Food Review: The Oakwood Cafe

The Oakwood Cafe

660 Osborne St

 

The location of the Oakwood cafe is just a little bit unusual. Sandwiched between a Subway and a Pizza take-out place in a strip mall sounds like the location for a barbershop or a tanning salon rather than the 10^th best restaurant in the Osborne-Corydon cluster (at the time of writing). Or maybe it isn’t unusual at all. The Oakwood is nestled close to the (somewhat) new and very exciting group of restaurants near The Park Theater in south Osborne.

They describe themselves as “a family friendly restaurant” with “some funky twists on a few dishes”.  These words can sometimes be code for “the food is boring and cheap because children don’t like to try new things and parents are very often impoverished” and “one of our dishes contains hot sauce in the lowest dose possible.” In the case of the Oakwood cafe it is not code for anything, it is truth.

My wife and I rarely look at the menu before we go to a place so we weren’t really sure what “vegetarian” meant in this context. Sometimes it means 1 salad that doesn’t contain chicken and there is a plate of hash browns which can be upgraded to beefy hash browns for an extra 2.99. Sometimes it means there are so many veggie options my little heart weeps with joy. In this case it is somewhere in-between. We went for dinner and found there was good number of dishes that we could eat (3 sandwiches, 8 burgers (by virtue of swapping in a veggie burger for any of the burger options), 2 pastas, 3 salads, 1 entree, and a few sides). I got a bit carried away on that list...

Anyway, we ordered:

Mediterranean Pasta

This came with:

Garlic Bread

Borscht (which isn’t vegetarian, but we pretended)

Vegetarian Wrap

This came with:

Sweet Potato Fries (upgraded for 1.99)

It came to about $42 with a 15% tip. In retrospect our server probably deserved more than that, he was amazingly friendly and helpful and very sociable. Some of the best service we have received anywhere.

The borscht came before the rest of the food. The soup is so perfect that I wouldn’t bat an eye if someone told me my grandma was in the kitchen shredding the beets. But what really won my heart was the sweet potato fries. Good heavens they were good. They changed my feelings about all the yam and sweet potato fries that came before and will be measure for all yam fries that come after. They were hot, they were crisp on the outside, they were soft on the inside. The chipotle aioli was tasty and not too brash. Oh my goodness, go eat their sweet potato fries now!! The vegetables tasted fresh and were cooked perfectly. The artichokes were particularly good. The wrap had goat cheese in it, which was amazing. The people at the table next to us were praising the liver and onions, so you might want to try it too. My only regret was not ordering a milkshake.

The verdict? If you find yourself there make sure to have the fries, they are worth every penny you spend. If you don’t have a borsht-making grandmother to keep your soup stomach full, you should probably order that too. I might recommend going for lunch over dinner because of the large number of sandwich and veggie burger options. 

Until next time,

Rant: Downtown Grocery Stores

            There has been a lot of talk about the Zellers grocery store at The Bay closing its doors. People are upset that yet another major grocery store is leaving. The picture that is painted is bleak:  Stefano Grande, executive director of Downtown BIZ, said that the IGA on Donald is the only full line grocery store downtown (Free Press, October 2012).  The Uniter (Oct 31^st,2012) said that downtown will become a food desert. The Sun (on March 16^th 2013) mentions that the Food Fare on Arlington is filing for bankruptcy, and the Extra Foods on Notre Dame closed not so long ago.  Zellers is gone and I will not deny that the loss of options is a tragedy, and I won’t even pretend that three grocers closing in and around the downtown is a drop in a full bucket. But I would like to point out that the reaction is a bit over dramatic.

I think it is a myth that there is only 1 full line grocery store in the downtown. By my count there are four major sources of grocery in the downtown. The IGA on Donald is the obvious first one. It serves the people who live in the most populous area of downtown – the area between Broadway and the Assiniboine River. The second is probably not a place you have gone to before: Sun Wah Supermarket, which has an impressive collection of products. It is within easy walking distance from anywhere in the northern area of the exchange district.  The forks market has a collection of smaller shops which, almost definitely, comprise a full service grocery store when considered together. By this same strain of logic the combination of Dong Thai and Dino’s on Notre Dame together are essentially a full service grocery store for the central park area.

