Why knot? say two local entrepreneurs to spicing up the salty classic

Pretzels see a resurgence since COVID, blared a headline in a food-industry magazine.

The accompanying article reported pretzel sales had been on a steady decline from 2016 to 2019, but that demand for the salty treats rebounded at the onset of the pandemic, referred to in the piece as the “stockpiling period.” (Kraft Dinner! Toilet paper!!)

Pretzel sales remained strong in 2022 and again during the first quarter of 2023. A separate story attributed this fact to companies doing their utmost to provide consumers with new and innovative flavours of pretzels, similar to how one has long been able to choose between umpteen varieties of potato chips.

“Flavours continue to drive growth, and flavours like southwest style, garden vegetable, sea salt and Parmesan garlic all hit the market,” the article went on.

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 is only the latest movie made better by a killer soundtrack

Groot, err, great news for fans of the rock band Heart: within days of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 landing in North American movie theatres on May 5, Crazy on You, a cut from Heart’s 1975 debut album, Dreamboat Annie, that appears on the Guardians 3 soundtrack, became one of Apple Music’s most-streamed songs.

Ditto Spacehog’s In the Meantime, which also rears its trippy head on the Marvel Studios film’s soundtrack. Last time we checked, In the Meantime was Apple Music’s third-most downloaded tune, 18 years after its original release.

Older songs receiving a second life on the charts via the big screen isn’t a new phenomenon.

Rock Around the Clock, a No. 1 smash for Bill Haley & His Comets in 1955, cracked the Billboard Top 40 again in 1974, after serving as the title theme for the ’50s-based coming-of-age flick American Graffiti.

Winnipeg punk legend Richard Duguay releases epic solo album

Veteran musician Richard Duguay doesn’t spend much time strolling down memory lane.

His critically acclaimed new album Beautiful Decline (Cursed Blessings Records) coincides perfectly with the 40th anniversary of Creatures for Awhile, the lone full-length effort by Personality Crisis. When this is mentioned to the member of the seminal Winnipeg punk-rock band of the early 1980s, Duguay pauses to take a long draw on his cigarette.

“You know, I really try to live in the present. Forty is a crazy number. While I do acknowledge that stage of my life, to me, everything is its own thing,” says Duguay, 61, who lived in Winnipeg until he was 28 “more or less,” then moved to Vancouver before calling Los Angeles home for the last 17 years.

“We did the (Personality Crisis) reunion six years ago (at the Pyramid). Was it fun? Sure. Was I glad it happened? Definitely,” he continues when reached poolside in the back yard of the North Hollywood abode he shares with his wife, Paula Tiberius, and their 14-year-old daughter Violet.

Banana Boat’s new owner proud to build on local ice cream parlour’s tradition

Last Wednesday was National Banana Day, except when you run an ice cream parlour where some of the most popular flavours of shakes and splits are banana-mango, banana-chocolate, banana-strawberry… even banana-banana, every day is banana day, pretty much.

“We definitely go through our fair share (of bananas),” says Dewinter Xu, owner of the Banana Boat, which is currently celebrating its fifth anniversary — that’s 60 months of sundaes — at 166 Meadowood Dr., directly across the street from St. Vital Centre.

That the Banana Boat, which moved to its current home in 2018 following a decades-long run on Osborne Street, gets its name from a speedy vessel that, over 100 years ago, began transporting the easily spoiled fruit from the tropics to North America is just one tidbit Xu has learned about his biz, since he purchased it in the summer of 2020.

“For me, research is very important, so before buying, I spent a week on the internet, searching for stories about the Banana Boat, how it got its start, what its history is,” Xu says, seated at a table flanked by a two-metre-long inflatable Dole banana.

Hobby baker’s whim ends up injecting creativity, variety into marshmallow market

With the puck set to drop on the Stanley Cup playoffs in a matter of days, let’s kick things off with a yarn that’s one part hockey, two parts marshmallows.

The Original Royal Pizza still rules

Royal Pizza was a bit of a misnomer when the 100-seat locale opened at 628 St. Anne’s Rd. in 1975.

Sure, it served thick-crust pies fully loaded with toppings, the same sort customers seek out to this day, but it also offered more sophisticated choices, such as steak and lobster.

When the world went bananas, this budding entrepreneur baked bread

National Banana Bread Day fell just over a week ago but hey, no worries if you missed it; Cass Hoefer, the founder of Bread Habits, a venture that turns out specialty banana bread, wasn’t aware until recently it was a “thing,” either.

Fibre artist ties in to 3D string-art technique popularized in the 1960s and ’70s

Great gift-giving minds think alike.

Owners of new Transcona hub for all things local buoyed by neighbourhood’s warm welcome

Dylan and Alexis Witt are the owners of Wittypeg, a new gift shop at 129 Regent Ave. E. that some have described as a permanent pop-up market, given the wide range of made-in-Manitoba goods adorning the shelves.

Stonework’s owner takes page from Mick Jagger’s playbook and applies culinary twist

Mike Publicover calls it his “Mick-time.”

Publicover is the owner of Stonework’s Bistro, which opened in the Shops of Winnipeg Square in May 2022. While you’ll usually find the veteran chef in the kitchen, turning out homestyle soups and fire-baked sandwiches, he still enjoys greeting customers in person, as much as possible. That means doffing his apron for a spell, to head to the front counter, where the action is.

Local apparel company creates Winnipeg-inspired threads

It’s a tough job, but somebody (burp) has to do it.

Vinyl re-issue of The Lake Winnipeg Fisherman brings back songs chronicling the Interlake

Ray Giguere, owner of Argy’s Records, once referred to The Lake Winnipeg Fisherman, a traditional, folk-music album recorded in 1970 by Riverton singer/songwriter Sol Sigurdson, as a “unicorn record.”

Swimwear staple survives pandemic years with no travel

Much was made of the negative impact COVID-19 had on the airline, hospitality and entertainment industries, only it didn’t do those who sell bathing suits for a living any big favours, either.

“In a world devoid of travel, swimwear sales have taken a dive of unprecedented depth,” began an article that appeared in Vogue magazine in March 2021. The writer went on to detail how sales of swimsuits and such dipped by 25 per cent during the first nine months of the pandemic, which wasn’t exactly news to Donna Anderson and Phil Marriott, the married couple behind Peepers, one of Winnipeg’s longest-running swimwear shops.

Old barn reconstructed in Lego, brick by brick

All they want for Christmas is their two front seats.

Fresh start

It’s pretty much a guarantee Vic’s Market will still be sporting that new-store smell when it toasts its 65th anniversary a few weeks from now.

