By Jennifer Kennedy
Mustard, that bright yellow condiment that’s usually just dolloped on hotdogs, squirted on sausages or spread on pastrami, doesn’t have to be so plain after all, as the shelves, tabletops and counters at the new Marvellous Mustard Shop prove.
The store’s list of piquant pastes — which customers can sample at Canada’s first “mustard bar” — goes on and on.
Triple-X hot mustard has a bite hefty enough to send any proud person to their knees. Then there’s grainy beer mustard from Scotland, roasted garlic mustard, Italian fruit mustard and maple peppercorn mustard from Prince Edward Island.
The Marvellous Mustard Shop on Sparks Street is every mustard lover’s dream.
But is it every entrepreneur’s?
“Everyone was saying it was risky,” says shop owner Holly Layte.
But, Layte, 57, and her husband and co-owner, Brian Nolan, 68, turned deaf ears to the warnings that selling mustard wasn’t going to have them running to the bank when they opened the store last month.
“I know it’s going to be profitable,” says Layte with an air of confidence.
“We trust our instincts implicitly. Absolutely, it’s going to work.”
But with mustards — and gourmet jams, chutneys and sauces — ranging in price from $3 to $22, they knew they’d need to sell many jars to be profitable.
And so far, she says they have.
“It’s been overwhelmingly successful,” says Layte. “We sold out one-third of our products in three days, and we thought we had enough for at least a month.
“We’ve always had faith in the concept. But we are actually really surprised at the number of mustard lovers out there.”
Others in the business of retailing mustard agree.
“It isn’t like selling computers or diamonds,” says Barry Levinson, self-declared “Captain Mustard,” in a telephone interview from his office in Wisconsin.
“But (owning a profitable mustard business) is definitely manageable.”
Levinson, who founded the Mount Horeh Mustard Museum in 1992 that now receives over 100,000 visitors a year, says he has “no doubt that if it’s done well and with passion, it could work.”
It was Levinson who inspired Layte and Nolan to take the risk and open what could be the only mustard speciality shop in Ontario.
Two years ago, the pair read an article about Captain Mustard that instantly turned them on to the concept of opening a mustard shop in Ottawa.
They went to Wisconsin to meet the mustard guru himself, which only further increased their desire and sent them travelling throughout the United States and Europe, gathering information on the condiment.
They finally opened their shrine to mustard a month ago, with the help of manager Heather Urrutia.
“I loved cooking and always used mustard, but I didn’t know much at all about it,” confesses Urrutia, the only other employee of the quaint store.
But now the part-time-nurse-turned-mustard-aficionado can reel off facts and figures about the yellow condiment the way a wine connoisseur does with vintages.
One mustard, a brown ginger mustard, was rumoured to be John F. Kennedy’s favourite, says Urrutia. Another, called Violette — the most expensive of the lot at $22 — was created for a 14th century pope. Still another, called Stadium Mustard, is the yellow condiment most popular with American astronauts.
Then there are the stories about customers.
“You get people who love a certain mustard,” says Urrutia.
Just recently, one man walked into the store and bought $100 worth of mustard.
“ ‘That’s my grocery shopping for the month,’ he said, because he only eats mustard and baguette,” recalls Urrutia. He told her this special diet is good for his heart.
Indeed, research has shown that mustard is high in dietary fibre and can actually reduce cholesterol, says Steve Cui, a scientist at Agriculture and Agri-Foods Canada.
But in the end, buying mustard “is all about having fun and leaving here with a great feeling about life,” says Layte.