Mandy Wolfe - Recipes for Lettuce and Life

The story of Mandys is a story of two sisters (that would be us, Mandy and Rebecca!), and so it really begins with our story. Well let Rebecca start it:

REBECCA | When I was a student at Parsons in New York in the late 90s, the New York salad-bar scene was at its apex. On every corner, there was a generic chopped salad placewhatever the epitome of healthy lunch made easy was at the time. I tried a lot of them, but nothing tasted as good as what my sister Mandy made for me when we were growing up in Montreal. While I was in New York, I would fantasize about her monster chopped salad with garden-fresh herb vinaigrette. Or her cilantro and mint-rich salad, inspired by her travels through Vietnam in her early 20s, or her real specialty: the famous (huge) chocolate chip cookies shed been making for our entire family since she was young.

I was 19 at the time, and my boyfriend (now husband) Vince had a clothing shop called Mimi & Coco back in Victoria Village in Montreal where, as a summer job, I sold clothes. Vince had a little space in the back of the shop that he wanted to convert into an Italian-inspired panini and coffee shop. The same winter we fell in love, I convinced him that the salad trend I was seeing in New York could take off in Montrealand that instead of panini and coffee, Mimi & Coco should have a salad caf; that Mandy would create a delicious menu for it; and that she and I would run it! Shockingly, he agreed. Then (even more shockingly) I convinced Mandy to quit her teaching job and embark on this crazy salad journey with me.

MANDY | And that is exactly what happened. In May 2004, we opened Coco Caf. It was a tiny space, just 200 square feet overall, with only a three-foot counter to prep all of our salads from. Rebecca and I were the only employees. Some days we would stand behind the counter for hours and only a few customers would come in. But we believed in our product, and we stuck to our vision, and slowly word spread. We would cook the meat needed for our salads at night in our apartmentsno one wants to spend $200 on a sweater that smells of curried chicken!and bring it to the shop in the morning. We made all the dressings at night too, in batches, using our idiosyncratic expiry dating/tagging system. Our shared Jetta had a constant aroma of roasted chicken and balsamic reduction!

It took a couple of years before the lines began to snake outside of the store, but snake they did. We were bursting at the seams, and we worked our asses off. We banged out thousands of salads behind that counter and closed shop every day when we legitimately ran out of lettuce, so needless to say, our hours varied! A day in the life consisted of waking up before Aubut (Distribution Alimentaire)a no-frills warehouse of sorts that caters to every restaurateur and caf owner in Montrealopened their doors at 7 a.m. so we could be the first ones there, then driving over Mount RoyalMontreals cherished landmark that separates the east and west ends of the cityto our butcher in Mile End, followed by a stop at March Central for any other missing ingredients, all before opening the caf in time for our first customers to arrive. I dont know how many times we made sesame syrup reduction at 2 a.m. after a heavy night out and miraculously remembered the recipe to a T! Or how many custom salads we ran out to swanky SUVs double-parked on Sherbrooke Street, lest we miss a sale or not deliver top customer service to our VIPs. After a decade of tossing salads and washing dishes at the speed of light in Coco Caf, we developed carpal tunneleven salad slinging has its health risks!

REBECCA | Coco Caf was our incubator: during that time we figured out what salad combinations worked and what didnt. We were very lucky to have incredibly loyal, patient, and open-minded customers who stuck with us. And we would whip up whatever people wanted to eat. We got to know all our regulars orders by heart. If lots of customers were asking for similar things, we knew they were onto something, and wed officially add a new salad to the menu and name it after them! So when Brian walked through the door and asked for his favorite salad combination, Mandy made it for him. Not long after that, college students and moms and their kids and their friends would come in and say, I want the Brian salad, and we would make Brians favorite, and thats how some of our salads evolved. Others came straight from Mandy, like our Roman and Tuscan salads, which started with her spontaneously whipping up a sun-dried tomato pesto chicken stuffed with buffalo mozzarella on the barbecue one night for a bunch of friends. Or the Endless Summer salad, which she tipped over the edge by adding pomegranate seeds (and later, our in-house-devised Mock Chicken).

We switched the name of our business a couple of times in the early years too, changing from the original Coco Caf (after we got a letter from Chanels legal department!), to Greens & Co., which sounded too clinical and cold. Then I convinced Mandy that we should be branded with her name. For me, it has always been about Mandys salads. Mandy would still make my salad for me every day, and I would always tell my friends and family that I was eating a Mandys salad. It rolled off the tongue nicely, and I strongly believed the authenticity of it would help propel our business, simply because well, it was a true story, and Mandy was actually there. Back then we didnt know what the business would become of course, but Mandy finally accepted it after a lot of convincing. She had no idea that her name would later be on stores across the city! Today, she still asks me if I want to change the name to Beccas or some kind of hybrid of our names. But the name Mandys is just right, and its what we will always be.