DL Chicken

I’m having my very own Hot Ones moment, chatting with DL (Down Low) Chicken founder, and Toronto native, Doug Stephen. Glancing down at my phone’s recorder, I see that Y Not Italian! autopopulates the location data at 538 Manning Ave, and I realize I’ve been here before, and the homey neighborhood italian favourite is no longer. But there are no sour grapes, the former owner took a sunset cruise into retirement, opening up a perfect opportunity for the hugely successful Van City chicken chain that slings out chicken sandos with both Italian (sautéed peppers and fennel sausage inspired spice), French-style with a root veg gravy, and fried chicken and waffles made from a savoury mashed potato batter (I think?)

But back to the chicken. I’m taking bites of the Nashville-style OG Chicken sandwich and hanging off Doug’s every word when the extra hot sauce starts to kick and I start to imagine what it might feel like to be on the Hot Ones set. like, I’m trying to focus because Doug has a great tale to tell but the sauce is so good that my brain keeps distracting me with it.

Have I got your attention yet? Read on for the rest of our spicy conversation.

I grew up swearing that I’d never get involved in restaurants. My dad was in restaurants. I ended up getting into trouble with the law as a teenager and so my dad helped me get a summer job at the Hot House Cafe at Church and Esplanade. He was like, you can work as a server and you’ll make as much money as you are now, so I decided to focus on being a better bus boy and then became a server because at the time, I was the worst bus boy you’ve ever seen, and the rest is history.

I feel in love with the industry, I fell in love with wine, I fell in love with cocktails. I fell in love with food. I made the move from the Hot House Café to Jump, and Biffs for the O&B Group in 2002.

In 2012, on my third stint in Vancouver, I opened up a restaurant called the Merchant’s Oyster Bar. It didn’t have the biggest following or budget. My buddy Davey was a cook, never even a sous chef, asked me to be his join and build a new restaurant. We did some cool stuff over a year but then he had a family emergency and he had to move back to Winnipeg and I had this really dumb idea to move from the front of house to the kitchen. Everyone agreed that it was a dumb idea but also said ‘I anybody’s going to do it, it’s you.”

We changed the name to Merchant’s Workshop and it had a constantly evolving menu of farm fresh produce using local armers for our protein.

I felt really lucky that our friends and regulars kept the place afloat in the first year because I made some really weird food but I got my feet and discovered my voice in terms of how I wanted to cook. We even got to the point back in 2018 where we got a gold medal for best restaurant in East Vancouver from Van Mag, our version of Toronto Life.

Along the way we had developed a late-night menu that had things like fried chicken, burgers, crab legs, things like that.  The fried chicken was getting to be so popular that people were lining up the door down the block. One of the guys from a bar down the street was kind enough to let the fire department know that we were frying chicken illegally (we didn’t have a hood tension with chemical suppressions), we were just using little home deep fryers, and they showed up.  That’s when we were like, we should have kept the money down. And that’s where the name comes from.  It’s an ode to that story. We should have been a little more careful about that.   

After Merchant’s Workshop won the award in 2018, we had built up enough steam and hit up some investors to open up the first DL Chicken. Merchant Workshop was so gratifying for my ego but I was working 16-hour days and I wasn’t really even paying rent.

We started DL to hopefully create a different level of business for ourselves.  So, we sold Merchant’s in the first week to focus on DL. 

I love Chen Chen’s Chicken, PG Clucks and other Nashville chicken shops but I think what we do different is creating a service level that’s unseen in the quick service restaurant realm.

We also use hormone and GMO-free birds, which are the best birds on the market. It sounds oxymoronic to say healthy fried chicken but I’d want it to be as healthy and as good a protein as I can put in my body. I’m getting a bit older so these things start to matter more. 

It’s really easy to make something spicy but it’s hard to make something spicy that tastes legitimately good. So, when we looked at our hottest spices, we tried to take a look at how we could blend them to accentuate the natural fruitiness in a Carolina reaper and ghost chilis, and wanted to highlight that even if you still get a mind-numbing hallucinogenic experience. 

The other sandwiches on the men are an exploration of what the spice dose can province and how they can hit in a different manner.  We love to take a look at that form the various cultural lenses with all the foods that give us a familiarity.