The Wooden Monkey (1707 Grafton Street, 444-3844) is looking to expand. “We’ve got a possible site in Bedford,” says co-owner Lil MacPherson. The new restaurant won’t be as big as the present successful downtown locale. Partner Christine Bower “is a monster when it comes to having another restaurant, and to make a good living for both of us, you need two restaurants,” explains MacPherson. “The profit margins aren’t as high in this particular restaurant because of what we do”—sourcing local high-quality food—”and the big thing for me is, the more Monkeys we have, the more local food we buy.”
MacPherson is famously busy—she’s a presenter for Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth film, and is now in Italy, at the invitation of the international Slow Food movement. She also was a main force behind the creation of the Nova Scotia chapter of the Business Alliance for Living Local Economies, and has been NSBALLE’s fist chair for three years, a position from which she is resigning. “I’ll still be totally involved,” she says; “I can’t not be involved because that’s how I live my life. But I’ll let Paul Emile [the incoming chair] take charge of the stuff that he can do a better job at anyway. I see myself as being an ambassador.”
I couldn’t have a conversation with MacPherson without bringing up the convention centre proposed for the lot immediately across the street from the original Wooden Monkey. “Oh, I’m totally against it,” she says without hesitation. I’ll explore that opposition soon, at thecoast.ca/bites.
This article appears in Oct 14-20, 2010.
All of Bedford’s best businesses seem to originate downtown (Cellar, Il Mercato, Freak Lunchbox, Uncommon Kids, and now Wooden Monkey?
Makes downtown less unique which I don’t like. Having said that it makes good business sense to take a tried-and-true recipe that has incubated downtown and introduce it to the Bedford Market.
Curious about Lil’s objection to the convention centre. She will benefit bigtime from it once it’s there.
Free Publicity for Tim B’s left wing crackpot pals