La Liga Soccer geared up for World Cup 12 months in advance

It’s the first Sunday morning of the 2022 FIFA World Cup and Cecilia Castro pauses in mid-sentence, saying, “Sorry, but I need to watch this,” as she nods toward a big-screen television mounted on the wall to her right.

Entrepreneur crafts bespoke pack for backyard rink rats

Big league scouts on the hunt for the next Great One might want to sneak a peek over their neighbour’s fence.

Steinbach’s very own record store an experience in nostalgia

STEINBACH — S-A-T-U-R-D-A-Y night!

Tipsy Cow is celebrating five years of dishing up burgers and booze

Upscale burger and local craft beer joint Tipsy Cow — home of the fittingly named dad bod burger, which boasts two five-ounce patties topped with bacon mayo, onion and applewood cheddar served on a freshly baked brioche bun — toasted its fifth anniversary a few weeks back.

Fall-flavour newbie punches up Japanese-style baking with a pinch of seasonal pumpkin spice

If you can’t beat ’em, whisk ’em, mix ’em or sift ’em — join ’em.

Ringo Starr, from A to Z

He gets by with a little help from his friends.

Local canvas connoisseurs have city’s professional wrestling history covered

Let’s get ready to rumble!

Grandmother turns fence into little slice of Transcona fun

Fran Doyle has lived in the same, grey-stucco bungalow at the southwest corner of Kildare Avenue East and Wayoata Street, deep in the heart of Transcona, for close to 50 years.

New ice cream queens in town

When life gives you lemons, make lemon meringue ice cream.

Jardins St-Léon Gardens a bounty of family heritage, fine local products and produce

If we’ve said it once, we’ve said it a thousand times: if you want to be the captain of a National Hockey League team, you need to shop like the captain of a National Hockey League team.

From produce to craft beer, Wolseley Farmers Market has been a one-stop shop for 10 years

It’s Tuesday afternoon at the Wolseley Farmers Market, where market co-ordinator Mica Szpigiel has one eye on what appears to be a storm off to the northwest, one eye on a jewelry vendor setting up a canopy-style tent in suddenly windy conditions and another eye on… oh, wait, she’s run out of peepers.

A third hand would probably be helpful, too, Szpigiel contends, as she juggles a laptop, two phones and a notepad while seated at a picnic table at the market’s home site, Robert A. Steen Community Centre, 980 Palmerston Ave.

If Szpigiel looks familiar, that’s because she spent the past two summers there as a vendor, selling specialty bagels under the banner Szpagels by Mica.

A serious knee injury that required surgery currently prevents her from being on her feet to bake for hours on end. That’s why she jumped at the opportunity to serve in her present role when the opportunity presented itself in March.

Boulevard Meats & Deli not afraid to push carnivorous boundaries

Boulevard Fine Meats & Deli bills itself as a traditional, full-service butcher shop with a twist.

What sort of twist, you might ask? Well, one of the most popular offerings at the Southdale locale, inconspicuously tucked inside a strip mall at 49 Vermillion Rd., is a culinary version of a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.

Cara Potenza, who runs the aromatic, 2 1/2-year-old locale with her sisters Cari and Cori, credits head butcher Norm Howat for coming up with their hot-selling bacon shots, which individually consist of a thick slice of garlic sausage cloaked in bacon and topped with cream cheese. Not only do individual shots pack a punch owing to a smattering of diced jalapeño in the cream cheese, they’re good for you, too, Potenza says with a wink.

“I swear, Norm is more a scientist than he is a butcher, in that he’s able to reverse engineer anything, just by looking at a picture of it,” she says of Howat, who came out of retirement two years ago at age 68 to teach the sisters everything he knows, and then some.

Vinyl aficionados set to drop needle on big new record show and sale

The inaugural Manitoba Music & Record Sale goes this Sunday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. at the Caboto Centre, 1055 Wilkes Ave., and co-organizer Mike Huen has a word of advice for older vinyl nuts who, in the past, may have been hesitant to let their children handle their prized possessions: mama — or papa, as the case may be — let ’em play.

Huen, who is running the show in tandem with Vic Gaggini, co-host of The Vinyl Vault, a weekly radio show on 93.7 CJNU, says when it comes to treasures such as hockey cards, stamps and record albums, collectors should think of themselves as their cache’s caretaker, versus its gatekeeper. He offers the example of a father who owns a vintage automobile, who is constantly telling his kids if they want to sit in it, they have to put a blanket down first. And if they think they’re ever going to be eating ice cream or french fries in the backseat, they have another thing coming.

“What happens in a case like that is the kids end up resenting that car, and wanting nothing to do with it, even when it’s passed down to them, later in life,” says Huen, who closed his decades-old antique shop Mike’s General Store in January. The same goes for vinyl records; if a son or daughter asks to listen to a parent’s pristine copy of Dark Side of the Moon or Hotel California, and is forever being told no, not on their life, they’re probably going to grow up wanting nothing to do with mom or dad’s “stupid albums,” he says. But if the answer is “sure,” and while they’re at it, they should give Led Zeppelin III and Rumours a spin, then they’re going to have great memories, and perhaps become a record collector, too.

Huen, 63, and Gaggini, 64, both got into music “big time” when they were teenagers. They didn’t know each other then, but agree it’s a safe bet they were combing through the bins of downtown record meccas such as Opus 69 and Autumn Stone at the same time, most Saturday afternoons.

Three decades in the wiener’s circle

Still smokin’ after all these years, Darren Yewchyn has something special up his white, paper hotdog sleeve to mark the 30th anniversary of Smoke’n Bob’s, one of the longest-running and most recognizable street-food vendors in Winnipeg.

Later this summer, Yewchyn, who succeeded his uncle (Smoke’n) Bob Yewchyn as owner in 2009, will begin marketing his own barbecue sauce, the same flavouring he’s been slathering on smokies, burgers and footlongs for a little over three decades. Standing next to his decked-out cart at the northwest corner of Portage and Notre Dame, he says he always believed his tomato-based concoction was top notch. It wasn’t long before customers started requesting sauce to go, however, that he made the decision to take things a step further.

“People would show up with empty ice cream pails, asking me to fill ’em up and name my price,” he continues, dressed in his usual attire: a bright yellow T-shirt, shorts and ketchup-red, Smoke’n Bob’s apron. “They’d tell me they throw it on everything, bacon and eggs, potatoes, steak … So yeah, after all this time, it’s kind of exciting to be starting a new chapter for Smoke’n Bob’s.”

