Gabrieau's Bistro

What’s the recipe for business success? For Gabrieau’s Bistro in Antigonish, Nova Scotia, it involves more than turning a profit. Owners Karen and Mark Gabrieau add entrepreneurial zest, mix in staff mentorship and concern for the environment, then top it off with heaps of community involvement. 

 Their accomplishments have been recognized with many awards and acknowledgments. Gabrieau’s Bistro won a 2008 Maritime Business Ethics Award (16-50 employees category) from the Better Business Bureau of the Maritime Provinces.
 
The Gabrieaus are a husband and wife team. “I’m the visionary and Karen’s the structure,” Gabrieau says. “If I open a new business, that’s my excitement, that’s what motivates me. But she’s the person who runs it after the fact.”
 
There’s a lot to run. Gabrieau’s Bistro, which opened in 1999, encompasses the restaurant and a catering service. Gabrieau’s Culinary Closet is a retail store featuring “cooking and entertaining essentials” and Hawthorne Property Rentals houses apartments and a banquet room. Together the businesses have an annual revenue of more than $1.6 million.
 
“When you’re an entrepreneur you don’t have freedom as in time off, but you do have freedom to make your own decisions, which I think is very important when you’re talking about quality of life or contributing to the betterment of other people’s quality of life,” says Gabrieau.
 
Evidence of the latter can be found at Gabrieau’s Bistro whose staff includes some employees with disabilities. Gabrieau says it is almost as if these individuals are “the glue that keeps the team together.”
 
“Many people think that it is an inconvenience or it’s time consuming, employing people with disabilities,” he says. “However, they are the absolute best employees one could ever have. It takes more time up front, but your investment comes back to you a hundredfold.”
 
Chris Cook is executive director of East Novability Society for Persons with Disabilities. In December 2008, Gabrieau and other employers who have hired people with disabilities were presented with certificates of appreciation.
 
“We’re thanking employers of our clients for recognizing that it makes great business sense to hire people with disabilities given their skills and the loyalty they have as employees,” he says. “They’re demonstrating good corporate citizenship by having a diverse workforce reflective of society in general.” 
 
Mentorship is also evident at Gabrieau’s Bistro, which was named Taste of Nova Scotia 2002 Restaurant of the Year. Gabrieau, the bistro’s chef, says of working with apprentices: “Ultimately in our business nobody’s a lifer, nobody’s with me forever. I have to do as much as I can for each individual within the timeframe that I have them to make them the best that they can be to go on.”
 
Sometimes their paths lead them back to Antigonish, as with the bistro’s sous-chef who apprenticed with Gabrieau, attended culinary school, worked in Toronto and then returned home.
 
Innovation is encouraged at the bistro, where Gabrieau says the focus is on “local ingredients and international flavours and cooking techniques.”
 
“I give the guys a well-equipped kitchen, really good food products, and what knowledge I can, and I motivate them to have fun and to experiment,” he says. “Then when they create something and the customer loves it they’re not just reproducing my cuisine.”
 
Creativity extends well beyond the kitchen to include service, menu design, décor and marketing. “That’s one of the things that’s great about the freedom of being an entrepreneur,” Gabrieau says. “You don’t have to live within this structure, you can change things as you see necessary. Not everything works, but you learn from it.”
 
The Gabrieaus aren’t afraid to turn to others to tap into their insights and expertise. Gabrieau attributes a willingness to reveal some vulnerability and ask for assistance to the sense of community that exists in Antigonish. “Here I think everybody has a stake in everybody else succeeding.”
 
Brian Segal is president & CEO of the Antigonish Area Partnership, on whose board Gabrieau sits. Segal speaks highly of the Gabrieaus’ varied contributions to the community, from their support of charities to their employment of individuals with disabilities. 
 
“The quality of what they serve and their whole overall approach to their business and to their place in the community, it’s all about doing an excellent job,” he says. “I think they stand out because of that. They’ve received lots of awards and they’ve have had lots of recognition and they deserve it.” 
 
One of these awards is the Eastern Region Solid Waste Management Committee’s 2007 Business Waste Management Award for Excellence in Waste Prevention, Education and Management.
 
While committed to recycling at the bistro, Gabrieau was frustrated that other restaurants weren’t complying with waste management rules. “I organized with the chamber of commerce a training session so that we would inspire or motivate people to become better corporate citizens with regard to the environment,” he says. “So instead of punishing people, we wanted to start rewarding people for doing a good job.”
 
Another initiative in which Gabrieau is playing a leadership role is Crumbs From the Table, an Antigonish charity which involves participating restaurants displaying collection boxes, with proceeds going to established charities.
 
“We’re such a wasteful society,” Gabrieau says. “I tell my guys in the kitchen when I get angry about waste, it’s not because of the dollars that are going in the garbage, it’s because of the people that are starving in the world and we don’t have the right to be wasteful.”
 
The Gabrieaus have given generously to their community and have received much from it. In fact, a small group of investors from the community was instrumental in the Gabrieaus being able to start the bistro nearly 10 years ago.  
 
When asked to sum up the advantages of doing business in Nova Scotia, Gabrieau replies: “We still have values and we make decisions based on those values. You can be successful and you can be successful in more of a human sense. In Nova Scotia I think we care more about people than wealth. And I think that’s what’s important.”

Feature story written by Marie Weeren