A second thing to consider is that people are not limited to only shopping in the downtown, except if they are a part of the most disadvantaged populations. If you look at a map of grocery stores downtown (just do a Google search of “Winnipeg downtown grocery”) you will see that there are a multitude of larger groceries within a short busing distance, or moderate a long walk, from the downtown. There are two Safeways: one on Ellice and one in Osborne, Neechi Foods in the north. In the east there is a Safeway on Marion and an Extra Foods on Goulet. Pal’s supermarket on Broadway is also nearly full service. That is 6 major grocery outlets within a short distance of downtown.

There are also medium sized grocery outlets, places like Edmonton Convenience Store, Giant Tiger, and speciality food places like Mondragon and Sunrise Health Foods. Ethnic groceries like Abyssinian Commercial Trade and the Portuguese Fish & Food Market. These places fill small portions of the gap created from a lack of a major retail outlet to out-compete them.

However, grocery options don’t stop when physical buildings stop. There are other places to get food. The most publicised, and possibly the best option, is the Good Food Box. This program is put on by the Winnipeg FoodShare Co-op and it which gives you phenomenal prices on high quality fresh produce all year long. What about Winnipeg Grocery.com? they deliver to places through out the city (for an $11 delivery charge) and they have quite a reasonable selection of items. There are also buying clubs. These are not as widely publicized and you tend to have to know a person who knows a person to get in. That may not be convenient, but it is an option. This category also includes the summertime CSAs who deliver fresh produce to farmers markets and pickup locations across the city.

People are always talking about increasing the vibrancy of downtown. I am not an expert in urban planning, I'm not a retail geographer, but I have observed in other cities that the type of vibrant commercial districts which CentreVenture etc  are trying to create are not dominated by large retail outlets. Do we need one downtown?

Here is the part where I backpeddle a bit: Food deserts exist. They are serious issues and they have very negative health implications for disadvantaged populations.  Here is a report on food deserts by the PWHCE which talks about food deserts in Saskatoon and Winnipeg. Reading it will show you that there is a problem. Zellers probably presented some of an impoverished population with an important source of healthy food which is now lacking. Elderly people may not be capable of travelling the extra kilometre to the Safeway on River and Osborne (and it is quite expensive to shop there) or to Pal’s in West Broadway. Will a Superstore, a Costco, or a Sobeys save the day? I’m not certain they will. They might just put a lot of small shops out of business.

So what would I recommend? I don’t really know. I have always put food at the top of my priority list, I am perfectly mobile, and I don’t know what it is like not to earn enough money to feed oneself.  But, this is my suggestion: Set up a program that delivers food to people who are not mobile enough to do it themselves. Since that is almost as unlikely as a zombie apocalypse, why not do it yourself? If there is an elderly person or someone in your apartment building who cannot get to a grocery store themselves, offer to do it for them. They are the ones who need the support and who are affected by this the most. You are going to the grocery store anyway.

 Everyone else will probably just jump in their cars and drive to a place where food is available, or they will keep frequenting smaller local shops who supply them with enough options to be satisfied.

Until next time,

Food Review: Kokeb Restaurant

Kokeb Restaurant

266 Edmonton St

Updated September 2014

When I am unsure of where to take someone for a (non business) lunch downtown this is my fall back option. Kokeb is located in an beautiful and well lit space across from the Hydro Building. Despite this perfect location it is rarely full during the lunch hour. You will never have to wait to sit down. The crowd clears out by 1:15.

