Favorite recipes from Pêche’s nonrepeating menu become fixtures on Tiki Bird’s menu

Patrons of Pêche Restaurant in Palisade know this: The menu changes often, so if you encounter a life-changing entree, enjoy it while you can.

Those menu changes are by design, and Pêche owners Matt Chasseur and Ashley Fees Chasseur stand by their approach.

They also understand why people ask them to bring back this, that and the other thing they loved. That’s why they now have a second restaurant, Tiki Bird Restaurant, which opened in June at 119 N. Seventh St. in downtown Grand Junction, where some Pêche customers will recognize entrees they thought they’d never see again.

And there’s another really big reason to rejoice: Tiki Bird’s menu doesn’t change.

Matt explained the Pêche approach and how that spawned Tiki Bird: “Part of the philosophy of Pêche is once a dish comes onto the menu, it has a lifespan, and then we take it off and never put it back on. It forces us as culinarians, as a restaurant, to continue to grow. We have to evolve. We don’t want to be that restaurant just running the same food, recycled over and over again.

“So, what we found is at the end of six years – it was actually two summers ago – we’re like, ‘Everybody keeps asking for these chicken dishes. They want the jerk chicken back. They want the Thai fried chicken.’ And we just looked at each other, and we’re like, kind of jokingly, ‘Let’s open a chicken restaurant. Let’s bring all these things back,’ because all the recipes are documented out to the 10th of gram. … the methods are all well-documented, so we had this, basically, this cookbook already behind us.”

First, they contemplated nonrestaurant ways to provide their recipes. Sell a cookbook? Put recipes online sporadically as part of a social-media campaign?

“Then,” Matt said, “it was like, ‘No, let’s just use these and bring them to a new restaurant.’”

Another driving reason behind the new restaurant came from their experience in the restaurant industry and knowing what their food options are late at night in Grand Junction.

“When we’re finishing – typically on a Friday or Saturday night it’s close to midnight, if not 1 o’clock in the morning – and all the time you hear the rumblings of the chefs. They’re like, ‘Oh, yeah, we’ll get a bite to eat after work.’ I was like, ‘Where are you gonna go?’”

The answer was a number of national-chain, fast-food places, and Matt and Ashley questioned the healthiness of those options.

“And then we’re looking at each other, and we’re like, ‘Well, there’s nothing. There’s no other options,’” Matt said. “And being in the industry, we understand that you don’t want to cook all day and then go home and cook again.

“So, that was kind of the impetus where we were like, ‘OK, if we do this, we’re going to be open until 12 as well. We’re gonna be open for those folks that are having lunch. We’re gonna be open for those folks that are, you know, working 9 to 5, and they’re gonna come out for dinner after that. But then, it’s extremely important to us to be open for the service industry.

“So, whether you’re in the hospitality industry, you’re working second shift, the fire station, the hospital, those folks have an opportunity to finish work and go to a place for a delicious meal.”

They knew the menu would be the chicken entrees that made lasting impressions at Pêche. Still to be addressed was the beverage program and how to match it to the food.

“And immediately we’re thinking fresh juices, which are extremely important to us,” Matt said, detailing how Tiki Bird juices its own pineapples, lemons, limes, oranges, etc.

That led to the tiki theme, both the rum-based cocktails associated with tiki and the nonalcoholic cocktails that Matt and Ashley have designed that make it hard to tell that there’s no alcohol in them.

“It was almost like the NA (nonalcoholic) part of the beverage program pushed the tiki forward, because we knew we wanted to do a fresh tropical punch,” Matt said. “Then it was, ‘All right, let’s dive into the world with tiki, because they go hand in hand. You can have a tiki cocktail without any alcohol. It’s delicious. You know, it kind of makes you smile, makes you feel like you’re on the beach. So yeah, it just started to evolve into that.”

Outstanding website

The Tiki Bird Restaurant origin story was just the beginning of the many details Matt and Ashley shared during their hour-long interview with The Business Times on June 24.

There’s no way we can do all of that justice, and we recommend you check out the restaurant’s wonderful website at www.tikibirdrestaurant.com to see the menu, hours, their philosophy, staff biographies and more (and do the same for Pêche at www.pecherestaurantcolorado.com).

But there are plenty of interview highlights to hit, such as:

Still in the soft-opening stage

Matt and Ashley say they’ve assembled a wonderful staff, but about 40 percent are new to working at a restaurant, so they ask for patrons’ patience and grace during the early months as people get trained.

In a move that seems to defy a soft opening, Tiki Bird announced it’s soft opening via social media.

“It was important to us to put it out to the guests: Give us grace,” Matt said. “We take training very seriously. In order to train properly, you have to take time with individuals. … And in doing so, the food’s gonna take longer to come out. The service is gonna take longer to service.

“So it was important to us to (say), “Yeah, we’re gonna open the doors to the restaurant. But please, give us an opportunity to learn the dance.”

Matt added he and Ashley “feel truly blessed to be able to have the support and the willingness and the team that we have here in the building, people that want it as much as we do, if not more.”

This is a chicken restaurant

Determining Tiki Bird was going to be all about chicken for its main courses had a lot to do with Pêche customers asking about chicken, specifically the Thai fried chicken.

Beyond that intensely local reason is a global one, as Matt said, “It’s universal. Every single cuisine across the world has chicken.”

