Congratulations to Bailey Hayward of Bib Gourmand Gary’s, the 2024 MICHELIN Guide Vancouver Outstanding Service Award Winner!
Carefully curated but totally unpretentious best describes the vibe at Gary's, thanks to the work of co-owner and Operations Manager Bailey Hayward. The resulting experience is everything one could ask for in a neighborhood restaurant: approachable, friendly, and engaging.
With her partner in life and in business Chef Mathew Bishop, she started the restaurant as a friends-only supper club at their home. Today, in a brick-and-mortar location, it emanates that same warm and intimate feeling for any guest. Fittingly, Gary’s uses three words to describe itself: “a nice place.”
What is a typical night at the restaurant?
Before the restaurant opens, we always do our family meal in the restaurant. We all eat together, and then it's setting the lights, having the right music on, making sure that everything is set in place.
Usually we have guests in right at five, and then it trickles in from there onwards. We treat people as if they're an old friend or someone that we've known for a really long time.
What's your favorite part of the guest experience?
People in general. We're in the business of hospitality because we like people, first and foremost, but especially getting to meet the community.
This is so close to our own house, so getting to meet people that live in the neighborhood that now we run into near our own home has been super special. Getting to create those regulars, a lot of people in our neighborhood in Vancouver and South Granville.
If you're familiar with South Granville, there's a lot of storefronts that are for lease, so it's a neighborhood that needs a bit of a resurgence. It's just been so lovely getting to meet those people.
What does "really good service" mean to you?
It is really personal. It’s adding thoughtfulness in unexpected ways.
Hospitality begins before the guest even sets foot in the restaurant. When people make a reservation, we're asking them if there's an occasion that they're celebrating. If someone's celebrating a new job, we write a personalized card. If it's a birthday, we reach out to them ahead of time to get the name of the person that's celebrating. We're finding little ways to add personalization with not a lot of time or money spent to do so. But those things really blow people away, because they're not expecting it.
My background is in retail management, so I think that I've always had a really good natural eye for detail. Being detail oriented is such a big part of it. It's like a chameleon – you bend to follow the guest lead in some way, shape or form. We keep the foundation strong and consistent, so that we can show up in different ways personality wise.
Unreasonable Hospitality about Eleven Madison Park. They have a role that's specifically tailored to guest experience, and making these really grandiose guest experiences. One example was a couple whose trip to a sunny destination got canceled, and they ended up bringing in a bunch of sand and creating a beach oasis within the restaurant.
From the guest perspective, they might not always remember what they ate, but I guarantee they're going to remember how they felt. At the end of the day, we're all human, so let's take care of each other. It's extending that to our team, but also to our guests, our purveyors, the farmers that we work with.
That circles back to where Gary's began: in our own home. They're the people that we love and care the most about, and having them over for dinner. How can we relay that to a stranger to give them that same feeling?
How are you able to keep the team calm?
My leadership style. I find in leadership, it's all top down. I'm able to handle an immense amount of stress. Because service and hospitality is an emotional job that we've all chosen to do. It's a labor of love, but I think if I'm calm, that has a trickle down effect to the team.
At the end of the day, we're just cooking people dinner. It doesn't need to be more than that. We care a lot about it, but we're not rocket scientists, we're not doing brain surgery. We're just cooking people dinner. So let's not make it about more than that.
Because of how we look at it, it's not high stress. We opened a year ago, and we have our entire opening front of house dining room team, which is very rare. After an opening, people leave for different reasons. A year in having the same team, it's just made us that much stronger.
What is the biggest misconception about your role?
My job feels easier to me than what some people might think. It’s stressful in some ways, but getting to pursue our passion and what we really love – it has really felt effortless. In a lot of ways, we're not really weighted down. With Gary’s specifically, we have no partners, we have no investors.
It's just me and my partner Mathew. So there's been a lot of freedom in that. We've had a lot of choices to care about the things that really feel true to us and the things that we really care about. And we've been able to let go of some of the other things in the past that haven't been as important to us.
What advice would you give to someone who wants a career like yours?
Love taking care of people, because that is the foundation of all things hospitality. Everything just comes back to that one thing. If you do care, then a lot of things are going to come easy to you.
Be flexible. I've gone with the flow and accepted every challenge as it was presented to me. And I've learned a lot of really amazing lessons along the way.
I worked my way up from assistant server to server to GM to service director and now to restaurant owner. I suppose maybe a short trajectory because I've only worked in restaurants for seven years now, but I think the caring aspect is not something that's teachable. That's just something that someone has naturally within them.
Hero image: Kristine Cofsky / Bailey Hayward