Yewchyn, 56, has been hearing it a lot lately; how it’s somebody’s first visit to a hotdog cart since the onset of you know what. The married father of two feels their pang. Although the city’s downtown was largely deserted the last two summers, he continued showing up like clockwork, Monday to Friday, April through October, to serve however many customers happened by.

June Home Supply’s collection of stylish housewares designed to deliver domestic bliss

If you’re asking Danielle Cyr about the best month of the year to live in Winnipeg, she’ll tell you with great certainty it’s June, when daytime highs aren’t as stifling as they are in July, and when you can still nurse a cool one on a patio till 10 p.m., before it gets too dark or mosquito-y, the way it does in August.

Admittedly, the married mother of two is rather biased. First of all, her birthday falls during the sixth month of the year, on this story’s publication date, as a matter of fact. Second, June Home Supply, 250 Kennedy St., is the tag she and her husband Joël settled on four years ago for their stylish home decor store, oft-described as “Instagram-worthy” owing to a host of items customers say they don’t necessarily need, but, once they’ve seen them, can’t imagine living without.

“We tossed around quite a few names when we were trying to figure out what to call ourselves and kept coming back to June,” says Joël, seated next to Danielle in Thom Bargen, the Graham Avenue coffee shop that shares an interior passageway with their premises.

“Not only is June Danielle’s favourite month of the year, it’s also when the city seems to come back to life,” he continues, taking a sip of his Americano. “Plus, it’s a word that has a nice ring to it, and looks good written out, which isn’t always the case, right?” (Right! Here’s looking at you “moist.”)

Winnipeg couple brings the Tasty Heat with award-winning curry mix, hot sauces

The capsaicin-rich envelope please.

Among the winners at the 2022 Scovie Awards, an annual competition that recognizes the top fiery foodstuffs in the world, was Tasty Heat’s Hot Sauces & Spicy Foods, a Winnipeg-based, small-batch hot-sauce biz owned and operated by Amila Rajakaruna and his wife Arshala Dona.

Talk about getting it right the first time: last summer, the couple expanded their line of seven flavourful hot sauces, which include selections dubbed Sunny, prepared with ghost peppers, habanero peppers and a hint of fruit, Tangy (ghost peppers, green peppers and lemon) and Woot (ghost peppers, cayenne peppers and berries), by adding an all-natural, preservative-free curry spice blend. A few months later, their introductory effort, called simply Tasty Heat’s Meat Curry Powder, placed third in the “meat required, unique” category at the 25th Scovie Awards, so-named for Wilbur Scoville, the scientist who developed the Scoville Organoleptic Test over a century ago, to determine the heat scale of chili peppers.

“I sent them a box of our curry mix, which was then judged in a blind taste test by 90 professional chefs,” says Amila, seated next to his wife on the main level of The Forks Market, where they just finished dropping off a sales order to The Forks Trading Company, one of a dozen or so retail outlets in Winnipeg that carry Tasty Heat’s products.

Brazilian immigrant finding success with Lorette-created confections

LORETTE — Week in, week out, one of Rubia Lima’s top sellers is an Oreo parfait that combines gently crushed pieces of Oreo cookie with Belgian chocolate and whipping cream. Sounds yummy, right? Not to Lima, founder of Madame Sucré, a Lorette-based enterprise that serves up a wide variety of confections inspired by her native Brazil.

“Oreo cookies aren’t something I’m too crazy about, but since lots of people here seem to like them, I figured why not use them in one of my parfaits?” says Lima, who moved to Canada from South America in 2015, and regularly relies on her “peeps” — that would be her husband and their 12-year-old daughter — to serve as royal tasters when it comes to ingredients she isn’t overly keen on. (Salted caramel, a key component in her immensely popular hot chocolate bombs, is another no-go in her books.)

“My whole thing is to take things I grew up with in Brazil, and add what you guys love most to create something unique. My sign reads, ‘Brazilian treats,’ but Brazilian-Canadian is probably closer to the truth.”

Projectile-tossing sports retailer has enthusiasts beating a path to his door

Tourism Winnipeg routinely touts the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, The Forks and Assiniboine Park as must-sees for anybody visiting the city.

The way things have been going lately, the marketing board may want to add an Exchange District shop specializing in UFOs — that’s über-popular, flying objects — to its list of can’t-miss tourist attractions.

Jason The (pronounced Tay) is the founder of Disc Republic, 50 Princess St. The 18-month-old enterprise is devoted almost entirely to disc golf, a fast-growing activity that calls on participants to aim Frisbee-type projectiles at faraway targets, using rules similar to conventional golf. As one of the largest stores of its kind in Canada, Disc Republic, which also carries a small selection of items associated with the disc team sport Ultimate, routinely draws parties from across the country and beyond who inform The that his operation is the reason they’re visiting Winnipeg in the first place.

“Online sales are a huge part of what we do, and to date, we’ve shipped items as far as Australia, New Zealand and Estonia,” The says, touring a visitor past a rainbow-coloured menagerie of plastic saucers sorted onto multiple display racks by size, weight and shade. “Still, lots of people prefer to hold a disc in their hands before buying it, and make a special trip to the city to check us out for themselves.”

Dog-designated doughnuts have got local tails wagging

Oh Doughnuts owner Amanda Kinden created a bit of a stir last month when, as an April Fool’s prank, she unveiled her latest “brainstorm,” this one aimed purr-cisely at the feline in your life.

On the morning of April 1, Kinden posted photos on her social media feeds of a pair of cats going to town on buster-style doughnuts boasting a middle-section filled with kibble and — the “paws de résistance,” she called it — a topping of glazed sardines and anchovies. Before realizing the joke was on them, Oh Doughnuts customers left messages for Kinden and her staff along the lines of, “Can this be ordered over Skip?” “Are these still available?” and “Oh, Buddy would love that!”

The first thing Kim Frobisher did after spotting Kinden’s spoof was have a good chuckle. Then she typed a comment of her own offering a thumbs-up for the gag, but added if anybody was actually interested in doughnuts for their fur babies, canines in particular, she and her pal/business partner Kerner Pieterse would happily set them up.

Frobisher, 35, and Pieterse, 29, are the owners of Woof Doughnuts, a home-based venture that has been barking up the right tree for 18 months. Three weekends ago, they were peddling their dog-centric doughnuts at a large craft sale held near Assiniboia Downs when a fellow she guesses was in his 30s happened by and, without reading a sign explaining what their enterprise is all about, commented, “Hmm, you definitely have some unique flavours here.”

