier city. We didn't know we weren't expecting it, but gluten free fried chicken kind of just took off. And you're like way ahead of the curve. You focus on delivery even before COVID. So you're well positioned to really capitalize on that. Yeah. When we were building out, I was already planning our own delivery service. So we partnered with these guys really early. I think we were one of the first restaurants on their platforms. And we all worked really hard together to kind of get their systems working with our systems. And it's, you know, since then it's worked really well. Other people are adapting to that model. And that's been our model since we've opened. You get to see behind the scenes. You do get to see behind the scenes. Let's go. Let's take a walk through the kitchen. Awesome. Now when it comes to the menu, Juke definitely stands out as a master of fried chicken, offering restaurant quality gluten free fried chicken with fast food convenience. But what truly makes Juke unique is when you step inside the chickeny room. That's when you can experience their extensive cocktail selection as well as indulge in more of your favorite comfort food. So this is our kitchen, a little takeout area right here and we're crossing into the kitchen where the team works super hard to make this right. So Juke, as you've mentioned, we do gluten free fried chicken. What makes ours a little bit different than everybody else is our fried chicken is brined for 24 hours. Brined for 24 hours. Brined for 24 hours. What does it look like? Just over here is what it looks like. What's the technique behind brining? I always hear about it. Wow, that's the secret. Basically, there's different ways to do it. You can pickle brine, you can buttermilk brine. We choose to do buttermilk with herbs and spices. Sits overnight for 24 hours. What's the purpose of that? Tenderizes the chicken a bit, fuses it with a little more flavor, makes it nice and juicy for when you deep fry it and holds in all that flavor. So what we do is we brine it and then we roll it in our custom dredge, which is our gluten free base. It comes looking like this and then we go to a special machine where we call this the burge cage. Close the burge cage, turn around over here. Drop the birds in this. 50 pieces for 25 minutes. 15 minutes, sorry. Told you he was going to correct me. 50 pieces for 15 minutes and then it comes out golden and crisp. So what's so special about this machine? Tell me more. There's not many of them, first off. I haven't seen this before. But instead of an open deep fryer, this is a pressure fryer. So you put it in, you seal it, and then basically the temperature and all your oils heat to one consistent level. Like convection oil. Kind of. This keeps it consistent. So all of the pieces of chicken from the top to the bottom cook at the same rate, the same temperature. This will be your most expensive piece. Do you care to share? I think this one was about $12,000 to $15,000. Wow. And how many do you guys serve a day? Like these guys just crank them out? So we do 50 pieces every 15 minutes and they usually sell about every 20 minutes. So by the time they're done resting, we sell them. Non-stop, the whole day. Especially at night with, you know, we work with three different delivery services. We have our takeout, then our chickeny room is our bar and cocktail lounge that we have as well. So it's always moving. It's always rotating, it's never sitting long. Yeah, it's just... Can we see the chicken? You definitely can see some chicken. We're going to bring over our chef Clay. He's going to make probably our most popular item, which is our jukebox. That's too bad. Because we do fried chicken and ribs, jukebox is two pieces of chicken, three ribs, and a side of your choice. We choose to do our peanut slaw, which is always, like, a favorite. My business partner and chef, Brian, I call him the king of sauces. The king of sauces. The best sauces in the world on anything I've tried. So we have, like, four different hot sauces. We do our barbecue sauce. Everything made in-house. Everything made in-house. My business partner works really hard. I'm fortunate. I've got two kids at home. So he... I do everything I can to take what I can off his hand. Yeah, yeah. But being the chef, being the guy coming up with all the new menu items, he works super hard at what he does. And he's got a great team that executes. That's awesome. I love the fact that you're giving him so much credit. And of course, like, it's definitely the necessary paid credit, right? It's a team, right? It's a team. He helps me where I can. I help him, especially over the last few months. He's been here a lot more than I have. Beautiful. Let's go for a chat. Yeah, let's go for a chat. Go for an eat. Go for an eat. Beautiful. Now, because they mainly deal with fried fruits and require specialty kitchen equipment, the total investment for juke is definitely on the higher end. On the bright side, the labor cost is substantially lower than typical restaurants since they focus mainly on takeout and delivery. All in all, juke stands out as a very unique concept and it's truly inspiring how Justin and his team has brought such a crazy idea to life. Oh, this looks delicious. Enjoy. We'll send you guys off with a bunch of food. Beautiful. I love that. Thank you. Cheers to that. Thanks for having me. Thanks for coming down. So tell me more about this whole concept. You told me you went to London with your wife. You're like, this idea of fried chicken and barred don't really mix. I didn't think it would mix, but it works here. I was in New York actually the weekend I was going to propose to my wife. Four years ago? Five. No, we've been married for eight. So proposed nine years ago. So I had the concept for a long time before we actually made it happen. And we went to this place. It wasn't a fried chicken place, but they had fried chicken on the menu. And I was like, hmm, I could do something like this, but we could like really flesh it out and make it ours. And that's like the food I love to eat. So I had that idea to do like a fried chicken restaurant. But I was like, in Vancouver, my biggest concern I always said was a rainy Tuesday in February where you might have like donuts, like no one coming in the door. So I was like, how do you combat that? How do you get revenue coming in while still trying to take care of people that may not want to come in? So then I started to think about takeout. So I was like, how can you do and being a bartender is my background. I was like, how do you open a really great cocktail bar but offer takeout that works well and doesn't just look like it's an afterthought. And I didn't know how to do that. So the next trip we went on, we were in London just walking around on a rainy day. And we walked into an Indian restaurant and it was really authentic Indian when you walked in. But as we kind of turned the corner, it was like all these bright vibrant colors, like all