The Best Restaurant in the World. Ever.

Jericho Arts Centre to November 16, 2025

Tickets from $30 at www.curiouscats.ca

Posted November 11, 2025

Playwright Rick Dobran is one multi-talented guy: former server and restaurant manager, stage and film actor, tattoo artist and playwright. The collages that hang in the Jericho Arts Centre lobby are his creations, too. There’s probably lots more; I have the feeling this guy packs a lot of living in.

And he packs a lot into The Best Restaurant in the World. Ever. which began as a short piece at the former Havana stage in the late 90s. Dobran beefed it up for the 2000 Fringe for which he won the Jessie for Best Script. Twenty-five years later, Best Restaurant is now a two-act play (running a little more than two hours plus intermission) that the playwright hopes retains the magic of the original.

There still is magic – well, more like surreality – in this new production with conversations between Lily (animated Mersiha Musovic) and ghosts. But the premise – and it’s a wild one – simply doesn’t support a couple of hours in spite of all the laughs and hijinx along the way.

You will not be fed The Best Food in the World nor will you get any recipes. A cooking show it is not. What you will get is a multi-layered, interwoven tale involving Chef Joe (Dobran) and his staff of six plus Lily, who may or may not be dead. Looking like a raggedy street person, Lily has come to warn Joe that disaster is about to happen and that he alone can prevent it. Indeed, he can “save the world” if only he’d try. But poor Joe is haunted by flashbacks that include bombs falling and sirens. And he’s obsessed with creating the best entrée ever; excellent and spectacular are not enough for him. He’s looking for perfection.

There’s lots of heart in this script as we come to understand that some of the characters have given up on love. Rhea (Erin Jeffery) says if you believe in love, it’ll break your heart. Maître d’ Max (a delightfully snooty Jordon Navratil) has turned his nose up at love and the world in general. Vida (Christi Arellano) is still carrying a decades-old torch for a high-school boyfriend. And filthy rich Rando (Kurt Evans) is just a nasty, arrogant screw-up who thinks money can buy love.

Set designer Karen Hamm (who also directs for Curious Cats Theatre Collective) provides a handsome high-class dining room complete with red velvet swagged drapes, a potted palm and one white table-clothed table with a couple of chairs. There’s just a suggestion of a kitchen and a hint of a bar with a brass rail. Sound designers Maryth Gilroy and Robert Brockman-Cobban make sure we know this is a classy joint with strains of tango music filtering in. It all has the feel of a 40s or 50s film; you almost expect Bogart and Bacall to show up – with a reservation, of course.

The writing is witty, the cast of eleven (including, Jarod Campbell, Alexander Forsyth, Lachlan Harris-Fiesel, FJ Mensah and Kenneth Seto Tynan) is hard-working and animated – especially in a late-in-the-play choreographed scene with all hands on deck – and director Hamm keeps it all moving along.

But with a lighthearted plot trying bravely to fill a couple of hours, The Best Restaurant is like eating a big meal; while you cleaned your plate, you wish you had been served a little less.