Ciao magazine celebrates 25 years

A recent issue of Ciao magazine toasted Winnipeg dining establishments that have stood the test of time, a rundown that included Bailey’s Restaurant and Lounge, Rae and Jerry’s Steak House and the Red Top Drive Inn, the latter of which has been dishing out some of the city’s tastiest burgers for 62 years and counting.

Ciao publisher Laurie Hughes should have raised a glass to herself while she was at it; 2022 marks 25 years since she and her late husband Brad Hughes founded the magazine, which, from the start, has showcased the best our fair burg has to offer in the way of restaurants.

“Seriously, I almost feel like we should be celebrating our golden anniversary as opposed to our diamond one, with all that’s gone on because of COVID,” Hughes says, seated in the brightly lit boardroom of her stylish Exchange District digs, situated on the fourth floor of a five-storey building that once served as a saddlery.

Hughes, a mother of one, acknowledges any pandemic-related hardships she and her company, the Fanfare Magazine Group, faced pale in comparison to what restaurateurs were dealing with, owing to government-imposed restrictions that negatively impacted their ability to operate.

Absence makes the appetite grow stronger

OK, let’s try that again.

To say it’s been an interesting first four years for Barbeque Hut-Pakistani Grill at 435 Notre Dame Ave. is a bit of an understatement.

Winnipeg’s first-ever authentic Pakistani dining spot was an out-of-the-box hit when it began welcoming customers in the spring of 2018, largely owing to menu selections described at the time by Free Press restaurant critic Alison Gillmor as “fresh and very good,” “beautifully sauced” and, in regards to a spicy cheese dish dubbed paneer kadahi, “an absolute standout.”

She wasn’t the only one singing the West End locale’s praises; throughout that year and the next, online review sites were rife with recommendations for owner Jehangir Khan’s take on traditional offerings such as fish tikka, Lahori mutton kahari and chicken haandi, the latter prepared in an earthen clay pot Khan brought with him when he moved to Canada from the South Asian nation in 2007.

After 114 years, Western Paint adds new lines of business to its traditional model

If you haven’t visited Western Paint at 521 Hargrave St. in the last, oh, 100 years, you may not recognize the joint.

The family-run operation, which opened on Smith Street in 1908 before relocating to its long-standing digs in the Exchange District three years later, recently underwent a bit of an overhaul.

Two months ago, Paul Schimnowski, 71, who succeeded his father, Jack, as owner 35 years ago, shifted the store’s extensive paint and paint-supply division over a few metres, to a space formerly occupied by workers’ desks and such. That paved the way for a new, 3,000-square-foot showroom fully stocked with live-edge, wood furniture built by Rob Sargsyan, a Headingley-based artisan originally from Eastern Europe.

While some might wonder what a company that has been in the paint game for 114 years is doing peddling tables and chairs, Schimnowski explains it’s simply a matter of moving with the times, a lesson he learned from his dad, who learned it from company founder Ernest Guertin.

Jared Ozuk teaches students how to make bread

Timing is everything when it comes to baking, so it comes as no surprise when Jared Ozuk, who offers online, Saturday-morning bread-making classes under the banner Winnipeg Bread, kicks things off precisely as advertised, at 10 a.m. on the dot.

The first thing Ozuk does — well, after introducing a cat visible over his right shoulder as Wylie, one of two felines he and his wife Reni share their tidy, one-story abode with — is conduct a quick roll call to ensure all seven people who signed up for today’s 3 1/2-hour tutorial on artisan bread are present and accounted for. Secondly, he asks each of them, one by one, to direct a camera at their homework assignment, a mound of dough they were supposed to have added salt, water and yeast to, the previous evening.

Satisfied that everybody’s dough has the consistency he’s looking for, he thanks them for including him in their weekend plans before announcing, “OK, it’s time to start baking.”

Seated in his dining room a few days later, Ozuk shakes his head when asked if Winnipeg Bread, which will toast its one-year anniversary next month, was a calculated move on his part to capitalize on what came to be known as the “COVID-19 baking craze.”

Fancy Infusions raises the bar with flavour-packed pepper jellies

Hayley Williams doesn’t take it personally when somebody tells her they’re not much for spicy food.

Instead, the founder of Fancy Infusions, a venture that turns out close to 30 varieties of pepper jelly including cranberry-spice, Thai red pepper-garlic and jalapeno-raspberry, spreads a spoonful of one of her signature flavours onto a saltine, then lets her detractor know they’re about to be pleasantly surprised.

“Certain people see the word pepper on the label and get scared off, but it’s not like your tongue is going to go ‘whoa’ or anything, not even close,” says Williams, whose husband Trevor lovingly calls her Fancy Face, hence the “Fancy” on her business card.

“If somebody does find it a bit hot I tell them it pairs well with low-acidic things like cheese. Honestly, though, many have said they don’t need anything other than a spoon… that they’re content eating it straight out of the jar.”

Little Nana’s offers traditional, simple southern Italian fare with a side of quiet

The first thing you notice after slipping into one of Little Nana’s Italian Kitchen wooden dining booths, each of which is fully enclosed on three sides, is that there is zero need to shout to be heard.

Ticket stub collecting intense, lucrative

Last month, an hour after somebody paid a record price of US$468,000 for a ticket stub from basketball legend Michael Jordan’s first regular-season game with the Chicago Bulls, that benchmark was broken when a person at the same sports-memorabilia auction successfully bid US$480,000 for a ticket stub from baseball pioneer Jackie Robinson’s big-league debut with the 1947 Brooklyn Dodgers.

While a cool half-mil might seem like an exorbitant price to pay for a decades-old piece of paper, it’s probably a pretty safe investment. A recent, online article titled “Ticket Stubs: the Hobby’s Hottest Collectible” stated that stubs from games gone by have steadily risen in value since e-tickets with QR codes began supplanting actual, physical ducats about 10 years ago. In the last six months alone, stubs from “jewel” events such as the 1992 summer Olympic Men’s Basketball gold medal match have commanded as much as 40 times more than the previous year, when they’ve hit the market.

That brings us to Rob Ferrand, a Winnipegger who has kept the ticket stub from every single Winnipeg Jets game he’s attended since 1979, the year the first iteration of the team entered the National Hockey League.

Check that; almost every stub.

Entrepreneur sets up online commerce platform for city’s Filipino community

He’s calling it the Filipino Amazon.

Adonis Fernandez — Don for short — is the brains behind Bentahan.ca, a year-old, online sales platform that markets Philippine-centric merchandise produced in Canada, the United States and the Philippines.

