MANDY'S WORLD

From restaurants to groceries to housewares, the salad chain's sister founders have their sights on Venti-sized success. Their superfans are eating it up.

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I’m perched on a millennial pink leather banquette in Mandy’s Gourmet Salads’ flagship location in Montreal’s Old Port.

To my right, Rebecca Wolfe gives me the celebrity dish while tucking into a pretty porcelain bowl of veg. To my left, Mandy Wolfe—yes, the Mandy—is eating a Wolfe, the cult salad of her own creation: a $20 mix of kale, mesclun greens, arugula, avocado, cherry tomatoes, shredded carrots, quinoa, walnuts, parmesan and tamari dressing. And then there’s me, with a Wolfe of my own, sandwiched between salad royalty.

As we chew (and chew, and chew), a steady stream of customers outfitted in a mix of athleisure and office casual winds its way past mountains of Mandy’s merch—Chocolate bars! Scented candles! Hand soap!—to order their own Wolfes or Habibis or Cactus Cowboys. In the sizeable open kitchen behind the Carrara marble counter, a perpetually scooping team of salad artists assembles each bowl from a vast well of perfectly prepped ingredients. For every customer who takes their salad to-go (in a pink-and-green paper bag, natch), another stays put, pulling up a lacquered rattan bistro chair to a marble bistro table and taking in the airy, checkerboard-floored space (a former printing press) while an eclectic mix of Euro folk plays at perfect volume in the background. It’s the complete antithesis of all those sad desk salad memes.

The 75-seat Old Port location—often graced by celebrities shooting films in town, including Aniston, Adam Sandler and Owen Wilson—is the crown jewel in the Montreal-based salad chain’s palm-fronded pastel empire. Mandy’s 15-restaurants-and-counting portfolio now includes Toronto and Ottawa, with Vancouver and Calgary on the horizon. (The chain is privately owned by Mandy, 47, and Rebecca, 42, who remain hands-on and have no immediate plans for franchising. “Too scary,” says Rebecca.)