SOMBA K'E/YELLOWKNIFE - They say that in order to excel at anything, you must become the very thing you're pursuing.

Todd Stewart, left, and Randy Caines balance full-time jobs at local schools with their responsibilities as new owners of the downtown A&W Restaurant, which they recently bought from Larry Adams. - Guy Quenneville/NNSL photo

Transmigrating their souls into lip-smackingly good hamburgers might have proved messy, so long-time friends and new A&W co-owners Randy Caines and Todd Stewart have done the next best thing: they've drawn from their lifelong love of the fast food chain (see sidebar) to inform their business practice.

Caines, a full-time teacher at N.J. McPherson Elementary School, and Stewart, vice-principal of St. Patrick High School, recently took over ownership of the popular downtown burger joint from Larry Adams, who owned the 15-year-old business for the last nine years.

On Monday, at the tail end of the lunch rush, Caines and Stewart took some time to discuss their plans for the restaurant with Yellowknifer.

Yellowknifer: How long have you been in the food services industry for?

Caines: About two months! I'm a teacher, and I still am. This is something that I got into simply because there was an opportunity. I believe in the product and it's a place my dad would take my brothers and I to when we were growing up ... There was only one. I have very fond memories of it.

Yellowknifer: How do you both balance your jobs here with your teaching responsibilities?

Stewart: We have a manager here, Joy Fernandez, who's been here a long time. She was managing here for nine years (under Adams). She knows this business really well. When we took this business over, it was well-run. It was not a business that needed saving ... So that was kind of the attractiveness of it as well. We have the utmost trust in her and her decisions. That allows us to continue teaching and keep the store.

Yellowknifer: What did you want to change about the restaurant?

Caines: We wanted to extend the hours. That was our primary goal. We pretty much closed at 6 p.m. (from Monday to Friday, under Adams' ownership), and now we're open 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. We're also working toward being open on holidays, as well. We weren't open on holidays before.

Yellowknifer: Will you open on Sundays?

Stewart: That is something that we're looking into changing. We have a couple restrictions. We are a mall store. So that kind of holds us up.

Yellowknifer: In what sense?

Stewart: Our washroom, it's in the mall, so that becomes one of the restrictions for Sunday ... But that's something that we have to try to figure out.

Caines: We haven't come to a decision completely yet because we are family-oriented ... We value having time with our family and we value letting our staff have time with their own families. There's positives and negatives on both sides. Money's not our only focus.

Yellowknifer: Anything to add?

Caines: There were suggestions to have a walk-up window on the side (like neighbouring business Main Street Donair) and we haven't done the market research yet to see if that's going to be a viable option, because you're changing the structure of the building itself and there's codes and laws and permissions from the landlords and whatnot ... But we wouldn't rule it out in the future, either.

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