Let’s say you’re in the market for an ornamental jeepney, a popular form of public transportation in the island nation. You’ve come to the right place; Bentahan, which translates roughly as sales or selling, has a toy-size, plastic model available for $10. How about a water-colour painting of the Taal volcano, a still-active powder keg oddly situated in the middle of a lake in the province of Batangas? They have that, too.

Or perhaps after all the white stuff we’ve received you’re looking forward to gardening season, and want to try your hand at kangkong, a type of spinach native to Southeast Asia, or talong, a member of the eggplant family. Fernandez, a married father of one, stocks seeds for both, priced at $5 per bag.

After 20 years, Frig’s Natural Meats & More is a West St. Paul mainstay and it's not going anywhere

‘W e weren’t expecting you yet, you’re gonna have to give us a few minutes,” Linda Frig shouts from a back area where’s she busily cutting chicken breasts, when a reporter arrives early for a scheduled interview at Frig’s Natural Meats & More, her and her husband John’s namesake butcher-and-grocery mart at 3515 Main St. in West St. Paul.

“Take all the time you need,” we yell back, opting not to argue with a person wielding a cleaver and sporting a blood-stained smock that wouldn’t look out of place in an episode of Dexter.

When Linda’s daughter, Michelle Mansell, who had been grinding meat in another part of the store, joins us 10 minutes later, she immediately apologizes for the delay. They lost their full-time butcher a week ago, she explains, which has left them short-handed.

Not that there’s anything particularly new about that; if there is one thing Mansell has learned since her parents founded Frig’s, which, as the “Natural” in the name implies, specializes in ethically raised, chemical- and antibiotic-free goods, 20 years ago, it’s that when it comes to running a small, independent business, “you roll up your sleeves and do what you gotta do.”

Elevator operators were once an integral part of a visit to downtown Winnipeg

Since its grand opening in 1931, the Calgary Public Building, presently the home of Arts Commons, Calgary’s premiere performing and visual arts centre, has relied on good, old-fashioned elevator operators to ferry staff and visitors from floor to floor.

Unfortunately, it’s like they say: what goes up must ultimately come down.

Later this year Arts Commons’ fleet of uniformed elevator attendants — liftmen if you’re reading this across the pond — will be grounded once and for all. After 91 years, the building’s two manually operated elevators are being fully modernized, owing to how exceedingly difficult it has become to track down replacement parts for the brass-accented units when something inevitably goes awry.

Steve Glass, manager of facility operations for the City of Calgary, says if the eight-storey structure isn’t the last place in the country to employ elevator attendants on a close to full-time basis, he doesn’t know what is. He and his staff have heard there might be another locale in Quebec but, at the very least, they’re fairly certain theirs are the last operators in Western Canada; at least nobody’s told them differently, he says when reached at work.

Winnipeg restaurateurs earning rave reviews serving up traditional food from Egypt

Winnipeg restaurateurs are earning rave reviews serving up traditional food from their homeland.

Winnipeg jazz legend Ron Paley forced again to ring in the new year quietly

New Year’s Eve was always a fairly big deal in the Paley household.

Ron Paley, the longtime leader of a 22-piece jazz ensemble that carries his name, guesses he was five years old when his parents Walter and Ann first coaxed him and his two sisters to stay up with them until midnight, to sing along with Guy Lombardo and His Royal Canadians, playing on a living room radio.

Paley, 71, continued to circle Dec. 31 on the calendar right up until 2018, which, as it turns out, was the last time the Ron Paley Big Band rang in the new year in style, for a packed dance floor at the RBC Convention Centre.

“I can’t remember specifically but yes, I’m almost certain this current stretch — three years and counting — is, by far, the longest I’ve ever gone without playing somewhere on New Year’s Eve, going all the way back to my university days,” he says, seated in the St. Vital abode he shares with his wife Qiuyan and their son Philip.

After 43 years, Creative Audio is still pounding out high-end equipment

Boxing Day has long been synonymous with door-crasher sales at places peddling electronics, to the degree local bargain hunters willingly wait in line overnight, almost always in sub-zero conditions, to score a deal on a new pair of headphones or a big-screen TV.

That said, if you’re reading this while shivering outside Creative Audio, 353 Provencher Blvd., you definitely want to scoot home immediately, and crawl back under the sheets.

“We’ve never been open Boxing Day, and never will be,” says Jeff Kowerchuk, owner of Creative Audio, a specialty audio-and-video shop that opened in Osborne Village in May 1978, the same month he was born.

“It’s not like we don’t offer a few specials this time of year, because we do. For us, though, Boxing Day has always been more about spending a little extra time with family and friends, versus another day at the office.”

After 40 years working in commercial kitchens, Roger Wilton turned his COVID job loss into a satisfying pot of success

After more than four decades working in commercial kitchens — the last 16 years planning meals for fans and famous folks at the downtown arena — Roger Wilton turned his COVID job loss into a steaming, satisfying pot of success.

Taking a new concept out for a spin

If you haven’t visited Osborne Village mainstay Urban Waves lately, don’t be alarmed when you’re met by thousands of vinyl albums, the next time you poke your head through the front door.

Pivot has become a bit of a catchword during COVID, what with scores of people switching careers, addresses… even partners. (“Why the pandemic is causing spikes in break-ups and divorces,” screamed a recent, BBC headline.) It would appear pivot is the name of the game at Urban Waves, as well.

In early November a new, exterior sign went up there, announcing the presence of Old Gold Vintage Vinyl, a quality, used record shop that had already been on site in one form or another for a little over two years. No need to worry, Michele Arcand, Urban Waves’ founder, assures longtime customers initially perplexed by her and co-owner Brent Jackson’s store-within-a-store concept; neither she nor her array of pop culture paraphernalia, hand-crafted jewelry and funky, fashion accessories are going anywhere, any time soon.

“A few have come to look around who’ve asked, ‘Is it still Urban Waves?’” Arcand admits, standing next to a display of ceramic coffee mugs, among the most popular being ones emblazoned with images of TV’s the Golden Girls. “When we point out all the usual items are still here, but how they’re displayed differently in and around the records, then yes, they are relieved.”

Aisles of plenty

Happy holidays.

Close to a dozen celebrations and observances associated with several religions and ethnic backgrounds fall between now and mid-January. That each is marked in its own, unique manner, almost always with menu items specific to a certain culture or nationality, can present a bit of a challenge if you’re in the grocery biz, and are doing your utmost to be everything to everyone.

That is, unless you’re Dinu Tailor, owner of Dino’s Grocery Mart, arguably the largest ethnic grocery store in Winnipeg.

