And my colonoscopy doctor, as I was getting my colonoscopy, told me that he took his wife there for her first date, for their first date, so there you go. Pizza and pasta is one of the most popular dishes in the world, yet having a truly authentic Italian experience is still highly sought after when you want to just enjoy a night out with your friends and family. Today I'm going to bring you behind the scenes to Nuq, one of Vancouver's top Italian spots, and to check out their secret sauce behind their true success, let's check it out. There are four locations in Vancouver where you can find a Nuq restaurant, and today we'll be heading to the Olympic Village location, an area well known for their scenic views and their active lifestyle. Nuq is open from 5pm to 10pm daily, and their main clientele are those looking for a classic dining experience with delicious Italian cuisine. It's a busy one, I think it's popular because it's a very simple restaurant. We do a handful of things and we do them well, we make everything in house, and I don't think pizza and pasta are ever going to go out of fashion. And the people seem to like it, it's simple. Simple and everybody knows what it is that we're trying to sell them, we're not trying to sell them something they've never seen before, we just serve them a handful of pastas and a handful of pizzas that they all know and they seem to like. And I think another reason we're popular is we were really one of the first people to do it in a modern setting, not an old school Italian setting with a seven page menu. We were really one of the first people to modernize the experience. We haven't really modernized the food, just the experience. That's awesome, and everything is made in house, and you have this huge pizza. Yeah, we have different ovens in every restaurant. This is the biggest one here. It's huge, it's almost too big. But yeah, they're meant to emulate a wood burning oven. They're gas, which is, I wanted wood burning originally, but my original location, wood would not be allowed. It's very difficult to get a permit to put a wood burning oven and thankfully I couldn't. So we have gas and now we're not Boy Scouts, we're cooks. We just turned the oven on and a couple hours later it's ready to go. Do we get to check it out? We will get to check it out, yes you get to. If you want to make it on pizza, I don't actually make pizza. I don't know how to do it, but follow me. Now when it comes to their menu, Nook keeps it incredibly simple and straightforward, offering only a handful of pastas, pizzas, and appetizers to go along with their line selection. The philosophy of Nook is to make simple yet delicious food using the highest quality of ingredients. And judging by the pasties every single night, I think this is definitely a recipe for success. Okay, come with me to the kitchen. This is Lucas, he's going to be making the pizza for you. So yeah, our menu is pretty small, you know, we only have I think five or six pizzas on the menu. So you like the thin crust, that's what people love. It is a certain style of pizza, I mean this is not like your traditional takeaway pizza, which has got six pounds of cheese. I mean there's certainly, there's a call for both kinds of pizza. I'm not going to poo poo that kind of pizza. There's a couple days every year where I require getting a pizza delivered to my house that makes me feel regret in the morning. But I think this is relatively good for you for pizza, you know, it's real mozzarella cheese, it's much more low fat. It's only eight ounces of bread, for lack of a better word, some tomato sauce, I mean there's really nothing that's all that bad for you in there. So this is what I like. This is the biggest oven that the Woodstone makes, it's 96 inches wide by 60 inches deep. I mean you could probably fit about eight at a time, really comfortably. I think what makes us more unique or did make us unique originally compared to most of the other restaurants here is we make all of our pasta in house. And that was very unusual 11 years ago, it's become much more common now. But I mean I think that is what we did set us apart at the beginning. I don't know, once you eat fresh pasta it is different, I like it a lot better. All I can say is different, one is not really better than the other, but it's different. Does this save a lot of cost, because I know you really focus on your ingredients. The food cost of it is cheap, but I pay rent on the space just to make it for all the restaurants. I have a person full time making it. It's probably a wash, but it is easier. I mean the first year we started we didn't make it. And you know it would take like two and a half hours to part cook all the pasta and get it organized. So this is really easy, we're just set up and go. It takes two minutes to cook the pasta. Yeah yeah, we'll go over here and we're going to see Alex. So this is my least, hands down my least favorite pasta. It's called Rigatoni Boscaiola. It's been on the menu since we opened. What's the special about it? Nothing. The humans love it, they love it, they cannot get enough. The secret to the pasta is the water that you cook it in. The water that you cook it in? Yeah, we use that in the sauce and that starchy water sort of reduces with all your other ingredients and allows the sauce and everything to sort of stick with the pasta and it all comes together. Can you say that's your secret sauce? No, that is the secret to pasta. Anyone that makes pasta that is the secret to really good pasta. I mean it's not rocket science. The other nice thing that the flexibility we have because we cook very simple pastas is we can use very good ingredients. I mean we're charging you 20 or something dollars for