Healthier, Local Food
Jancat Art Cafe is here to serve our community a brand-new, innovative style of Japanese/American fusion cuisine.
Read below to learn what makes our food healthier and more delicious
Real food ingredients is our DNA
Our first and foremost focus is making dishes that are easier on the stomach, delicious and fresh.
We avoid or try to minimize: artificial flavours, colours, preservatives
We never use: flavour powders, powdered milk, artificial sweeteners, "barista blends" for our non-dairy milks, "whipped cream" in store-bought cans, ingredients that have no nutritional value and shouldn't really be considered "food"
We use: fresh vegetables, real berries, jams made from real fruit, real dairy and unsweetened non-dairy oat milk (without "barista blend" additives), and whipped cream made from simple, real whipping cream (adding only a bit of sugar and real vanilla extract).
We strive to have more: organic ingredients, local products, and gluten-free alternatives
Certain products we use are very unique to East Asian cuisine and to bubble tea, and have to be imported. All of these products are carefully screened by the Jancat management team for ingredients that go against our philosophy and we diligently check all of our suppliers.
We won't serve you anything that we wouldn't eat ourselves. And we like to eat well :)
100% original, made to order and fresh
We don't re-sell you "convenience" pre-packaged items.
Don't expect to find a cake from a grocery store bakery disguised as Jancat. Convenience foods like this might often contain high amounts of sugar and preservatives that go against our Real Food principle anyway.
We care about quality. A lot.
Every single dish is prepared by our team, according to a recipe that undergoes our unique and rigorous process before it earns its place in our menu. We painstakingly go through different proportions and combinations of ingredients, formalizing a repeatable preparation process and screening new suppliers.
Most items are made to order.
While it might mean a 10-15-minute wait for your lunch order, it also means that you always get fresh and juicy meat, crispy fries, onigiri rice with amazing texture, crispy seaweed and fresh fillings, which are healthy and delicious.
Not "fast food" but not too slow
We are not here to compete on speed with big fast-food chains, as we have a commitment to serve you healthier and fresher options.
With that said, within our quality constraints, we focus relentlessly on our speed and efficiency every day and constantly improve our kitchen workflow and layout.
If you're not in a rush, you can expect a 2-3 minute wait for your handcrafted bubble tea, and a 7-15 minute wait for your made-to-order lunch, depending on the dish and its complexity.
Things can get much slower during rush time, but we will try to scale our team as soon as we can do this sustainably without dramatically increasing prices on your favourite meals.
If you're on the go and need a quality meal fast, just give us a call to pre-order up to 30 minutes in advance and we will get your lunch/dinner ready on time.
Diversity of fusion cuisine
Our menu selection occupies a unique niche at the intersection of Japanese cuisine and North American go-to restaurant food staples.
Our head chef applies her knowledge of Japanese cuisine and working methods to create dishes that are both inventive and yet familiar and comfortable to our customers. When visiting Jancat, you are sure to discover something new, as well as to find a meal that you would truly enjoy.
Supporting local suppliers
As much as we can, we try to source our ingredients from our neighbours' businesses. We hope that by working together, local businesses can keep our community thriving as we all ultimately share the wealth of each other's success.
We are immensely grateful to have amazing local businesses work with us:
Next generation of Bubble Tea
Bubble Tea is a broad variety of different drinks, depending on the restaurant you go to. Each shop has its own culture and definition of bubble tea. What may come as a surprise is that bubble tea does not always contain tea - many drinks use milk without tea as a base.
We believe we are the first store in Elgin County (and maybe even Canada) to introduce the next-generation bubble tea. Typically, bubble tea used to be offered in an extremely wide range of flavours largely because it's common to use flavoured powders as the base for bubble tea drinks. In the recent few years in East Asia, a trend has developed to make bubble tea using as many handcrafted and fresh ingredients as possible - that is what we refer to as the next generation of bubble tea.
We do not use flavoured powders and we hand-craft all of our bubble teas. While it involves more time and cost, we believe that it's the only way to make bubble tea a nutritious drink that's not only delicious but also healthy.
This also means that we have a way to use much less sugar than what most people are used to in their bubble tea, because we are not constrained by the base level of sugar that may be contained in some powders.
If you are trying Jancat for the first time, don't worry - you won't need to specifically ask us to put less sugar to make our bubble tea drinkable. And if you don't like your first drink at Jancat as a new customer - we'll make you a second drink on the house incorporating any critical feedback you may have as much as we can*.
* This promotion is available on a case-by-case basis at the sole discretion of the manager on duty. We don't have capacity to remember every guest, and cannot always tell for sure if someone has or has not been at the cafe before. Limit of up to 1 drink only per customer. Not applicable to orders of over CAD $11.