PaJo's celebrates being 'part of your adventure' for 40 years in Steveston
On a sunny weekday morning recently, the lineup started almost as soon as
opened for business at 11 a.m. at Fisherman’s Wharf in Steveston.
The hungry customers were drawn by the four selections of wild Pacific fish — halibut, sockeye, rock snapper and cod — and the bottomless fries and fountain drinks that accompany every order, including the tacos, homemade hamburgers and hotdogs.
The floating fixture — “Part of your adventure” and “Famous for fish and chips” are its slogans — has drawn tourists and multi-generations of locals to it since 1985.
On June 11 it will celebrate its 40th anniversary with a wharf side bash.
Sometimes, founder Pat Branch, who had never even cooked fish and chips prior to opening PaJo’s, likes to just relax above the gangplank and observe in wonder the scene below.
“In my wildest imagination,” she said, “if you told me 40 years ago that I would have people lining up to get down here, I would have called you crazy.”
Branch’s eldest daughter, Cindy Plumb, is the CEO now, but Branch, 85, is still involved from her Vancouver Island home in Bowser.
Not taking no for an answer is one of the secrets to her success, she said.
Established with then business partner Joan Wettlaufer (PaJo is a portmanteau of Pat and Joan), Branch couldn’t get a bank onboard.
“I’d researched it and researched it, but I couldn’t convince (the bank),” she said as she and Plumb offered a couple of visitors a variety of tasty samples on the floating deck where it all began.
“I sat across the desk from the banker, I said if he would only listen to me for maybe not even five minutes, and he actually said to me, ‘I’m really sorry, but we don’t want your business.’”
She was stunned.
“I knew it was a really good idea, I knew he was wrong, we created our own financing and it all worked perfectly.”
Branch knew it was a good idea, for one, because the business she’d been inspired by,
in Victoria, was a flying success.
Branch and her husband Larry, a fisherman who passed away 10 years ago, were boat-hunting in the capital in 1984 when she noticed Barb’s, and got talking with the owner, Barb Peterson.
“She was very friendly, and she said, ‘You’re our first customer.’”
Peterson wound up being a fountain of information and encouragement as Branch got her fledgling eatery going.
In those early days, Branch would make almost daily trips to Save-On to pick up jars of mustard, ketchup and mayo, gallon jugs of apple cider, enough fish to last a few days, plus ground beef, hotdogs and buns, throwing it all in the car, then bringing it down the ramp to the restaurant.
It was like she was picking up supplies every day for a big family picnic, until she connected with suppliers.
“And that’s when, more or less, in my mind I knew it was real, that I wasn’t just going to pick up groceries.”
The restaurant sits atop a floating dock, the first floating restaurant in Steveston.
Tourists sometimes complain about how steep the gangplank is during low tide, but there have been high tides when the dock is almost level with the top of the four pylons it’s anchored to.
Picnic tables sit in two neat rows on the deck, with more above on dry land, seating about 80 altogether.
A modest outbuilding serves as storage for potatoes (grown at a family farm in Delta) and mushed peas (from the British Store a couple blocks away.)
A sea-themed mural on the building’s walls adds, along with PaJo’s yellow umbrellas, a bright splash of colour during the many grey days. The artist,
, fittingly spent countless hours as a child drawing her favourite foods — burgers, pizza, ice cream.
Like the tempura-style batter, PaJo’s makes its own tartar, and the recipes for both are a family secret.
“But I’ll tell you, even if I told you the recipe today and you could deconstruct it and you went home and tried to make it, it wouldn’t turn out the way ours does,” she said.
In year two, PaJo’s opened another outdoor venue at Port Moody’s Rocky Point, and in 2017 it opened a takeout in the international food court at Vancouver International Airport.
Another secret to its success, Branch said, is treating staff like family. The two outdoor venues are seasonal, shutting down in October and reopening for Family Day weekend in February, but YVR stays open year-round.
Staff, said David Hartono, director of operations since 2020, number 25 or 30 full-time, increasing to 75 during summers.
The we-are-family atmosphere is real, not sloganeering, he said. No one was let go during the “existential threat” of COVID-19, for example.
“And so in the span of these five years, I grew to love not just the people who I work with, but also the family, because I’m seeing how the family is leading the team,” said Hartono, whose previous job was with a multinational French food services company that employs a half-million people worldwide.
“We’re all truly family, I think that’s where I’m getting at.”
Branch said there’s nothing she’d do differently, except for one thing, maybe.
“Once you start something like this there’s this list of things when you go to bed at night, this list of things that could happen with a floating restaurant that has propane gas fryers inside,” she said.
“I’d try to worry less.”
Source: vancouversun.com