Justin Tisdall, Co-founder and Owner of Juke Fried Chicken and Beetbox, landed in the food hospitality world by successfully merging the classic concepts of comfort food, quality food, and takeout to create a competitive edge and continue to grow as a leader in Vancouver’s food scene.
The concept was fine dining, but making it accessible and approachable to people on a daily basis. That’s what Juke Fried Chicken is, the idea was a cocktail bar with fried chicken.
“We use our restaurants as our offices, so I’m always close to my team and our guests. That’s the culture we want to foster and the community we want to build. You’ve got these people you care about and they care about you and if you can help them reach their goals in life, that’s huge to me. We are all about developing a team that wants to push us in the same direction, and in turn we reinvest in them and their goals. I guess that’s what being in a community is all about.”
Question: How are you supporting other local businesses?
Answer: At Juke we have always focused on hyper-local and sustainability. We use the best birds we can source. 100% of our Chicken comes from Rossdown Farms. We also work with great local brands such as Legends Haul for our other meat and ingredients and local companies like Benny’s (in Chinatown) and Yen Brothers. Many of the cocktail items we use in our cocktail bar attached to Juke, The Chickadee Room, are hand-picked from our great purveyors in our neighborhood of Chinatown.
For our packaging, we use CasePak which is also a local company.
We buy from local businesses for our services whenever we can. Our insurance provider is local, our accountants are a local couple, our repair and maintenance, equipment suppliers, and tradespeople are all local. For our graphic design, we use Glasfurd & Walker and Andrew McGuire Designs, and for signs and printing, we use Franklin Signs, Signmaster, and Initial Print. We use a Point of Sale system from BC’s Auphan Software, and our packaging is from Tapio in Richmond. When building and renovating, we use Pacific Solutions Contracting and we use local materials and partner with local artists. We worked with a local welder to make our chairs.
Question: What social and environmental practices are you proud of?
Answer: In Chinatown we work hard to be a part of our community and make all feel welcome. Our approach to food, our staff, and the community are all the same – we want it to be affordable, and we everyone to feel welcome and safe. And our restaurants are safe places for minorities and those in the LGBTQ2S+ community. As a BIPOC owner, I’m conscious of how we hire and who we hire. We pay fair wages and provide benefits to all of our full-time staff. We try to be generous with our team – we feed them, we support them with what they need in their lives, and many of them have been with us for years.
Since day one, we made all our packaging compostable or the most enivronmentally conscious products. We keep up to date on the environmental standards and are working with Oceanwise to figure out what the best packaging should be. We need to do the right thing, and the cost can be pretty high for an independent business, but we’ve never compromised on that because we couldn’t sleep at night if we didn’t. We’ve always separated our food scraps from the garbage for composting, and we work with our suppliers to get them to limit the plastics and packaging they deliver to us. Many of our light fixtures, signs, and furniture have been upcycled from TV shows.
In The Chickadee Room, we have created a program called ‘Cocktails for a Cause’ where each month we work with a charity and a spirit brand and create a cocktail list. $1 from every cocktail sold goes to supporting these charities. We are now in year 3 of this program. (you can scroll through Chickadee’s instagram and see all the charities we work with).
We support a lot of local charities. We’ve worked with Vancouver Pride and the Downtown Eastside Women’s Centre. We also work with Mealshare, donating meals to youth in need. We send lunches to a low-income, high-risk school in Chinatown, we’ve done some work with Saplings outdoor children’s program, and have done some work with Black Lives Matter children’s charities. We focus a lot on helping kids because we feel that the better off they are, the better our communities is will be.
Follow @jukefriedchicken on Instagram: