Diner thrives for 75 Beausejour eatery with taste for Cheez Whiz marks three-quarters of a century By: David Sanderson Posted: 6:00 AM CDT Saturday, Aug. 23, 2025

BEAUSEJOUR — Free Press writer and editor Ben Sigurdson recently mused about Cheez Whiz in his and reporter Eva Wasney’s weekly Dish newsletter.

Sigurdson shared that he couldn’t recollect the last time he ate the processed spread, and how he satisfied a sudden craving by tossing a 450-gram jar into his basket, during a run to the grocery store earlier this month.

Later, after smearing it over various foodstuffs — including veggie dogs and Ritz crackers — he concluded it wasn’t nearly as appetizing as he remembered it to be, noting “only on celery (the classic Cheez Whiz delivery mechanism) did the stuff taste remotely decent.”

In the end, Sigurdson was left pondering what to do with a near-full jar of Cheez Whiz that is presently taking up valuable space in his refrigerator.

Might we suggest transporting the remains to Beausejour, where Vickie’s Snack Bar has been slathering the orangish-yellow concoction on menu items for decades?

Wynnie Doan laughs, saying she’d never heard of Cheez Whiz, let alone sampled it, before she started managing Vickie’s, which is currently celebrating its 75th anniversary in business.

When she arrived on the scene in January 2020, her aunt and uncle, who bought Vickie’s in 2017, explained that Cheez Whiz is special there, and that it’s not something utilized at too many other dining establishments, says Doan, who grew up in Vietnam, where the Kraft product isn’t exactly a staple in the grocery aisle.

“At first I was kind of confused — cheese slices I understand, but cheese from a jar? — but after talking with customers, I learned that lots of people love it and come to Vickie’s just for the Cheez Whiz on their burgers and hot dogs,” Doan says.

“We even have customers asking for a side of Cheez Whiz for their fries or breakfast toast.”

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Victoria “Vickie” Mackew was 31 years old when she founded her namesake eatery in 1950, at 719 Park Ave. Her parents had owned the two-storey building since 1928, and through the years it went through various iterations, serving first as a second-hand store, then as a shoe-repair shop and lastly as an egg-grading station.

“The first year was terrible, I used to cry every night,” Mackew told a reporter for the Beausejour Review in 2000.

“But what could you do? You had to work, so we just worked hard.”

Mackew’s persistence paid off. By the time she agreed to sell the restaurant in the fall of 1983 to her niece Denise Kazina and Denise’s husband Fred, it had become a thriving operation that was packing ’em in, seven days a week.

Having grown up in nearby Tyndall, Fred Kazina was already familiar with Vickie’s when he and Denise became the new owners.

The only problem was that Mackew, who died in 2012 at age 92, had never bothered to jot a single recipe down. Before they assumed the reins in January 1984, Fred spent three months there, learning how to make chili dogs, patty melts and Denver sandwiches precisely in the manner of his aunt-in-law.

The Kazinas initially took a “don’t-fix-what’s-not-broken” approach to the spot. Gradually they introduced a few changes, however, the two biggest of which were more than doubling seating capacity to 60, and opening at 8 a.m. versus 11 a.m.

“I’d been working construction before we took over and I knew there would probably be a demand there for breakfast,” Fred says over the phone.

“We started offering it and never looked back.”

“To go from Ho Chi Minh City, which has something like 14 million people, to Beausejour, with a population of only 3,000, felt like a dream come true to them.”–Wynnie Doan

The Kazinas, who were also among the first restaurateurs in the province to offer bison burgers, sold Vickie’s in 2012 to outside interests, following a 28-year-run. The business was back on the market in 2017, the same year Doan moved to Winnipeg from Ho Chi Minh City, to study international business at Red River College Polytechnic.

Doan’s aunt and uncle were already living in the city when she arrived. They were looking to purchase a local business, she recalls, and they fell in love with Vickie’s the moment they stepped through the doors with a realtor.

“I think what they were mainly looking for was a more peaceful, slower pace of life,” Doan says.

“To go from Ho Chi Minh City, which has something like 14 million people, to Beausejour, with a population of only 3,000, felt like a dream come true to them.”

Running a restaurant proved to be more difficult than Doan’s aunt and uncle anticipated. In the fall of 2019 they approached their niece, who’d recently graduated, to see if she would be interested in managing the day-to-day affairs. Doan agreed to help them out, despite having no experience in the hospitality industry.

Doan’s first couple of months on the job were challenging. Despite no evidence to support their beliefs, a percentage of customers became convinced she was about to overhaul their regular haunt by converting it into an Asian restaurant.

“There was definitely some hesitancy. Lots of nice people welcomed me with open arms, but others would walk in, see me behind the counter and walk back out,” says Doan, a married mother of one who commutes from Transcona during the week, and who resides in a three-bedroom apartment directly above the restaurant on weekends.

“The first few times I got emotional when they did that. I’d be like, nothing has changed, everything’s still the same. At least give us a try.”

COVID-19 didn’t do her any favours, either. Two-and-a-half months into her tenure, she was selling “maybe five burgers a day” through the take-out window, which resulted in her having to lay off the majority of her staff.

“Even when we opened back up in June, there were so many rules about social distancing that it was still difficult. It was an interesting Year 1, for sure.”

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The menu at Vickie’s Snack Bar is dotted with homages to the past.

For starters, there’s the Vickie’s classic breakfast, which consists of two eggs, choice of meat, toast and hashbrowns. Also popular are Vickie’s “family-secret” beet borscht and Fred’s sunshine burger, the latter a burger with the works topped with a fried egg.

Doan says it isn’t uncommon for her staff to begin preparing a customer’s order the moment they eye their vehicle pulling up in one of the dozen angled parking spots, directly outside the front door.

“Some people I know by name, but lots of times it’s by what they get every time,” she continues. “I’ll go ‘here comes whistle dog and fries’ and their order will already be on the grill by the time they get to their table.”

About that; until she started running a restaurant (her husband Hiep Phan has been assisting in her in that department since they tied the knot in 2022), she never knew diners were such creatures of habit. Many’s the time a party has chosen to wait an extra 15 or 20 minutes to be seated, simply because their regular table is occupied when they arrive.

Doan is still tossing around ideas how to properly fête Vickie’s milestone anniversary.

They may reintroduce a food challenge they ran two years ago, when customers tried their luck downing a double homestead burger — that’s four beef patties, four slices of ham, lettuce, tomato and cheese — fries and a shake in 10 minutes or less for a T-shirt prize.

Or they might tie the occasion to Sunday’s Shades of the Past Car Club show, when five blocks of Park Avenue will be closed to vehicular traffic, for an annual showcase of four-wheeled treasures.

“At some point, we’re also going to donate a certain amount of money to a local charity, for every burger sold on a particular day,” she adds. “That’s a for-sure but we’ll still trying to decide which organization or organizations will receive the funds.”

Finally, in case you’re wondering, Doan didn’t choose to live in this part of the world owing to the fact her given name, Wynnie, is pronounced the same as that of a certain hometown hero, a good-natured, gold-furred, honey-loving ursine.

“No, the Wynnie/Winnie thing was such a coincidence. That was something I discovered after I moved here, which I find very interesting.”

david.sanderson@freepress.mb.ca