Pub Crawl – The Victory Café

The Victory Café
581 Markham Street
416-516-5787

There's no doubt that opening a brand new pub is a daunting experience, to say the least. From physically building the place, to dealing with all of the paperwork and red tape, to creating a combination of food, drink and atmosphere that reflects your own tastes while also appealing to enough people to keep yourself in business, it's not a project for the lazy or faint of heart.

Perhaps more daunting, however, is taking over an already existing and successful establishment and trying to keep the old clientèle happy, while also putting your own stamp on the place and attempting to attract new customers as well.

This was the challenge taken on by Blake Smith, Neil Brereton and Stuart Fraser in 2005 when they took over The Victory Café from original owner Paul Kellogg. Nestled at the southern end of Mirvish Village since  1998, and originally located over on Bathurst north of Bloor for a few years before that, the Victory was a popular haunt for everyone from starving university students to more well-to-do Annex residents before changing ownership.

"I'd always wanted to have my own business," Smith recalls, "and I'd gone through a lot of different ideas and concepts, and thought that maybe a pub might be worth trying. I went to Neil and said 'Well, what do you think about owning a pub?', and he jumped at the idea. Initially we looked at pub franchises, like the Firkins and Fionn MacCool's, but then Neil went to see a hospitality real estate guy who had a bunch of pubs and bars listed, and The Victory was the only place where the sales were increasing. We'd never heard of it, so we came by and had a beer, thought it was a really great place, and we bought it."

Unlike some new owners, the trio decided to leave the atmosphere and design of the space almost exactly as it was during Kellogg's ownership. The main floor bar area is just as welcoming as always, with the long bar along one wall and the row of cozy two-person booths along the other left intact. A smaller room on the north side of the main floor was also left pretty much as-is, with the only serious renos being an overhaul of the large second floor, making it much more inviting for private events, performances, and more frequently nowadays, overflow from the downstairs.

They also made a point of retaining most of the original staff, although a few changes were made to what said staff was serving. For starters, Brereton and his wife Maz, both UK ex-pats (he's from Belfast, she's from Manchester), felt that the beer selection needed to be given a more local focus. As he points out, "Beer is  like bread: you want it fresh, and you want to be close to where it's made. We very much wanted a Canadian pub, rather than a fake British or Irish pub, with local Canadian beers."

Smith was initially reticent about dropping well-known brands in favour of lesser known local craft brews, but his unease quickly vanished when their Stella Artois replacement, Stonehammer Pilsner from F&M Brewery in Guelph, became one of their biggest sellers. The tap line-up now features nothing but Ontario craft beers, with the most recent addition being their exclusive Compass Empire Ale, a British-style IPA brewed at Burlington's Nickel Brook Brewery using a recipe created by Smith and his father, a long-time home brewer.

Another UK-influenced modification to the bar was the addition of two handpumps to serve cask-conditioned ale. While pouring cask ale can be a bit of a gamble, as the beer will go off and be undrinkable within a few days of tapping, it didn't take long for cask aficionados to flock to the Victory, making it rare for any casks to last long enough to go sour. Inspired by the popularity of their regular cask offerings, as well as the success of the annual Cask Days festival at Volo, the Victory hosted their first Cask Ale Festival on their patio during a Pedestrian Sundays event last summer, and they'll be following up with a Winter Cask Ale Festival on January 31st.

Also tweaked when the takeover happened was the food menu. While the emphasis is still on hearty and reasonably priced pub grub, they started using fresher and less-processed ingredients. "I'd say 95% of the items on the menu now are made fresh from scratch," says Smith, "and that wasn't the case previously, a lot of the stuff was bought in pre-made." Brereton adds: "We use fresh pasta, do our own smoking, the fries are hand cut, we use local fresh bread and real cheese. We try to use whatever is in season, and whatever our suppliers have that's good and fresh."

Customer favourites include the substantial burgers, home-made mac 'n' cheese, panko-crusted cod sandwich, and beer-battered fish and chips with the traditional side of mushy peas. Vegetarians are well served with several veggie apps and five meatless mains, including chili and a gooey-good grilled cheese sandwich with cheddar and gruyère. And of course, every proper pub needs a decent curry on the menu, so the Victory is lucky to have a Sri Lankan chef in the kitchen with his mother's secret recipes for chicken and vegetable curries.

Three years into their run at the Victory, it's obvious that Smith, Brereton and Fraser are still keeping the locals happy. During our Thursday evening visit, the place is filled close to capacity on both floors, with many plates of food and pints of beer being cheerfully consumed. Maz, speaking from her point of view as a customer rather than the wife of a partner, sums things up perfectly:

"Coming from a country where the community pub is part of life, that's for me what the Victory is about. It's a community pub, it does great food and beer, and it now has its own beer which is a very unique in the marketplace. Speaking as a regular - and I'm a very happy regular - I'd love to see more pubs doing this kind of thing."