“I hear it all the time when I’m out on the floor, how if you can’t find a certain thing here­­­­­­­­­­­­­­ — save (East) Asian items, those are well-served elsewhere — you’re probably not going to find it anywhere else in the city,” says Tailor, walking a visitor past a display freezer well-stocked with stinging catfish, often the centrepiece of a traditional Kwanzaa dinner.

Mother-daughter team producing spicy Indian-style preserves featuring local ingredients

How spicy is spicy?

That’s the question fielded most often by Jayashri Shetty and Sapna Shetty-Hees, the mother-daughter team behind Jaya’s Preserves, a West St. Paul-based venture that turns out a variety of Indian-style preserves, including spicy carrot pickles, spicy beetroot pickles and — pass the milk, please and thanks — spicy tomato jam.

Pre-COVID the pair were able to offer interested parties free samples on a soda cracker or piece of naan, to let them determine the heat quotient for themselves. With that option currently unavailable owing to pandemic-related restrictions, it’s a bit tougher to answer accurately, they contend, simply because what’s mouth-on-fire hot to one person might be a walk in the capsaicin park to someone else.

“I’m probably the wrong person to ask, as I’m not much for spicy food myself, so what I do is use my husband’s comparison, which is that our regular pickles are about the same spice level as a bottle of Frank’s RedHot (sauce), while our spicy pickles are equivalent to Frank’s extra-hot sauce,” says Sapna, standing next to her mother behind their booth at the winter version of the St. Norbert Farmers’ Market, where, barring major holidays, the two peddle their line of goods every Saturday from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.

Market research drove Baraka Pita Bakery from Calgary eastward, and Winnipeg is the richer for it

Market research drove Baraka Pita Bakery from Calgary eastward, and Winnipeg is the richer for it.

For the love of the lake… any lake

The majority of Manitobans, landlubbers included, are fully aware that the largest lake in the province is Lake Winnipeg, and that the deepest, courtesy of a meteor strike some 20 million years ago, is West Hawk Lake, in the Whiteshell.

But how many know that the clearest is the aptly named Clearwater Lake, near The Pas, where the bottom is visible up to 11 metres? Or that the one with the longest tag is — too bad we don’t get paid by the letter — northern Manitoba’s Pekwachnamaykoskwaskwaypinwanik Lake, Cree for “where the wild trout are caught by fishing with hooks.”

That’s where Kevin Morissette, founder of Lake Depth Maps by KM, a venture that turns out meticulously crafted, three-dimensional replicas of people’s favourite bodies of water, enters the picture.

Since founding his aqua-charged biz, the 31-year-old has twigged into random facts about scores of lakes he wasn’t previously familiar with; not just in Manitoba and northwestern Ontario but in other parts of the world, as well.

Oakwood Café owner happy to have taken risk on job she should have had all along

Five years and one pandemic in, Oakwood Café owner Wendy May decides the job she didn't think she was qualified for is the one she should have had all along.

Graphic artist's nostalgic images crowd-pleasers

Craft-sale season is back and for a spell there, veteran silk-screen artist Roy Liang was concerned his latest brainstorm, a zippered pouch bearing an image of Laurentien pencil crayons (Soft Peach! Roan Red!) was going to date him more than usual.

Sure, the 51-year-old founder of steeped-in-nostalgia biz Winnipeg North of Fargo has fond memories of the Canadian-made pencil crayons, a back-to-school staple when he was growing up in Gimli. But would shoppers under a certain age even recognize them, he wondered?

Liang, whose yesteryear line numbers holiday ornaments that pay homage to a bustling Portage Avenue, circa 1960, and throw pillows emblazoned with a shot of a 1959 Eaton’s Christmas catalogue, needn’t have worried; moments after unveiling the Laurentien-inspired pouches on Instagram, he was inundated with messages from some of his more youthful followers that read, in part, “OMG, I need one of these,” “Love, love, love” and “These are awesome, just bought two.”

“It was the same thing a few years ago when I made magnets showing off the front of the old Winnipeg Arena,” says Liang, seated in a backyard gazebo, where his and his partner’s 12-year-old Jack Russell terrier Walter is resting its head on another of his creations, a pillow boasting the motif of the shuttered, downtown Bay store as it appeared in more glorious times.

Cupid’s wingman delivers

Lovers in a dangerous time or what?

To say dating in the midst of a worldwide pandemic has been challenging is putting it mildly. A quick Google search bears that out, turning up myriad articles along the lines of “COVID-friendly date night ideas you need to try,” “Date night ideas during the Coronavirus pandemic” and “Date ideas to get romantic during the Coronavirus.”

Around this time last fall Megan Parsons found herself in the same boat, wondering how to make a date with Keilan, her boyfriend of four years, extra special. Like many couples, they hadn’t been able to see much of one another owing to mandated, household restrictions, so she wanted a planned get-together ahead of her 24th birthday to be particularly memorable.

Prior to Keilan’s arrival, Parsons strung white fairy lights around a tree in the backyard, where they later nestled under blankets to watch a cheesy, ‘80s rom-com on a makeshift screen. Following the flick they stayed up late, chatting about this, that and another thing under the stars. A week or so later, Parsons mentioned to Keilan’s mom what a wonderful time they’d had; also, how dating during COVID wasn’t exactly a piece of cake.

Original Sorrento's restaurant still flinging pizzas, pastas after 45 years

The original Sorrento's Italian restaurant is still flinging pizzas, pastas and parmigiana more than 45 years later.

Singles event

Kevin Mears, lead vocalist of long-running Winnipeg rock band Monuments Galore, rolls his eyes when asked how many times the group, which got its start in 1982, has performed at the Royal Albert Arms Hotel, an Exchange District icon that has also played host to the likes of Hüsker Dü, Teenage Head and Green Day.

“My DNA is splashed all over that room from back when we used to do three sets a night there, six nights a week on what seemed like a monthly basis,” Mears says, seated in Cheers, a Logan Avenue breakfast-and-lunch nook located minutes away from where the 62-year-old married father of two works as a supervisor for a data collection company.

“So I don’t know, is gazillion a number?”

It is in our book, which means tonight will mark the gazillion-and-first occasion Monuments Galore (whose odd moniker came courtesy a conversation Mears had in the early ‘80s with a co-worker, who, over lunch at the Legislative grounds remarked, “There sure are a lot of monuments here,” to which Mears shot back, “Yeah, monuments galore”), takes the stage at the Albert, original lineup intact, in support of a new CD entitled The Single Years.

