Black Rabbit's Mad Hatter, Luc Doucet

Kept hidden and tucked between other Moncton small businesses at 329 St. George St., Black Rabbit’s creative epicentre is a well-lit, open room with a full kitchen set up at the back.

Bright yellow walls peek through several white boards with notes, mantras and ideas indecipherable to outsiders.

Cooks Joey and Dakota were busy prepping the very last of the night’s menu for a four-day pop up Black Rabbit Experience, focusing on street food such as pad thai and steam buns, taking place in a vacant storefront on Main Street. The space is shared with other small business creatives, like Kombucha maker Phillippe Gervais who owns VALK fermentation.

Over whirring sounds of food processors, knives hitting cutting boards and Alexisonfire’s 2004 record, Watch Out! coming from Joey’s speakers, Black Rabbit’s owner Luc Doucet acknowledges his insatiable desire to continually be creating something new.

“I built this company to inherently be very difficult, obviously, with moving restaurants around and having pop-ups, but I tell the people working here if we are not doing difficult things then what is the point?”

Doucet has owned Barolo & Company, a parent company for Black Rabbit, Black Rabbit Experience and a number of his rotating ideas, for three years.

Doucet began cooking when he was 15 alongside his dad as a way of bonding. He got his first cooking gig at Doc Dylan’s, from there he restaurant hopped while trying to find something he enjoyed doing.

“I think it was the job itself, it wasn’t cooking, I was just on the line frying fish and making burgers, which is delicious, just wasn’t my cup of tea,” he said.

Doucet wanted to step into the front of house, but struggled with finding a place that would give him a chance.

“A male server with no experience is tricky,” he said.” I didn’t know anyone in the industry. Finally someone gave me a shot in Shediac at the Sandbar when it first opened. I fell in love with it.”

Doucet has worked and managed restaurants throughout Moncton, Dieppe and Shediac since then and brings his experience in both back and front of house to Black Rabbit.

Down the rabbit hole

In February 2017, Black Rabbit was born as a one-off pop-up restaurant after Doucet got a call from a friend asking if he’d like to use an available space for a restaurant.

The name Black Rabbit is borrowed from Alice in Wonderland, and details the otherworldliness Doucet intends to create with each meal. “It’s like, follow us down the rabbit hole. We want to create experiences. You’re coming to the restaurant removing yourself from that world and coming into ours. That’s what it’s all about.”

In May 2018, Doucet received another call, this time looking for someone to run a restaurant in Shediac. Always looking for a challenge, Black Rabbit partnered with Bower Hotels to create Black Rabbit the restaurant.

Bringing Joey and Dakota with him, Black Rabbit released a new menu every week for 12 weeks. Working 100 hour weeks, they decided early on to focus on catering to locals.

"...you’re coming to the restaurant removing yourself from that world and coming into ours. That’s what it’s all about.” “Eighty per cent of our business was local, meaning people from the Maritimes, not tourists.” “At the end of the day we probably would have made more money selling burgers and salads guaranteed. We would have made more money for less work. But instead we made everything from scratch,” said Doucet. The Shediac location closed for the season in October, but Doucet is working towards having it open all year next year. Growing a food scene

Back in Moncton, Doucet is getting ready to open a small, late night wine-centric restaurant off St. George, behind the Barolo & Co. offices. “We are hoping to open that restaurant in December. We have a sommelier from Halifax, Stefan Nielsen, who joined last week and he will be the face of that restaurant.”

Doucet describes it as a bar for people who love food and wine, and it certainly won’t be catering to everyone. “It’s about the storytelling, about talking about the wine. We will not make any excuses, there will be no pinot grigio or pop on the menu,” he said. “It’s sit down only, no standing room.” Its menu will change monthly, with six to 10 items to choose from and the restaurant will stay open until 11 with hopes of keeping the kitchen open later.

“We are lacking smaller restaurants,” said Doucet. “Any bigger city has super amazing number one bars in the world and they’re 20 seats. As soon as it gets too big you lose quality.” Doucet says that places such as The Laundromat, Notre Dame de Parkton, Les Brumes Du Coude, 2nd Floor at Dolma and Manuka being all within walking distance is a good start but he’s focused on seeing more places like those come to life.

His focus is to bridge Main street and St. George with excellent but small restaurants.

“If you would have asked me last year, I even told my wife, I would never own a restaurant and now we have two."

Doucet says he’d like to have six to eight new restaurants under the Barolo & Co. banner, including Black Rabbit. “We are trying to make Moncton and the surrounding areas a culinary destination within five years.”

It takes a unique sense of drive to make ideas such as Doucet’s a reality. He credits his small team with helping him and understanding his goals. “They bring energy that’s for sure. We need serious people who want to work insanely hard.” “We had few people on board in the beginning who didn’t get it and you need people who understand what we are about and who are willing to take the chance.”

“We are trying to make Moncton and the surrounding areas a culinary destination within five years.”

Doucet said Dakota didn’t have any experience in the type of cuisine Doucet was creating, but he had a willingness to learn and and to try that’s what stuck out to him.

“If you don’t have a team that is willing to try and to support the idea then you don’t have anything.”

The Black Rabbit Experience will carry on Doucet’s original Black Rabbit theme of a pop-up restaurant, offering unique experiences to those lucky enough to get a table, but it will also serve as a test-run for future endeavours.

There have been two pop-ups already this season, but Doucet knows that sometimes it’s ok to slow down and focus on the tasks at hand.

“I’ve been figuring things out for 15 years and every chef, admittedly or not, is still trying to figure shit out.”