Where the Panini Reigns Supreme

Lunch at Traverse City’s Chubby Unicorn

By Karl Klockars | April 13, 2024

Even when he was running the kitchen at Bubba’s in Traverse City, Justin Chouinard had his eye on the little restaurant space across the street.

For years, 439 East Front has housed restaurants like Patisserie Amie, Cook’s House, 9 Bean Rows, Sparks BBQ, and most recently, Zest Kitchen. Today, chef Chouinard holds the keys to that cozy little kitchen as the proprietor of Chubby Unicorn, the sandwich-focused lunch destination inspired by his former food truck of the same name.

The Wheels on the Bus

After spending 15 years at Bubba’s followed by some time at nearby Firefly, Chouinard set out on an eight-month road trip, eating his way around the country. He returned to work in another local kitchen, “then all of a sudden I saw an ad for this bus for sale. It’s gray, it’s a little taller than most buses for sale, and I thought, man, that would make a really cool food truck,” Chouinard says.

After he acquired the vehicle from the Magic School Bus company, Chouinard was basically left with a blank space.

“Everything had to be ripped out of there,” Chouinard says, so he called in his friend and professional builder Chris Richter. “I asked them what it would take to build me a kitchen inside this tiny receptacle. He said, ‘Give me the bus for a month and I’ll make it happen.’ And he made my dream come true,” Chouinard says.

After a health department inspection to make sure everything was good to go, “Boom—I was selling.”

Deciding on a menu was a tougher decision than deciding to buy the bus in the first place. “I actually wasn’t sure what I was going to sell out of the bus when I bought it. I just knew that I could do it, and I’d figure out what it was I was going to do later,” Chouinard tells us.

Fate made that decision easier when a restaurant auction made two sandwich presses available to him (“the Cadillac of panini presses,” per Chouinard) and the heart of the Chubby Unicorn menu unfolded.

The transition from full kitchen to food truck wasn’t without some wrinkles, though. Going from two decades of working with a team to a two-person operation was a big switch.

“All the kitchens I had worked in were very large, and I had a lot of staff underneath me,” Chouinard says. “It was quite the transition to go from having a lot of support staff to be just myself and one other person working the window. It went from a whole lot of camaraderie to a whole of prepping by myself and being by myself. So that was probably the biggest transition or difficulty that I had.”

Sandwich Creativity

The brick-and-mortar version of Chubby Unicorn, which opened Jan. 1, 2024, eliminates that difficulty. There’s room for a dozen patrons dining in at once, and there’s really no separation between the kitchen and the dining area, which gives Chouinard the chance to interact with new customers, get feedback on the menu, and chat with regulars.

The menu is fairly tight, with three salads, three soups, and about a half-dozen sandwiches on any given day, plus specials and a kids menu (aka “lil’ chubsters”).

A Chubby Unicorn diner fears no flavor: The Dilly Dally salad comes loaded with eleven ingredients including candied walnuts and sundried tomato basil feta cheese, while creatively-titled sandwiches like the Capi-Doodle-Dew loads up garlic asiago Bay Bread with grilled chicken, capicola, provolone, asiago cheese, peppadew peppers, red onion, cilantro, herb aioli, and sweet Italian dressing. The Thick Little Hottie goes even further, piling pastrami, roast turkey, capicola, gorgonzola, sharp cheddar, peppadew, and crispy jalapeños onto a garden ciabatta roll and topping it with both a roasted garlic aioli and a habanero drizzle.

If those sound somewhat familiar from your last visit to the food truck, Chouinard says he carried over much of the menu because what wasn’t broken didn’t need fixing.

“[The paninis] became so popular that when the brick and mortar came along, I decided to stick with the exact same thing,” he says. “I think what sets my paninis and sandwiches apart from the rest is that I butter and season the top of every single panini very specifically so that it matches the flavors on the inside of the bread. That gives it a real extra pizzazz, for sure.” (Add one more flavor to the list!)

Not that an outside influence to update the menu wasn’t there. “Some other restaurateurs tried to talk me into changing my menu, but I just felt so strongly about the following I’d created with the bus because the bus was never parked in one spot for very long. I traveled a lot with it, and the amount of people that I saw that were coming to these different locations blew my mind,” Chouinard says. “I figured I had something really special that people really enjoyed eating … and so I kept it the same. I think the formula is going well.”

Which is not to say that the menu is entirely static. Specials change every week from a near-endless font of sandwich inspiration.

“Man, my brain is continuously running. I get all my creativity out through my sandwiches,” he says. “There are some crazy flavor combinations that you certainly won’t find anywhere else.”

“Odd” Hours

One thing that you won’t find right now, however, are weekend hours. Yes—after all this time in professional kitchens and on his own food truck, Chouinard is only open during perhaps the most ideal hours for a restauranteur to also have a life outside a kitchen: Monday-Friday, 11am-3pm.

“It’s still super long hours just because I’m starting out,” he says, between pre-opening work, ingredient prep, and cleaning. “But being that it’s lunch, I do get to get out for dinner time. And I have my nights off. And that’s so ideal for me because I have not had that for my entire adult life.”

The hours are also ideal for folks working downtown, especially as lunch hours have been curbed or cut at many of the area’s other eateries.

“As long as I can make a living and keep these doors open, that’s really what I’m gonna try and stick with. Just because it is nice to have a life outside of work,” he says. “I’ve never, ever looked forward to the weekend before in my whole life. And now I’ve got a taste of what it’s like to be Monday through Friday. And it’s nice.”

It’s also nice working in a space that has so much local history, which Chouinard is certainly very aware of, noting that former tenants like the owners of Cook’s House and Sparks BBQ do stop in for lunch on occasion.

“It seems like that a lot of the restaurants that go in there end up going into a bigger building, doing bigger things. And I don’t know if that's my plan, at least not for the next five years,” he says. “I’ve had a real lust for [this] building for a long time. Now that I’m in it, I really like the way it feels.”

Find the Chubby Unicorn at 439 East Front St. in Traverse City.