Winnipeg entrepreneur's crunchy treats are not mere biscuits

National Biscotti Day falls annually on Sept. 29 and we couldn’t think of a better way to mark the holiday-of-sorts than by sharing the best yarn about the oblong-shaped, Italian treat we’ve ever heard.

Silvia Aiello is the founder of Ms. Biscotti, a home-based venture offering biscotti based on recipes originally developed by her late mother, Pasqualina DeLuca. DeLuca (nee Sparanese) was born in Cicciano, Italy. She was still in her teens when she began working at a commercial bakery close to where she lived, shortly after the Second World War ended. A quick study, she was promoted to foreperson before her 18th birthday and that’s where today’s story truly begins.

In 1949, a few years before moving to Winnipeg at age 22 with her husband Pasquale, DeLuca heard through the grapevine that management was planning to replace a large number of employees with machinery they believed would produce biscotti, their top seller, more efficiently. That came as troublesome news; Cicciano was tiny and many of its residents, Aiello’s mother included, relied on the business for their primary income.

Aware of her co-workers’ fears, DeLuca made a proposal to her bosses: pit her against whatever apparatus they were intending to introduce, and if she was faster at producing and packaging biscotti than the machinery, everybody would hold on to their jobs.

Prairie platters

Pucker up!

The New York Times recently profiled Molly Lewis, a Los Angeles recording artist whose debut EP, The Forgotten Edge, came out in June. That wasn’t news in and of itself; rather, it was Lewis’s instrument of choice that caught the reporter’s attention.

Lewis is a professional whistler; has been since she took home first prize in a Masters of Musical Whistling tournament held in Pasadena, Calif., in 2015. Before landing a recording contract of her own, the 31-year-old lent her lips to numerous projects, appearing on albums by the likes of rap icon Dr. Dre and indie-rock band the Yeah Yeah Yeahs.

Reading Lewis’s story reminded us of The Whistler, an album recorded by prominent Winnipeg lawyer Harvey Pollock in the 1970s that we’ve owned a copy of seemingly forever.

Iconic outdoor-equipment supplier relocates to West St. Paul

If you haven’t dropped by Yetman’s Ltd. lately, you may not recognize the joint.

In September 2020, brothers Norm and Keith Yetman relocated their family-run operation, an outdoor equipment distributor that will toast 75 years in business in 2022, from its decades-old home on Jarvis Avenue, near the Old Exhibition Grounds, to a spanking new facility at 1201 Grassmere Rd., just north of the Perimeter Highway. Soon thereafter, Norm’s daughters Kristen and Megan Yetman added a good, old-fashioned general store to the mix.

That means along with Yetman’s regular fare — kayaks, pedal boats, power tools and lawn and garden gear — one can also stop in for handmade soaps, leather handbags, vintage articles of clothing... even the odd vinyl album. (Emphasis on the odd: the Rio Carnival Orchestra’s 1958 release, Honeymoon in South America, a steal of a deal at $3.)

“I’ve noticed an interesting dynamic in the past 12 months or so,” Norm says, seated alongside Kristen and Megan in a separated office area steps away from their 1,700-square-foot showroom, roughly one-third of which serves as the freshly branded Yetman’s General Store.

At Big Rick's Hot Rod Diner, regulars are back to solving the world's problems

At Big Rick's Hot Rod Diner, regulars are back to solving the world's problems 'one at a time.'

Winnipeg woman translates love of coffee into a percolating podcast

If you live on Strathcona Street and have ever been roused from a pleasant slumber by what sounds like a coffee grinder operating at full tilt, no worries, that’s just your neighbour, Genny Sacco-Bak.

Sacco-Bak is the host of Coffee With Genny B, a new podcast that, on a weekly basis, spills the beans on a wide range of caffeine-related topics. Want to know where to go when you’re jonesing for the perfect espresso? Good news, the mother of two and grandmother of one has you covered. Interested in learning more about small-batch roasters based in Manitoba? Ditto.

Now, because Sacco-Bak would never dream of greeting the day without a cuppa joe in her hand, it creates a bit of a conundrum on mornings when her husband Frank rolls over in bed, hoping to catch an extra 40 winks.

City artist calls up misty watercolour memories of beloved local businesses

With Argy’s Records set to turn the big four-oh in 2022, owner Ray Giguere figured he should probably toast that achievement by adorning the walls of his shop with photographs of the original location, a (Rolling) stone’s throw away from Glenlawn Collegiate.

He didn’t have any pics of his own — he was 19 when he established the store, which moved to 1604 St. Mary’s Rd. in 1989, and recalls selling his only camera to help pay a bill — so he posted a message on social media, asking whether anybody who frequented Argy’s back in the day had shots they’d like to share.

Ken Hodgert, who sells paintings of Winnipeg businesses and restaurants from yesteryear under the banner Underground Nostalgia, went one better. Working off a still image captured from an old VHS tape, he recreated the store circa 1982, which he framed and presented to Giguere, free of charge. Included on the backside was a handwritten inscription that reads, in part, “Dear Ray, Thanks for all the memories in the form of music. You’ve had a huge impact on my life and many others… keep on rocking.”

“I’m not a sentimental guy or anything like that, but it was kind of touching to read that,” Giguere says, returning the painting to its resting place near the front door, beside a for-sale John Lennon T-shirt. “I’d been in touch with him on and off through the years; he told me once he was 10 or 11 when he bought his first record here. But did I expect something like this when I asked around for pictures? No, not at all. It’s a nice, little memento, that’s for sure.”

In-tents encounters

Shaelene Demeria has worn a lot of hats during the past eight years, among them mom, foster mom, program co-ordinator and employment counsellor. The 28-year-old Winnipegger can now add fairy godmother of date night to the list.

Demeria, who is Métis, and her fiancé Mike Ross, whose family is from Lake Manitoba First Nation, are the owners of Backyard Bookings, a spanking-new operation that rents out everything you need for a romantic getaway in the comfort of your own backyard: precisely, a posh, teepee-style tent attractively furnished with a double foam memory mattress, throw pillows, champagne bucket, floor mat… even your preferred munchies and board games.

Maryn Conrod, 22, discovered the venture on Instagram in late June, days before its official launch. She reached out to the couple within minutes, convinced Backyard Bookings would be the ideal way to toast her and her boyfriend’s 18-month anniversary, which fell in mid-July.

“The first thing that caught my eye was the setup, just how cool and classy it looked online,” Conrod says when reached at home in St. Andrews. “Secondly, although I’m Métis, I grew up without learning too much about my culture, something I’ve been trying hard to rectify the last couple years. When I saw it was a teepee we’d be spending the night in, and read the reasons why they had chosen to go that route, I was like, ‘OK, this is something we need to do.’”

