Conquering Expectations One Crepe at a Time
Text by Colter Pedersen | Photography by Jacqui Smith
“I never wanted to open a restaurant,” begins Kayt Bonahoom. Which is funny, since she just opened her second location. “I am not a cook by any means,” she continues, “But I’m a researcher. Cooking is following instructions, if you can follow instructions you’re fine.” Kayt comes across as a problem solver, her tone casual and confident. When she speaks, the twinkle in her eye belies her lack of any formal culinary training.
Three years ago she was a seamstress, selling clothing alongside her husband Josh’s artwork at the farmer’s market. Today she’s running a mini empire with two mobile food operations, two permanent locations and a catering enterprise on the side.
Most impressively, with little real restaurant experience, she basically taught herself the business along the way. Now when she talks, she sounds like a food consultant.
“For the second location we’re really trying to build it out in a way we can scale the model and present it to someone as a franchise,” Kayt says. “That’s definitely where we want to take this.”
In the internet age, branding is everything, and from logos to t-shirts to their own mobile app for ordering, they understand that idea. “People come in here and they think it’s a chain. We’ve got that from day one,” she adds.
Their approach is fun and fresh, and people respond to that.And that’s the beauty of Great Ape Crepes, it’s a restaurant focused on taste over technique, unconstrained by any outside influences telling them to do it differently.
“What’s really been just awesome about this whole thing is that we started from the very bottom with nothing,” says Kayt. She and her husband initially bought a crepe cart just to augment their clothing and art sales at the farmer’s market.
“We did all of this with no banks involved, because we couldn’t get a bank involved,” she says. “We started that crepe cart with $500, and that $500 was hard to come up with.”
Luckily, the cart was an instant hit, so much so that they paid it off in two weekends. An added hurdle, Kayt also happened to be about nine months pregnant on their opening day. “I almost had the baby at the crepe cart,” she jokes.
While they offer several food options, crepes are king. They offer a limited menu with fresh, deeply local ingredients. And they don’t just use local as a buzzword, they built their business around it. Almost everything from the eggs in the batter, to the organic cream-on-top milk in the coffee comes from Montana.
They work to keep prices competitive by cutting out the middleman and building relationships directly with the producers.
Always open to an opportunity, they get their lamb from a ranch they met at the farmer’s market, for example. “We’ve taken them to a whole new level of production,” says Kayt. “They have two ranchers underneath them now to meet our supply.”
Available sweet or savory, the crepe shells are surprisingly versatile. People particularly like how crispy they come. “It really makes it more like a hot grilled sandwich versus a pancake,” she says. “We’re really trying to Americanize the concept.”
Rich and herby, the best seller is the Turkey Provolone. With melted cheese, sliced turkey, organic spinach and basil pesto stuffed inside a crisp, buttery shell, it’s easy to see why. The Carne Asada is another standout. They marinate grass-fed, grass-finished skirt steak for 24 hours in citrus juices, then slow cook it for at least another six. Next they fill a shell with onions, bell pepper, black beans, pepper jack cheese and the tender beef before topping it all off with an herbed sour cream steak sauce. “The sauce is what really makes it,” says Kayt.
The same two soups are always available and made fresh daily. The Broccoli Cheddar has a bold broccoli flavor backed up by tarragon and garlic. But the thick, rich Clam Chowder is even better, following her mother-in-law’s recipe. “That’s one of the hardest things that we make,” says Kayt. “You can ruin a batch in one minute if you’re not watching it.”
Both she and her husband are relatively young for restaurateurs but their youthful approach is refreshing and inviting. With brightly colored artwork on the walls, a gorilla greeting you at the door and a baby orangutan hanging from the ceiling, the atmosphere is just fun. There’s even a climbing wall in the corner for your own “little monkeys.”
“This whole thing really is the American dream,” says Kayt. And it all started with a good deal on a great cart.
Great Ape Crepes: 625 Euclid Avenue, Helena, MT 59601, (406) 422-5850
