Sitting Down With Dom Wilton, Founder of Hector's Deli | Vanrooy Machinery 🥪

[0:06]I was inspired to start... well, I wasn't really inspired to start Hector's Deli, it was sort of accidental. We were opening a fine dining restaurant, uh, a 300-seater French restaurant, and we didn't get the permits for a year and a half. So we thought, um, having spent 15 years in fine dining, maybe it was time to do something simple. We found a little, uh, milk bar in the back streets of Richmond and decided to make amazing sandwiches, um, and it just took off. My experience with Vanrooy is that, you know, I'm a perfectionist, and I have a really hard time with anything. With our jackets, with our cardigans, with the shoes, with our shoes to wear for it to not speak about how we attach ourselves to brands and trying to get as close to perfection as possible. When there's an option to get something that is considered the best in its field, that's what we want to do. It's what we do with our sandwiches, it's what we do with our uniform. It's an easy choice to use Vanrooy because it's the best stuff. And I think that I get really pulled into that as well, you know, like, in our mission to try and create kind of perfect simplicity. Vanrooy is old and trusted and well-respected. It just, it feels like an easy match for our brand. Like I'm most proud of the fact, really, I'm most proud of the fact that we kind of present ourselves as this midway point where, where people can come and work at somewhere that sure like creates accessible casual food, if you will, but it's steeped deeply in the craft of food and hospitality and being a chef. So I'm most proud of the team for rewriting the script a little bit on what's possible in our industry that has traditionally maybe been given a bad name. We're happy people and we finish at 4:00 p.m. and we have balanced lives and we go and see our loved ones. Great equipment allows us to do what we originally set out to do, but at scale. So, you know, we might not necessarily need all of this equipment or we couldn't afford it when we first started. What we knew we had was integrity when it came to product. And, you know, we're, we're six delis now and we're 150 people. And what great equipment does for us is it creates consistency and predictability. And that's, that's probably the most important value of what we do at Hector's. It's like, as soon as our product has to suffer because we're scaling, then we have to stop scaling. So the equipment that we get from Vanrooy is a major part of us being able to do that. And so great equipment isn't really a want, it's a must-have, Matthew, at this point in our, in our business. What I hope someone who comes here once a year or five days a week experiences is the same thing, and that's genuinely warm hospitality, delicious sandwich, a nice place to sit and not much else. Just that is enough. I heard someone, I think it was David Chang say something the other day, which is, the world needs more good and less great. And I think I'm happy for us to sit in that category. I, I love seeing people as regularly as we do and having really loyal customers, guests who come five, six, some seven times a week, as opposed to needing to be that place that's like, oh, we're here for your special occasion once a year, but otherwise we don't see you. What I hope guests get when they come to Hector's is warmth, and love, and a simple feeling of genuine hospitality.