a pasta. And the bulk of it is flour and water mixed together. There's not a lot of pasta in the bulk. So we use good things around it to make it so that you are getting your money's worth. Oh here we go. That's the toss. You've got the cream, you've got the pasta, you've got the water. You know if it needs a little reducing she'll cook it down a little bit until it gets just right. And that's all there is to it. And then we just finish that with a little Parmesan cheese. We put a lot of Parmesan cheese on. I like Parmesan cheese so we put a lot. A lot of people think it doesn't need much but again we're not Italian here. We're Italian-ish. So that's all there is to it. Okay. Now to open a nook of your own you'll be looking at a large investment of roughly $2 million. Partly because of the expensive area, partly because of the large space and outdoor patio. And of course you can't forget about the expensive kitchen equipment and the large break of it. But by sticking to good simple food and creating an intimate experience for diners. Nook has proven time and again that this model works very well in the Vancouver area. Cheers, cheers, cheers. Thank you. Thanks for the tour. Thanks for taking us behind the scenes. It's a pleasure. So tell me, when you guys first started was it like a slamming success right away? It was and I'll be honest with you we didn't really expect it. I didn't really expect it. We started it was tiny. It was only a thousand square feet. It had 30 seats and I didn't think it could ever be that busy. But I like eating pasta and pizza so we sort of just did it for ourselves really. There wasn't a lot of that kind of thing here at the time. And I didn't think it would turn into what it was. And it's been lined up since the day it opened. I love that spot. I remember eight years ago. My now wife brought me there. And I fell in love with you. Like she's like that was my favorite pass-up place. It's funny because I had a colonoscopy and my colonoscopy doctor as I was getting my colonoscopy told me that he took his wife there for her first date for their first date. So there you go. So once we did it we sort of realized that this is sort of the answer if you want to be in the restaurant business. So has it always been so smooth sailing for you? Because I know a lot of people would want to know the difficult part. It was like for me when I ran an ice cream shop. It was difficult. Nook has been smooth sailing since we started. But I've been doing this for 36 years. My best gal and I started in 1997 on Robson Street with a restaurant called Tapestry, which was very busy. But we started it on a shoestring. And we've been through all the trials and tribulations. I was in rehab. That's where that's where that went. There's numerous things. Who knows? I'll blame it on that, sure. But it was hard. But it took some time to get going. And we've taken on a couple of partners over the years, which has taken a lot of the stress away. Just a lot of all the burden being just on yourself, which is hard. And when you start, we started in 1997. It was a different time in restaurants. It wasn't like it is now where everybody goes out and eats all the time. It was harder to get customers. We could buy booze. We go to a liquor store every day. It was just, you know, you just chasing your tail and it just takes time to get some momentum. Yeah. But once I clean up my act and settle down and, you know, once we open this, once we had two restaurants, things oddly enough got progressively easier. Then we had three. And it's gotten easier for me with every restaurant we've opened. Because once you don't have one restaurant, you're not the face of that restaurant. You don't have to do everything. You realize you can't do everything. And that is the rut you get into as a chef or a restaurateur. When you have one restaurant, you start off and you always start off under the gun. It's always tough. It's tight.  But day two is always harder than day one. And then it's a grind to get enough customers to come back regularly. And so you take on this burden to do all of the work yourself. And it's not sustainable. It's not healthy. And then you just have to trust people. And once you do that, your life gets easy in the restaurant business. I think that's the most difficult part for a lot of restaurants here is that they're not willing to delegate. Exactly. But you got to remember, I'm 52 the hard way. So I didn't start out that way. So I managed to cobble it together, keep it together for a long time. And the last 15 years I've been smooth sailing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I got lucky. I was the only woman to help me out. She got me to clean up my act. I got lucky. I mean, I came out better off than I started in this business. And that's unusual. Isn't it really ironic, like the less, not that I'm discrediting you, but less effort that you put in, the more that it becomes easier. You have to let your ego go and realize that you're not the only person that can do it. And when you do realize that, everyone you work with is happier because they take on more responsibility. Everyone's happier. For me, that is the secret. I think that's exactly what it is. It's the culture that you're able to build. And we're not cooking ego driven food either. Our goal is not to make ourselves happy, it's to make our customers happy. We cook food that tastes good and it's always going to taste good. I mean, it's pizza and pasta. How bad can it be? So there's a lot less pressure. You don't have to grind all your employees all the time. We have a lot more flexibility. The music's loud, covers up a lot of the flaws. And it doesn't have to be that hard. And this business, if it's going to