GarfieldEats

» see garfieldeats.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

GarfieldEats started as software. Nathen Mazri and Pascal Haider founded it in 2018 and the app came first, in Dubai, before any of it had a kitchen anybody could walk into. The Toronto storefront opened on 21 June 2019 at 995 Bloor Street West, and the app stayed the front door: you ordered through it, and while you waited it played you episodes of Garfield and Friends.

The food was the part people could not stop describing. Pizza cut into the shape of a cat's head, finished in an orange sauce bright enough that every photograph of it looks color-corrected. A frozen lasagna called Big Cow. Inside the restaurant, phones were bolted to the walls so you could place the order through the app while standing in the room.

None of it was unlicensed. Garfield has an owner, and in August 2019, about six weeks after the Toronto doors opened, that owner changed: ViacomCBS bought Paws Inc. and with it the cat. GarfieldEats never said publicly that this was a problem for them, and the reasons it eventually gave for closing were about money and a landlord.

I heard about it years late, the way most people outside Toronto did, through a photograph of the pizza rather than through anything resembling news. There is a version of the 2019 internet where a Garfield-licensed ghost kitchen in Canada is a local restaurant story that stays local. That is not the version we got, and most of the people who ever knew about GarfieldEats were never in a position to order from it.

The storefront closed on 9 November 2020. It had nearly gone in May of that year over the same dispute, and the two sides told it differently: the restaurant said Mazri had finally had enough of the landlord through a pandemic, the landlord's side said GarfieldEats had paid 35 percent of its rent despite being offered large reductions. What survived was e-commerce, a frozen lasagna with no room attached to it. That stopped on 23 December 2021.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the funny part ~

GarfieldEats was never quite a joke restaurant, and that is what made it worth watching. The branding was committed in a way that parody never is. Mazri gave interviews about the Garfield philosophy of life with no detectable irony, and the whole operation behaved as though a cartoon cat who likes lasagna were a sound basis for a restaurant chain.

~ the ghost kitchen underneath ~

Underneath the sauce this was a 2018 ghost-kitchen company. App-first ordering, with a licensed brand to skip the cost of building one, and delivery doing the volume. That model burned an enormous amount of money in those years, and most of the companies that ran it are also dead.

The pandemic should in theory have been its moment, since delivery-only was suddenly the only thing anyone could do. Instead 2020 is the year the rent stopped getting paid in full and the lease fight started. A delivery business still needs a kitchen, and a kitchen still has a landlord.

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