The owner is friendly and always offers a bit of green hot sauce in a small cup, which you should accept because neither the sauce nor the food is very spicy (to my level of tolerance). It’s a buffet so don’t expect a server fawning over you. The food was true to buffet form: there were good options (8 dishes?) and better than anything else, I could try them all. A vegetarian buffet is something of a miracle of gluttony for me.  Injera is available so that you can eat with your hands in the traditional fashion (there are forks as well). Of the dishes on the lunch menu Kik Alicha, and Misir Wet appear to be the only ones on the dinner menu. I must qualify this comment because: 1) there are no cards identifying the names of the dishes; and 2) I know nothing about Ethiopian food. I am only guessing this is what they are serving. 

Regardless, the options are all tasty enough to be worth trying. One or two of them really stand out: the Misir Wet, and a dish that must be the Ethiopian equivalent to beet borscht. Since the buffet is 10$, it will not break the bank to indulge a bit and buy a slice of cake from the very European desert menu.

This place is more than worth the price,

Until Next Time,

Food Review: Osborne Village Café

The Osborne Village Café

160 Osborne St

Updated September 2014

Since I first came here this has become a very popular breakfast place. When you go you should expect to wait in line for a while, unless you come early. You should have no problem finding a seat if you come before 11:00 am. I love this place and I have brought my mom and my (very elderly) grandparents here several times for brunch. It is a little bit loud for seniors but they occasionally suggest we return so clearly it was a pleasant experience.

This was my original post:

Maybe you've heard of the Osborne Village Café, maybe you haven’t, but if you know anything about Osborne village you will have heard of The Zoo. My father tells a story that when he was in university they would go to The Zoo, sit in a corner as far away from anyone as possible and make the utmost effort only to look at other friends sitting at his table. He says that at least once the door to the lounge was smeared with blood from where someone was thrown against the enforced glass pane next to the door by the bouncer before being thrown out for real. Whether this was mostly simile or if it actually happened I cannot verify, but it certainly has shaped my ideas about the place. A few metal head friends of mine report that it is definitely not that dangerous anymore.

What this boils down to is that The Osborne Village Café is in the Osborne Motor hotel and that made me nervous to go. Breakfast Winnipeg appears to be the only food blogger to have gone to the place, and they did so under different management. This is the critical thing to remember because their review is rather scathing and mine, as you will soon discover, is not. New management and new staff means new life.

The Café, as I’m going to start calling it, is a hipster paradise. It is like Cousins (or The Nook) in Wolseley because there is always someone I know eating there. The food is all under 10$ and generously portioned. You can tell that a lot of love goes into its preparation because it has achieved something rarely found in breakfast places: food that tastes like breakfast made at home. I pitch this compliment as follows: who has time to make a good old fashioned breakfast in their home? I rarely do. Secondly, if it tastes homemade they are not using eggs from a carton (they are local in fact) and the bread is good as well. Potatoes are local as well. UPDATE: Since the last time I went they have added even more local sourcing to their list, including tea from Hollow Reed.

Before you get the wrong impression and think this is only a breakfast place, let me set you on the straight and narrow: they serve breakfast, lunch, and dinner and they serve it all day. They have a weekly soup and a weekly pie (which I think is a great idea).  I don’t remember all the menu items but they included things such as an omelette called “the hipster” and a club sandwich called “the mansion”. I am told that many of the condiments are made in-house, and with the love that exudes from every plaid shirted server and customer I don’t doubt it for a moment.

update:

We have ordered:

- French Toast (no longer on the menu)

- Beet and Potato latkes
- The Hipster (omelet)
- Perogies (celery root with potato, parsley, mozza, and roasted parsnip)

- Curried Chickpea and Wild Rice Burger
- The Breakfast Burger
- The Squash
- Jagermeister Ice Cream

The breakfast highlights are the Hipster, The Veg, and the breakfast burger. The latkes are fabulous, and I really don’t like latkes. For lunch or dinner the perogies are great and they are swimming in cream sauce. The Squash is also outstanding. The Jaegermiester ice cream is also worth ordering. 

Until next time,