Experience the world in an entree

The global theme also manifests in cooking the chicken.

When people ask what the food is like at Tiki Bird, Matt said, “If I was to go to a table, I would look at you and be like, ‘My man, I’ll take you around the world tonight, where you want to go? So we go to Thailand, we go to Jamaica, we can go to grandma’s kitchen in the Carolinas. We can go up to Nashville. We can go to Paris.”

Wherever they decide to go, the price will be the same. Each of the eight entrees cost $28. Each of the six appetizers cost $18. With everything priced the same, they don’t have to think about what they’re spending.

“So you can rule that part out,” Matt said. “Now you can make the decision of what you really want. What kind of food do you want? … So, you want to go to Thailand? You want to go to India? You want to go to South Carolina? Twenty-eight bucks.”

We’d tell you more about the mug club, but …

You can’t join, at least not this year. Tiki Bird had 190 individual tiki mugs (no two are alike) available for its mug club at a cost of $95 per year for its perks (20 percent off the exclusive menu/drinks in the mug, invites to special events at the restaurant).

And 190 were sold. The thought of offering more occurred to them, but Ashley said they decided against it because of lack of space to store them.

“We had no idea if it could take off or not,” she said, “but it was a really fun way to bring the tiki culture into the restaurant in an exclusive way. And it worked, because we sold them out in a week.”

Open concept – dining and kitchen

Anyone going to Tiki Bird for the first time will notice this immediately: The space is wide open. Not just the dining area, but the kitchen, which is on display for everyone to see how the food is prepared.

“The open-kitchen concept, for us as chefs, it’s accountability,” Matt said. “It holds you to a standard. There’s not a single place that you can stand in this building and not be seen. That goes for the dishwasher, that goes for the culinary team, the beverage team.”

Matt said it’s also about staff taking pride in what they do.

There’s a wide aisle down the middle of the kitchen area, and customers must navigate it to get to the restrooms.

“I mean, to use the men’s room, you literally see the dish station,” Matt said. “Like, you see the heart of the restaurant. You’re gonna see the hardest-working section.”

Another thing the layout does is create workflow.

“We don’t want that standard, box kitchen where everybody’s running into each other,” he said.

What they found in the Storm: Elevated dining

Tiki Bird converted its parking lot into an outdoor patio, and the stunning centerpiece of it is a … shipping container? Yep, a shipping container.

To be clear, the shipping container has been modified, thanks to the handiwork of Storm’s Specialty Services, 779 Riverside Parkway in Grand Junction. It has two floors with the top of the container serving as a rooftop-style area with elevated seating. And one of the container’s long sides was opened, so outdoor tables can sit under the cover of the roof.

After a couple other businesses gave them bids they called “astronomical” and a sense those places weren’t really interested in the project, Matt and Ashley emailed Storm’s Kevin Lemas, who met with them.

“He’s like, ‘Absolutely, we can do this,’” Matt said. “Kevin Lemas is why that shipping container is out there.”

One man and a spray-paint can

After Storm’s Specialty Service did the structural work, Grand Junction artist Jeremy Velasquez made the shipping container pretty. His painting – vibrant colors in the tiki theme – enlivened the interior and exterior.

Velasquez also contributed several pieces to the interior of the main building, among them a mural on the south wall of the dining area.

Matt and Ashley marveled at Velasquez’s prowess with spray paint, especially on the shipping container, which Ashley said is the piece of the property renovation she finds most exciting.

“This space transformation is amazing from top to bottom, inside to out,” she said. “But the shipping container still makes me, like, ‘No matter what, we did something really cool with that shipping container,’ and we didn’t really do much other than have a vision. Kevin brought it to life.”

“And Jeremy gave it its soul,” Matt added, leading Ashley to concur, “100 percent.”

Bocce ball made most sense

The patio also has an area for kids and adults to play bocce ball.

While cornhole has become extremely popular and would work in the patio area, Ashley said that was a good reason not go with cornhole.

“You can go anywhere and play bags,” she said.

Ultimately, after considering several possible games to feature, Ashley said bocce ball was the winner, because it’s easy, enjoyable and relaxing.

“Bocce ball makes the most sense. Just does. It is the feel of the restaurant. It’s just like it’s the right thing,” she said. “We’re not saying we may not have a bag set out there at some point. I’ll just say with bocce ball, the Italians did it right. The Rule No. 1 for bocce ball is to grab yourself a fresh cocktail. Like, that’s Rule No. 1.”

Sign him up for endorsements

The architect for the Tiki Bird project, Rich Carter of Vortex Engineering & Architecture, was walking through the restaurant on his way to the exit when he stopped for a minute to tell Matt and Ashley how “amazing, top notch” the restaurant’s chicken is.

His compliment carries additional heft, as Carter said Tiki Bird “changed my whole perspective on chicken. I used to never order chicken anywhere, because it’s always bland and dry, but what you cook’s amazing.”

To that, Matt said, “Well, thank you.”

Carter didn’t stop there.

“This is something else,” he said. “Even at home, I rarely ever cook chicken, just because I don’t know how to cook it. And now, I’m still not going to, because of this. … Cindy, my wife, she’s always critical, but she loves this place, too. So, it was great. … I’m excited for you guys. Perfect location, perfect building, perfect menu, perfect owners.”