the street food and it was basically just a takeout area. And something clicked and I was like, that's how we can make jukework. Like you give full attention to that takeout area. Like you make it so it's a huge part of your restaurant, not an afterthought. So the big thing is restaurants is seats, like they generate your revenue. So I was like, how do I give up 30 to 40% of my restaurants and lose that seating. So we knew we had to make sure takeout was done right. My business partner, Brian Satterford, he and I had worked on and off since we were kids, like since we were like 19. So my wife always said, if we're going to do this restaurant, you're only doing it with Brian. And I was like, that's a hard sell. Like Brian at the time was the head sous chef at Hawksworth, which is one of Vancouver's finest dining places. I was running a restaurant called Shambar and we'd just gone from our old restaurant at Shambar and I was integral in like the new development of their two-story, like 350 seat place. So convincing Brian to leave a super high end establishment and come to a little fried chicken place, I didn't think it was going to be easy. But he was really happy to do it and so we dove in. That's so cool. Usually the most wisest idea ever comes from you traveling, being inspired and that's why it's so cool to be able to have you bring that concept that worked in New York, that worked in London and morphed it into something that works within the local community. I think that's the most important part and obviously you have to give credit to your wife. I give all the credit for everything to my wife. Cheers to that. You know how it is? Totally and it's something that I want to make sure that we definitely do is because that's usually the case. They're the ones that inspires you the most and you guys talk about random ideas and I don't give enough credit to my wife which is why I wanted to get some brownie points right now. I give her credit for everything that I do. For the wives. She was fully supportive. She knew I wanted to do this but she's like you need to know how to do it. Totally. And so for me, I'm born and raised in Toronto and in Toronto they have a lot of lounges which means it's not a club, it's not a restaurant you can just go out and have a drink and listen to great music. And I know you can't do that in Vancouver so I was like how do we make that feeling here. I just kind of made this room based everything on textures kind of chicken feet along the wall like almost like chicken skins on the banquets like everything was textured and part of the reason for everything being textured was it gives a great look but it also works in reflecting sound when you're really working with music and music was a huge part of why I wanted to call it juke. Gotcha jukebox. There you go. At the time I was as I said opening that other restaurant which took a lot out of me and Brian had just left Hawksworth and he was opening some restaurants for a friend and while Brian was researching chicken our good friend Corde was like hey what are you doing he's like you researching chicken he's like I want to open a chicken restaurant after we do this and so we all got on a call and I was like Corde used to own a place called meat and bread he was one of the founders and he was like let's bring him in so then we all got together and started looking for places So you're the server right there it's crazy you're so casually bringing these names and for our viewers that don't know what these places are these are like one of the top restaurants in Vancouver and you're just so casually you know me and Brad oh you know Hawksworth, you know Chambar these guys are like the top restaurants and you guys are like the great minds are coming together the masterminds to get this place so you open doors and you're like what's the marketing do you have to do a lot of marketing to get people through the doors so I think the three of us were fortunate being from those restaurants that you mentioned that people kind of knew of us or were excited to see what these three guys from these three places would be doing and at that time though delivery third party deliveries still hadn't come to town yet so they were about a month away so we really looked into how do we make this take out work like aside from pizza and sushi no one's really done it yet so how do we really get people to want to believe they can get good fried chicken at home so then the goal was just get that green box in everybody's house get it, anyone leaving here send them off with chicken even if they don't pay for it just send them home with chicken get that green box in their fridge and so the more we got that green box in people's fridge I think they really understood what we were trying to do and then Instagram had been going for a few years but it wasn't really a restaurant marketing thing at the time so we hopped on that wave pretty early and I think that really started and the thing with Instagram or any restaurant like word of mouth is your best business but when people are promoting you on Instagram like hey I just dying to you you should try this place out and we can repost that it was just like really good relationships were formed we had people here every day for our first month like every day and I was like that might not be the healthiest thing for you but even though it's clean and free right so yeah it took some time but you know we made it so big plans, big plans for chickadee, juke's yeah so when I was writing the business plan the goal was to do a juke every two years in any different capacity it might just be a little take out window it might be a food truck but the goal was to always be doing that I think Brian and I have also learned we have a lot of different concepts we wanted to do so we opened a plant based restaurant called beatbox also music related right but so then we've got our theme of keeping things music related but we can play in any avenue and Brian's such a good chef like he can make any food and it keeps him engaged and you know every time you do a new restaurant it's just like thrilling for your first 12 months but it all depends what we want to do and where we want to go but we also know you know the pandemic is hard it's going to hit people hard unfortunately not everyone's going to survive it but we're fortunate to be doing what we're doing we're fortunate to have the stuff we have and if we're lucky to move into another restaurant after thank you thank you so much for sharing all these secret sauces thank you for your time so there you go guys the secret sauce behind juke fried chicken's massive success Justin and Brian's philosophy is simple relationship relationship relationship whether it be relationship with your vendors relationship with your partners relationship with your staff those are the things that would make you truly successful thank you so much for watching this episode of the secret sauce I'll see you guys next time