In March 2020, Lambo’s Deli co-owner Justin Leon had just signed a lease for space in an old Portuguese convenience store in Toronto’s Trinity Bellwood area. His vision—to bring a bodega New York deli style sandwich shop to Toronto. “I found there was a real hole in the marketplace and there wasn’t anything like that in Toronto,” says Justin.
A few weeks later, the pandemic hit and Justin wondered whether they’d be able to get the business off the ground. He spent the summer building out the restaurant and figuring out the menu. “I didn’t have much experience in the industry and realized I needed more assistance cheffing it up,” says Justin. He was introduced to Cristóbal Bascuñán, who has vast experience at various Toronto culinary establishments and the two worked together to figure put together something that works. That “something” turned out to be submarine sandwiches—using conventional ingredients but topped with their own unique touches and flavours.
With Cristóbal now on board, they opened in October 2020 and it’s been off to the races ever since. “It’s not a sit-down restaurant or super fancy food, just a quick-service takeout,” says Justin. “But we were fortunate in that our business model was made for this environment. We were offering something that’s very comforting that people needed at the time,” he says.
Three years later, in October 2023, Justin and Cristóbal opened a second shop at Leslieville in Toronto’s east end. Both shops offer essentially the same menu of eight different sub sandwich options with some slight variations between locations.
A customer favourite is the Italian Trio, voted one of Toronto’s best submarine sandwiches. Given the deli’s popularity is not expected to dwindle any time soon, the two co-owners are now learning how keep up with their every-growing clientele with the help of Square to streamline operations.
Fast growth and high customer volume over short time period
Since its opening during the pandemic, Lambo’s sales have increased by 2.5 times. Today the busy deli serves an average of 350-500 covers per day on weekends, with an estimated foot traffic reaching 600-700 people per day. They’ve also since branched out into catering, which is becoming a sizable part of their business, as well as accepting pre-orders and offering promotional specials.
One might chalk up their success to a combination of having the right product at the right time—coupled with their creative use of social media to build their brand. The deli’s active engagement with followers and strategic leveraging of user-generated content have fostered a strong online community that drives significant sales. “People take pictures of the cross sections of our sandwiches and post them, so it’s like a self-perpetuating system because the customers are creating the social media content for us,” says Justin.
Using Square products to manage rapid growth
Bringing in lots of business—at a time when many other restaurant businesses were forced to close—is a happy problem to have. But managing this rapid growth successfully and keeping the business on track requires a flexible, integrated, and user-friendly online platform.
To keep their operations running smoothly. Lambo’s Deli relies heavily on Square’s ecosystem, noting its user-friendliness, intuitive design, and smooth integration between products. “Everything just kind of integrates well. You don’t really have to think about anything, it’s all very seamless,” says Justin. “In terms of user interaction, I looked at a number of different options and ended up choosing Square because of the simplicity and the actual user experience of the customer-facing side of the hardware. It’s just the best,” he says.
The intuitive integration also makes it easier to onboard new staff. “We just create a profile for them and enter them in the system. The training is minimal because it’s so easy to use,” says Justin. “I feel most other systems would require more of a learning curve, but because Square’s is so intuitive, it makes you feel confident in the product,” he says. This can be very handy when you are short staffed.
“We’ve had instances where we’ve had to pull somebody form the kitchen to work the front of the house with no training, and they just figure it out because it’s so easy to use,” says Justin.
The two co-owners have particularly high praise for the POS system, Square for Restaurants, KDS, and Dashboard. They’ve recently added Square Online, which is streamlining operations even further and is especially helpful for catering, pre-orders, and special promotions.
Speed and ease of transactions make for happy customers
With the high volume of customers, operating speed, efficiency, and ease of transactions are paramount. “Because we’re a quick service restaurant with something going out the door every 30 to 45 seconds, transaction time has to be as fast as humanly possible, and that’s where Square is really awesome,” says Justin. The system’s speed in processing transactions, sending orders to the kitchen, and ultimately serving customers is much faster. “It has reduced the amount of time it takes us to process orders and has increased the number of people that we can serve in the same span of time because even those seconds make a huge difference when it’s over the course of the day,” he says.
The ease of transactions, coupled with speed and efficiency, make for a more positive customer experience. “I always want the customer to have the best experience possible,” says Justin. The speed of service, customized branding on the payment screen, and overall transparent and smooth transaction process enhance customer satisfaction “They feel compelled to feeling good about their purchase in a way that is different from that with our past payment providers,” he says.
No doubt Lambo’s Deli is well positioned to continue on its growth trajectory. And as it does that, Square grow with them, helping to keep every aspect of the business running smoothly.