A feast of flavours

West End bistro offers modern take on indigenous comfort food

If you want to talk about the notoriously elusive idea of Canadian cuisine, it helps to start with indigenous food. Feast, which opened late last year on the corner of Ellice Avenue and Sherbrook Street, offers a modern take on traditional First Nations ingredients, beautifully showcasing bison, pickerel, corn, wild rice, sunflower seeds and berries, along with some creative adaptations of bannock and fry bread.

Owner Christa Bruneau-Guenther offers up First Nations cooking in an open, airy, light-filled space finished with white-and-black semi-industrial decor. Well-positioned as a West End community hub —next to the Adam Beach Film Institute and the Bandwidth Theatre, and across from the West End Cultural Centre — Feast clearly has a lot of regulars, with servers greeting some customers by name.

There’s a lot of locavore-influenced comfort food here, served in hospitable amounts. In fact, if you’re eating lunch at Feast, you might want to plan for a light supper.

The stick-to-your-ribs chili ($9.75), satisfyingly seasoned but not spectacularly spicy, is made from grass-fed bison and a mix of beans and topped with made-in-Manitoba Bothwell cheddar. Piled-high “Indian tacos” ($9.25-10.75) start with a plate-sized circle of crisp fry bread, which is then heaped with bison chili or maple-chipotle chicken, shredded lettuce and salsa, and drizzled with lime-inflected sour cream.

Naked man dies after jolt from police Taser

A Transcona man says he was lucky to be awake early Sunday when, shortly after 4 a.m., a stranger smashed through his screen door and kicked in the front door of his home.

“It’s all I can think about, like what if I was sleeping?” said the man, whom the Free Press is not naming to protect his identity. “Being awake gave me just a couple of extra seconds to deal with him before he got his whole body in.”

He was sitting on his couch when he heard the glass shatter and saw someone trying to force his way inside.

“Glass flew in and this guy — he was a big guy — tried to climb through the screen door,” the man said. “I hopped off the couch and just remember screaming for help. Well, of course it’s four in the morning, so nobody’s going to help, right? I wasn’t thinking straight.”

At last, some good news on homelessness

There is no shortage of reasons to be frustrated about homelessness in Winnipeg. But the latest numbers provide something that has been increasingly difficult to find — evidence that at least some things are getting better.

Dynacare strike could lead to lab test logjam

DOCTORS and health-care advocates are raising concerns about patient care if a Sept. 8 strike goes ahead at the private company that provides nearly all medical lab services in Manitoba.

There is no essential services agreement in place with Dynacare, so if its lab techs are off the job, patients who need blood tests and urinalysis will be directed to hospitals and public clinics for those services.

“There’s only so many of those workers and I’m sure that the public folks are bracing for big crunch of additional patients if the strike really goes ahead,” Noah Schulz of the Manitoba Health Coalition said Monday.

Dynacare serves 1.2 million Manitoba patients a year at 23 community lab locations.

Province announces free daycare for low-income families

Eligible parents will have their child-care fees waived come Sept. 13.

Woman who saved child, father from Red River uncomfortable with hero label

A Winnipeg woman who’s been hailed as a hero by police for saving a father and his young child from the Red River says she doesn’t feel like one.

“I’m a mom… and I would do it again,” said Jayclyn Morrissette, who was walking with her neighbour through St. John’s Park on Aug. 24 when they spotted a young girl flailing in the nearby river. “I was meant to be there and that was supposed to happen.”

Morrissette, who spoke to the Free Press Wednesday after police released details about the rescue, said she and her neighbour began looking for the child’s parents and found them at the nearby playground searching for her.

Morrissette waved them over. The father, who she said could not swim, jumped into the river first and immediately began to sink.