Even though he's an ambitious optimist, Matthew Corrin quips that he doesn't see his Lettuce Eatery chain becoming the Starbucks of salads "unless we start adding something as addictive as caffeine to our salad dressings."

But others adamantly predict swift mogulhood for the Winnipeg-born-and-bred Corrin, who's still years away from turning 30 and looks more like an Il Divo heartthrob than a shrewd restaurateur.

Watching Corrin zoom, in a single year, from having zero experience in the food industry to launching two queues-out-the-door restaurants in prime Toronto spots prompted the following comment from friend and patron Andrew Resnick, managing director of Radio Shack Canada.

"Matthew is a super-smart businessman with a great future ahead of him. He's got the right product at the right time in the right place."

Brennan O'Connor, Business Edge

Matthew Corrin's Lettuce Eatery brought the trend of salad entrees in a hip format from New York to Toronto just a year ago and has already expanded.

Why all the excitement? Because for increasingly health-conscious consumers - as columnist Rebecca Eckler recently opined in the National Post - "lettuce is the new black."

Sure enough, a nationwide survey by the New York-headquartered National Restaurant Association last year concluded that "More Americans are ordering salads as a main course.

And Food & Drink Weekly reported that bagged salad is now the second biggest-selling item in U.S. grocery stores (after bottled water). Meanwhile, of course, fast-food outlets including McDonald's and Wendy's have jumped into the salad sector.

Logic, plus Corrin's instant success, suggest that Canadian consumers are equally enthusiastic about salad options, and are having an impact on the $50-billion annual domestic food-service industry accordingly.

That statistic comes from Foodservice & Hospitality Magazine, whose restaurant reviewer recently stated: "When it comes to vegetables, nothing surpasses Toronto's chic new Lettuce Eatery."

Corrin beat everyone else to the punch by opening his first Lettuce Eatery in the heart of Toronto's financial district - the food court of the TD Centre at Wellington and York streets - in January 2005.

By November, he had launched an uptown counterpart near Bloor and Yonge streets, which differs from the first Lettuce Eatery by offering not just lunch and breakfast but dinner as well. Corrin plans to open a third restaurant in the trendy Spadina Avenue and Richmond Street district in February.

The Lettuce Eatery was Toronto's first taste of a phenomenon that's already a huge hit in major American, Australian and other cities: Restaurants whose primary offering is design-it-yourself gourmet salads purchased and consumed as entrées.

At Lettuce Eatery, the vibrant hues of dozens of chopped vegetables arrayed in gleaming stainless-steel trays complement Corrin's own crisp interior design, which features black, white, chocolate and apple-green fixtures.

A whopping 70 ingredients are on offer. They include diverse veggies, beans, fruits and berries, plus four types of lettuce, five cheeses, three flavours of chicken, two of tuna, shrimp and beef tenderloin. There are 20 dressings from which hundreds of diners per day choose their favourites, happily coughing up an average of about $8 per meal.

As he marked the anniversary of his initial Lettuce Eatery this month, Corrin took justifiable satisfaction in having defied the 98-per-cent first-year failure odds for restaurant startups.

Far from succumbing to that grim fate, he says his restaurants are "on target to do about a million in sales this year. We've already recouped our initial investment and we didn't have to go back for a second round of investment when we opened on Bloor Street."

So saying, Corrin took time just before the lunch rush to sketch out the tale of how he has gotten so far so fast.

Growing up in Winnipeg with fitness-conscious parents - an entrepreneurial-minded mother and a dentist father - he was only 15 when he embarked on his first business venture. It was compiling, printing and selling a provincewide guide to Manitoba's hockey and ringette rinks. It sold 2,000 copies and won him an enterprise award from his high school, St. John's Ravenscourt.

Corrin later pursued a bachelor of arts degree in media technology at the University of Western Ontario. Heading south during summer breaks, he landed a couple of enviable internships in New York City. One was at TV host David Letterman's company. The other was in the publicity department for famed fashion designer Oscar de la Renta - to which he returned for about three years after graduating.

Corrin's brainstorm about a hot business niche that New York possessed, but Canada lacked, hit him while he hung out with calorie-conscious fashion colleagues at bustling salad restaurants in Manhattan.

"I spent six months (at such spots) watching how everything was done: What was their demographic, how fast were they getting people through the line? When I wasn't there, I was sitting in Starbucks with my laptop researching the food industry and building my business plan."

Corrin then made a successful pitch to four private investors he declines to name, and moved to Toronto to search for the perfect location for what he by then had dubbed Lettuce Eatery.

It obviously took a bit of vision to settle on what he recalls as "the dark and dungeony food court in the TD Centre.

But when he met with Barbara Sewell, director of leasing for the building's landlord, Cadillac Fairview, and learned about plans for revamping the area and adding about nine vendors, he quickly negotiated a 10-year lease for an enviable corner spot with frontage on two sides.

"Matthew brought us an idea whose time had obviously come for the downtown core," Sewell says. "The Lettuce Eatery is hip, it's urbane and it's healthy. And clearly, judging from its success, it's responding to a pent-up demand among the professional people who work in this area."

During his first year in business, Corrin says he learned "an enormous amount.

And Resnick says it's his friend's ability to quickly recognize and implement improvements that has resulted in a doubling of sales and customer throughput.

Since opening with a menu consisting only of salads and salad sandwiches, Lettuce Eatery has added soups and breakfast options including an innovation Corrin says he didn't import from New York. "We now serve about 50 bowls a day of organic, slow-cooked oatmeal" to which patrons can add such ingredients as berries, fruit and chocolate chips.

That inspiration impresses but does not surprise Resnick, who says that "A lot of people might have opened a business like Matthew's but not had the wherewithal to add to their skillset so rapidly or perceive the potential scalability."

But judging by the additional plans Corrin already has in the works, it seems that Resnick and other admirers ain't seen nothing yet. He is already contemplating opening more Lettuce Eatery restaurants in Toronto in the near future and scouting likely spots in Vancouver and Montreal, with his home town of Winnipeg not far behind.

In a couple months' time, Corrin plans to launch what he calls "a major catering operation," which he projects will some day account for half of Lettuce Eatery's overall revenue.

Entrepreneurs twice his age might envy Corrin's unflappability as well as his commercial prowess. On the day he spoke with Business Edge, despite a surprise annual visit by health inspectors, he was as cool as any of the cucumbers he sells.

That pressure was nothing, he says, compared with "naming this place Lettuce Eatery and then running out of romaine on our first day and iceberg on the third."

Then, not long after that, both of his food-prep people were rushed to hospital after one cut himself and the other fainted at the sight of blood, fell down and hit his head.

That left Corrin alone at 6:30 a.m. with bushels of veggies to be chopped, not to mention six boxes of lettuce and 36 kilograms of spinach.

"I'll never forget getting through that crisis, thanks to help from my girlfriend, who's now my fiancée," he says. "I realized then that this is not rocket science. It's hard work. And if we could get through that, we can get through anything. Nothing's going to stop us."

(Terry Poulton can be reached at poulton@businessedge.ca)