Red Cherry Café rebounds

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This article was published 05/07/2023 (850 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The smell of hot coffee wafts through a winding corridor of the Portage Skywalk. It’s a form of accidental marketing that has been beckoning passersby into Red Cherry Café since Day 1. That is, until the pandemic put a halt to the weekday foot traffic.

The doors of Soliana Teklehaimanot’s shop had been open for barely a month when the health crisis effectively closed the downtown eatery.

“Business was just amazing — I was like, ‘Oh my goodness, I’m gonna retire early,’” she says with a laugh.

Things didn’t go as planned, but thanks to a generous landlord and a grateful attitude, Teklehaimanot has been enjoying the wilder-than-usual ride of opening a restaurant.

“I’ve made tons of friends through this job and it just doesn’t feel stressful,” she says. “If we only survive one month, good; if not, there’s something else.”

Teklehaimanot was born in Ethiopia and moved to Canada 20 years ago for university, where she studied food science. Food, nutrition and business ownership have been lifelong fascinations. She has a stack of notebooks at home full of restaurant ideas, menus and business-plan drafts.

“Even how to plate items,” she says. “I’ve been wanting this for a while.”

When the opportunity to open Red Cherry fell into her lap, Teklehaimanot was one of the aforementioned skywalk passersby. She was working in a nearby office for a social service agency when she started chatting with the owners of the location’s previous café. With their lease coming to an end, it created an opportunity to make one of her fictional restaurants a reality.

“All of a sudden everything just, like puzzle pieces, came together,” she says.

The goal for Red Cherry was to create a café that highlighted Ethiopian coffee — the business’s name is a reference to the ruby red fruits that contain coffee beans — while offering a taste of authentic home cooking.

Teklehaimanot grew up with four siblings in a household where helping out in the kitchen was mandatory. While making dinner for the whole family felt like a chore, she’s glad for the formative experience.

“I mean, we hated it when we were growing up,” she says, chuckling. “But now it’s our livelihood.”

The family previously owned a restaurant and she has a brother in Ethiopia who’s running a successful café.

When it came to opening her own joint, family played a big role. Her brother, Tileksow Senehiwot, helped decorate the cosy second-floor café, which looks out onto a bustling Portage Avenue streetscape, and her mom, Messelu Dange, took charge of the cooking.

In Ethiopia, Dange was a homemaker whose food was known far and wide. In Winnipeg, her traditional breakfast and lunch dishes have found a loyal customer base with the downtown office crowd, as well as local Ethiopian and Eritrean expats.

“What you get here is the same way I would make it at home,” Dange says, speaking through her daughter’s translation. “I don’t hold back on anything.”

During the pandemic, the food at Red Cherry was available through delivery apps and online ordering. The Ethiopian tradition of eating off a shared platter, however, was forced to pause.

“The reason we eat off one plate is that we don’t like doing dishes,” Senehiwot jokes. “It’s a meeting point; when we were kids, my dad, my mom, everybody, would sit around the table and eat off one plate. It’s bringing family together.”

That communal experience is coming back along with the slow return of workers and visitors to the neighbourhood.

Teklehaimanot is looking forward to bringing more of her restaurant ideas to life. She and her mom offer catering for special occasions and she’s mulling a secondary location with longer opening hours and a larger menu. Whatever comes next, community will be a cornerstone.

“I honestly believe everything happens for a reason,” Teklehaimanot says. “We have survived this long and I think it’s because we’re surrounded by good people, good family, good friends.”

eva.wasney@winnipegfreepress.com

Twitter: @evawasney