Entrepreneur with Dokis First Nation roots recognized for excellence and outstanding impact

Dokis entrepreneur Gerry Brandon was recently recognized with a 2021 Indigenous Entrepreneurship Awards Up and Comer Award for his L’Autochtone Taverne Americaine restaurant and Busters Mini Mart businesses in Haileybury.

By Rick Garrick

HAILEYBURY — Dokis First Nation’s Gerry Brandon was recently recognized with the Up and Comer Award for his “high-end” L’Autochtone Taverne Americaine restaurant and Busters Mini Mart in Haileybury at the 2021 Indigenous Entrepreneurship Awards.

“It’s like if you took a really high-end restaurant out of Vancouver on, say, Commercial Drive, or out of Montreal from [Rue] Saint-Denis, or Queen St. West in Toronto, and plunked it into a little town in the north,” says Brandon, who previously was a chef, caterer, and a culinary arts teacher for about 35 years. “In so doing, we have attracted the clientele that we wanted because the food is all from scratch, it is higher end, it is a little more pricier than most average restaurants here. So it’s created a real buzz, and then since we arrived here in town, there is now a brewpub across the road, a holistic healing centre on the other corner, there’s a massage therapist going in across the road, and there’s a new beauty bar-type of place right beside us.”

Brandon says his goal in creating the restaurant was to bring the three distinct cultures in the area, Anglophone, Francophone, and Indigenous, together in one spot over food and drink.

“This past weekend, we had a lot of our clientele come from Rouyn-Noranda, which is two hours drive in each direction,” Brandon says. “We get people from Sudbury and from Timmins — these people are all driving two hours just to dine at this restaurant, so it’s had a tremendous impact in the area in terms of its recognition as a great destination for culture.”

Brandon opened the restaurant in 2019 and the Busters Mini Mart high-end coffee shop/specialty food store in 2021. About 30 staff are currently employed between both businesses.

“The Busters kind of grew about because of a combination of COVID-19, the lack of storage space we had in our original property, and how busy we were at the time,” Brandon says, noting that the original Busters store operated from 1923-2014. “We bought the building and started storing in it and it became so full of specialty foods we were importing from Toronto and Spain and Italy and France and the Mediterranean that we just thought, ‘Why don’t we just open it as a store and reenergize what had been a store already for almost hundred years?’”

Brandon says the Busters Mini Mart has been “hugely successful,” adding that it helped save the restaurant from the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“It does your coffee, your lattes, your expresso, [which are] a big part of our sales there,” Brandon says. “But at the same time, we’re selling a variety of imported goods that you just can’t find anywhere in the north so that creates a draw — we’re getting people from Quebec coming over to do their shopping in Busters.”

The 2021 Indigenous Entrepreneurship Awards were presented to eight recipients, including Entrepreneurial Icon Award recipients Jennifer Harper and Mi’kmaq Coalition; Entrepreneur Spirit Award recipients Tara Audibert, Leena Evic, Patrick Hunter and Nicole McLaren; and Up and Comer Award recipients Brandon and Destinee Rosalynd Peter. Information is posted online.

“It is an honour for us to celebrate and recognize excellence and outstanding impact in Indigenous entrepreneurship,” says Sunshine Tenasco, founder of Pow Wow Pitch. “Gerry is using entrepreneurial skills to breathe oxygen and bring pride into his community. While Gerry claims just to be getting started, he is already making an impact through his example.”