have a long future, has to learn that, that we can't take all of our anger out on our employees and make it that difficult. We need to make their life easy as well and that support does. I mean, when Nicole and I started 23 years ago, I mean, we both worked in restaurants forever before we would never run our restaurants the way we'd been treated for the previous 10 years of working in restaurants. So we try not to have long days for the cooks. We try not, we don't do split shifts. We try to keep a bit of a work life balance as best we can in this business. And it's not always easy in the kitchen. It's very hard to hire people. So sometimes you really do have to rely on your kitchen staff to work more than they should work. But we do our best not to do that. We do our best to keep it, keep it the days under nine hours. Right. You've already like talked about all the different secrets to running this business success. Yeah, they're not really, they're not really secrets. I mean, everybody, so everybody should treat their employees, right? Surprisingly, not a lot of people do that. And once again, you know, when you started, most restaurants start out undercapitalized. And that is... What do you mean? Tell me. That's not having enough money to really get started comfortably. Until we had enough money to expand comfortably. So that we could start with enough staff. You know, you can't run a restaurant where you have eight people working on the busy nights and two on the slow nights. And the rest of the people don't get to work all week. So we try to keep everybody working year round. You know, we run the same staff every night, the same amount. Maybe we'll have an extra person on the weekends and everybody gets to work. And we don't do dine out in the winter. We don't feel a burning desire to be extra busy because those months are for the staff to have a bit of a break. Because they work like dogs in the summertime. It's terrible. It's hot. It's busy. So it evens out over the year. So we don't try to increase our business during the wintertime. So you actually treat them with heart. I try to. I like it when we work with. That's my goal. I hope they feel it. I don't know if they all feel it, but that is certainly my goal. I mean, I look at the restaurant business as our employees are the number one, our number one importance than the customer. Because if you don't have happy and good employees, you don't have customers. So it doesn't matter, right? That doesn't mean the customers aren't important as well. But without employees that feel like we care about them, you don't have as many customers. And you don't have happy customers. You don't. It makes it much harder. I don't want you to make it so simple and spend like two million bucks. You're like, you know what, it's going to work because that's the other thing a lot of people do. And like I said, we've been doing it a long time is your first month is always hard. Everyone after two weeks of, you know, things are going bad, they start changing and then you're just chasing your tail. We stick to our guns in all honesty. When we step outside of our lane and do something that's not as simple, they really don't want it as much as, you know, spaghetti bolognese. That's what people want. We do it. We do a good one. And we're happy doing it. So what's in the works for new? Where we make the pasta and kits, we have like 300 or 400 square foot on 1st Avenue, where we just opened up a little pasta, like pasta kit room. So we sell you a little kit of pasta where you get enough sauce for two, enough pasta for two and some Parmesan cheese. And we do it for $20. You come pick it up and you cook the noodles, heat the sauce up and prepare it at home. It takes about three minutes. It's as good as having it at the restaurant. And people like it. So we're really working on expanding that. I think things are going to get a little dicier in the next few months before they get better. So we're going to really expand on that in the fall when the weather gets worse and people will be less inclined, I think, to come indoors. I mean, people are really enjoying, we have outdoors here, we have a little bit of outdoor space in kits, we have outdoor space at all our other restaurants. So that's worked for the summer, so we have to try a few new things. We're doing a lot of takeout, which we've never done before. And so we're really going to expand on that. I mean, our plan for Nook was, if you had asked me this seven months ago or six months or two weeks ago, was to open more Nooks. And that still is our plan. I don't know when. We're always looking for new locations. I mean, we're lucky during this that we're not a tourist restaurant. We're in neighborhoods, we have regular clientele, summertime when your regular go away, the tourists flood in, it makes for a really good business. We don't have those tourists now, but we still have enough business and our customers are amazing. I mean, they've been supporting us for 10 years. And, you know, every time we move to open a new restaurant, we have regular customers that used to come and see us starting downtown that start coming to that restaurant. So we have really loyal, great customers and, you know, all of our staff it's been relatively easy for us. And, you know, once we come out of this, we're going to be ready to open it. I'd like to open up three or four more. Beautiful. Thank you. Thank you so much for coming down. I really appreciate this. It's a pleasure. It's what we do. Cheers. Cheers. So there you go. The behind the scenes in Vancouver's top Italian restaurants, Nook. Mike's philosophy is simple. Thanks for watching this episode of The Secret Sauce. I'll see you guys in the next episode.