St. Albert burger restaurant Jack’s Burger Shack has been awarded $125,000 to expand its business in one of Edmonton’s newest neighbourhoods.
In January, the Rohit Group of Companies launched a competition called The Cut to select unique commercial tenants for Stadium Yards, a new 720-unit residential development located next to Edmonton's Stadium LRT station. On Feb. 20, Jack’s Burger Shack won as the neighbourhood’s anchor restaurant. The new store is expected to be 2,500 sq. ft., three times the size of the burger shack's current location, and will likely need to hire 30 new staff members.
The restaurant beat out the other finalists to secure a spot in the top five, where they went face-to-face with other competitors in a live-pitch event at the Triffo Theatre in Edmonton in front of 400 people.
“It's still pretty surreal – I never really envisioned us winning. To be brutally honest, it hasn't kicked in yet," said Tu Le, co-owner of Jack's Burger Shack.
The burger shack first opened in Slave Lake in 2012, and expanded into St. Albert's Perron District as the first restaurant in its complex when Tu and his brother Ninh Le moved to St. Albert seven years ago.
When Jack's Burger Shack first opened, the area looked like a "ghost town" with little foot traffic, Ninh said. Since then, four other restaurants have opened in the building, including Jack’s Sandwich Shack.
Now the restaurant flips out a steady 100,000 burgers a year.
“We definitely drew awareness to this area where there wasn’t before," Tu said.
The restaurant gets its ingredients locally, a more expensive but rewarding route to source high-quality product. Using other local businesses to help their restaurant builds a sense of community, he said.
"Whether it's D'Arcy's Meats or Jeff Nonay's Lakeside Dairy, it brings awareness to their business as well."
Rohit Gupta, Rohit Group of Companies president, said his vision for Stadium Yards was for it to become a vibrant neighbourhood strengthened with community anchors working together.
“This couldn’t be possible without business owners who share our goals and want to be a part of this great community," he stated in a press release.
The market for high-quality burger joints is big right now in Edmonton, as seen with the recent openings of Woodshed Burgers and the Royale late last year. But as the "godfathers of the burger restaurant," the co-owners of Jack's want to prove they can keep up with the competition.
"We want to show that we can be a big fish in a big pond, not just a big fish in a little pond," Tu said.
The $125,000 in prize money was used to fund the construction of three bathrooms and ventilation in the new restaurant, with work expected to start in the fall.
With its popularity in St. Albert, Tu said many of the shack's followers have reached out to congratulate the local restaurant on their success.
"People take pride that we won because it's their neighbourhood restaurant. They take ownership of it too, and that's the beauty of our business," Tu said.
