David Healey is calling from the wrong restaurant.
Birdman, his new fried chicken place at 537 Johnson Street, is two weeks out from opening. The bar's in. The kitchen team is already prepping. The chairs are getting bolted to the floor as we speak — which is also why he's taking this call from somewhere else. He's at Wind Cries Mary instead, the Bastion Square cocktail bar he opened in 2019, right before the world shut down.
Birdman is restaurant number three for Healey and his business partner Jesse Dame, after Wind Cries Mary and Rudi. Together they run Cottage Hospitality Group, where they now employ somewhere around 84 staff across the three rooms. Healey is Executive Chef of the whole operation. By his own description, the opening is on schedule – "after enough restaurants, you're at where you should be" – he says, sounding calm in a way nobody opening a restaurant in two weeks has a right to sound.
I'd come in with a list of questions about Birdman. We got to most of them eventually. But we also got into a wide-ranging discussion about Victoria – where he eats on off days, who’s doing work he really admires right now, what the city is missing, and if the food scene is finally moving into its prime.
First, the new room. Birdman started, like a lot of things did, in 2020. Wind Cries Mary had been open less than a year when COVID forced everything into takeout, and WCM’s concept didn’t travel well. The dishes were built around the room – the family-style service, the quaint tongs, the candlelight – and none of that could be packed into a cardboard box. What did survive was the fried chicken. It had been an instant hit on the original menu, and Jesse Dame had told Healey two weeks into opening that he was never allowed to take it off. So Healey built a new, travel-friendly menu and concept around that dish, called the whole thing Birdman, and ran it as a ghost kitchen out of the back of Wind Cries Mary.
Six years later, that ghost kitchen is becoming its own room. From 11:30 a.m. to midnight. That span is rare in this city, and it's the part of the project Healey gets most animated about.
"You couldn't go anywhere at nine o'clock when I moved here," he says. "It blew my mind. Wind Cries Mary was partly built around that. Birdman is the same idea, just louder."
The space matters to him in a personal way. The 537 Johnson address – Friends of Dorothy until earlier this year, and a string of other businesses before that – is the room where Healey's wife took him on his first day in Victoria, back when it was Willie's Bakery in 2018. He'd just moved here, sight unseen, to open a restaurant for another group. "Of all the places we could've ended up," he says with a smile.
The conversation takes a turn when I ask who in town he really looks up to right now. Healey lights up and is quick to gush about a slew of local chefs and restaurateurs.
The first name out of his mouth was Sergio Hernandez. Hernandez is behind Part and Parcel up in Quadra Village, and recently signed on to work with Ferris’ and Perro Negro. He just redid the Perro Negro menu after the upstairs space expanded. Healey says Hernandez is one of the more interesting cooks in town who doesn't get talked about enough.
The reason, he says, is location.
"Victoria, more than most places, is a location-based city. Just by how it's laid out. Part and Parcel's room on Quadra is great for lunch — they get the lunch crowd — but it's outside the orbit of where most people are heading at dinner. They make amazing food, and I've always felt they haven't gotten the same recognition because of where they are. Sergio's a really good cook. He's going to do some cool stuff with [Perro Negro’s] program."
Healey beams as he talks about Corbin Mathany, who opened Ugly Duckling in Chinatown in 2023. Before that he was Healey's sous chef at Wind Cries Mary. "He kept it authentic to what he wanted. I was so proud of him."
Healey also names Clark Park at Chobap Sushi Bar, the eight-seat omakase counter on Courtney that opened in 2024. The Cafe Brio Group comes up too – Sam Harris and Vincent Vanderheide – who picked up Brasserie L'École last year.
He also gives an appreciative nod to Marilena, Top Table’s first foray onto Vancouver Island. I’m honest and say that I was worried when they first opened – desperate to get a concept like that in Victoria, but unsure whether it would be sustainable. He nods sagely, "It made sense, though. The market of people moving from Vancouver to here is growing. There's more all the time."
I asked him whether what I was feeling – this sense that something is shifting in the Victoria food scene, that there's a wave coming – was real, or whether it was just my own short timeline talking. I've been here three years. He's been here eight.
He didn't hedge.
"Definite upturn. When I moved here, the joke was Victoria is where you went to retire. That's not it anymore. Young people are moving here, people who fell in love with the city and want it to be exciting. We're seeing fine dining, casual, every kind of concept, and they're killing it. There's a lot of young blood in this city. People want to do new projects."
Eight years, he says, has gone by very quickly. He thinks the next eight will look completely different.
What's still missing, in his view, is the kind of food he used to walk two minutes to in Vancouver. We commiserate about the lack of options in town when it comes to quality, authentic Asian cuisine. Hand-pulled noodles. Real dimsum (I spend some real time bemoaning how much I miss the quality dimsum options in Vancouver. We talk about dim sum in Victoria. It is a short conversation.) But even there, he sees the gap closing. He points to Ox King for noodles. Chobap for sushi. The pop-ups. "More demand here means more of those places will show up. That's the food I like to eat anyway."
The conversation came back to producers eventually, because for Healey, the producers are kind of the whole point. He doesn't lock into dishes, he says – he locks into suppliers. The dishes will be driven by the quality of ingredients he can get. All of the chicken for Birdman comes from Rossdown Farms in Abbotsford. All three restaurants get their bread from Portofino Bakery in Saanich. He’s particularly excited about the buns they’re making for Birdman – “Their buns remind me of being a kid at a backyard barbecue. I always wanted that bun for the chicken."
He believes in tomatoes only when tomatoes are in season – a rule he'll defend at length. "Outside the season they're awful. I don't allow them."
He's not, he tells me, dogmatic about local. Healey's view: it's about quality. The closer something travels, the better it usually is. But not always. Some things travel fine. Onions, for instance. If you want to buy local onions, "they cost about four times as much as ones from Washington. And in restaurants where onions are that prevalent, you have to be honest about it." He'll spend the time and the money on the things that matter. He'll source onions where they make sense.
It’s a refreshing mix of obsessively local as well as pragmatic about the bottom line, and it goes a long way to explaining why we’re already seeing restaurant number three from Healey and Dame.
Cottage Hospitality has more concepts already drafted in the notebook. Healey won't say what. ("Once we get Birdman flying. Then we focus on the next one.") What he does say is that he and Dame both love this city, that they want to keep contributing to it, and that some of the things they want to see here they'll have to build themselves.
"We fall in love with this place," he says, "and then we want to be part of it. That's it."
Birdman opens Friday, May 22 at 537 Johnson Street. Hours are 11:30 a.m. to midnight, daily, with brunch service to follow. The menu centres on fried chicken sandwiches, oysters, mac and cheese, and house-baked pies. They are, to my knowledge, the only kitchen on Johnson doing that at 11:45 p.m.