Dairy to dream

You had us at butter.

It’s Wednesday evening at the St. Norbert Farmers’ Market where Rob Sengotta and Landon Kroeker, owners of a newfangled venture called Von Slick’s Finishing Butter, are fielding the question of the day — “Uh, what’s finishing butter?” — for the umpteenth time.

Sengotta, a chef who has toiled in kitchens throughout Canada and Europe, and Kroeker, a marketing professional, happily explain that it’s high-quality, salted butter that’s been infused with a mix of herbs and spices, as well as ingredients such as garlic, mushrooms or roasted red peppers. The “finishing” part of the name refers to how it’s meant to be used.

Pretend you’ve grilled a steak or salmon fillet and are now allowing it to rest for the prescribed period. The pair, who live and work in the southeast corner of the province, recommend placing a serving of finishing butter atop the dish just before diving in, to elevate the taste a notch or 10.

Winnipeg engineer the 'Ruff Nader' of canine car safety

A recent study conducted by pet-safety organization Paws to Click determined if a dog weighing 75 pounds was in a vehicle travelling 40 km/h and said vehicle was involved in a mishap, the dog would exert in the neighbourhood of 2,250 pounds of force on whatever it came into contact with, be it a driver, passenger or windshield.

Gordon Templeton, the 33-year-old founder of Optimus Gear Co., a Winnipeg business specializing in safety gear for your furry friend, arrived at the same conclusion seven years ago, not long after he adopted Nala, a 70-pound chocolate Labrador. The truck he owned at the time didn’t have a backseat. One day it dawned on him that permitting an animal the size of Nala to sit next to him unrestrained probably wasn’t the best idea in the world.

“There weren’t any what I’d call close calls, but there were definitely a few times when I had to slam on the brakes suddenly and she went skidding toward the dash,” he says, seated in the backyard of the Fort Richmond home he shares with his wife Dana and their two-year-old daughter Naomi.

Curious, Templeton, a mechanical engineer, went online, entering “dog seatbelts” in a search engine. He turned up a number of products billed as “crash-tested.” It wasn’t until he’d dug a little deeper that he learned the descriptions would have been more accurate if they had read, “crash-tested… and failed.”

Flipping burgers since 1958, everything old is new again for Dairi-Wip

Everything old is new again.

This summer marks the 100-year anniversary of the carhop, a fleet-of-foot person tasked with fetching food to those who’ve opted to eat in the comfort of their vehicle. The owners of North America’s first drive-in restaurant, Kirby’s Pig Stand in Dallas, Texas, reportedly came up with the job title in 1921, after recognizing sales of automobiles wouldn’t be decreasing, any time soon.

A century later, cousins Dean and Trif Lambos, owners of the venerable Dairi-Wip Drive-In at 383 Marion St., founded by their uncle and respective fathers in 1958, have resurrected the notion of a carhop, not so much as a nod to the past, but more out of necessity.

“When COVID first hit in March of last year, we kind of looked at each other, wondering what the heck we were going to do,” Dean says, explaining because their glassed-in, vestibule — the space customers ordinarily enter to place takeout orders for Greek-style burgers, fries and milkshakes “in a bag or a box” — was already a tight squeeze, it would have been problematic to allow more than one person in at a time while also observing physical distancing protocols.

Pup, pup and away

GIMLI — Something smells yummy.

Jordan Welch, a commercial fisherman from Gimli, arrived home recently following a long day at work. Walking through the house he shares with his girlfriend, Sierra Lathlin, he picked up the scent of cinnamon, which he ultimately traced to a plate of cookies cooling on a kitchen counter. No sooner had he taken a nibble out of one than Lathlin entered the room, yelling, “Hey, those are for the dogs!”

“He looked at me, looked at the cookie and popped the rest in his mouth, saying, ‘Whatever, tastes all right to me,’” says Lathlin, founder of Barkery Dog Treats, an Interlake-based online store that turns out all-natural, preservative-free goodies for your furry friend, including biscuits, doggie doughnuts, even “pup tarts,” the personable entrepreneur’s sugar-free take on the popular Kellogg’s toaster pastry.

“There’s nothing in my stuff that you or I can’t eat,” she continues, offering a scribe a free sample (thanks, but we just had lunch). “The only difference pretty much is that I dehydrate everything once it’s ready in order to extend the shelf life. That makes it a bit crunchier, not that any dogs are complaining.”

Kern-Hill Furniture is still in the family, and still leaves the sofa-making machine on all night

Kern-Hill Furniture is still in the family, and they still leave the sofa-making machine on all night. David Sanderson talks to brothers Scott, Nick. Jr. and "No. 1 son" Andy Hill about the store's lasting legacy.

Local entrepreneurs' take on South African jerky is a unique meat treat

National Jerky Day falls on June 12, but if it were up to the North American Meat Institute, based in Washington, D.C., the salty treat would be feted 365 days of the year.

“National Jerky Day was created… to celebrate the rich history, immense popularity and nutritional benefits of dried meat snacks,” said a NAMI spokesperson, presumably between bites. “However, due to the incredible growth in product demand, we think it is time for the event to become a daily holiday.”

(Wait, what, and replace National Ravioli Day, March 20, National Onion Ring Day, June 22, and National Pickle Day, Nov. 14?)

Closer to home, Jeremy and Megan Silcox are the owners of Mr. Biltong Beef Jerky Co., biltong being a South African take on traditional jerky created by European settlers in the 17th century.

Beausejour biz has a bit of everything and a lot of buzz

BEAUSEJOUR — Andrea Swain, co-owner of Pennyweight Market, a combination bulk food outlet, ice cream parlour and good, old-fashioned general store situated in Beausejour, laughingly opines that one of the challenges of launching a new venture in a small community such as theirs is that “everybody in town knows your business.”

Among the benefits? That’s easy, she says: everybody in town knows your business.

Not long after they acquired the space four summers ago, rumours abounded as to what it was going to be when it reopened, Swain continues, seated next to her associates Kimberley Friesen and Laurie McLean, inside their cute-as-a-button shop at 802 Park Ave. The previous owner had been around for more than 20 years, and ice cream and milk shakes were two of her main drawing cards, so there was some concern — OK, a lot — on the part of the high school students down the street that the three of them were going to turn it into a (here she lowers her voice to a whisper) health-food store.

Friesen, who, like Swain, grew up in Beausejour, located 45 kilometres northeast of Winnipeg, was at a neighbourhood pool party in July 2017, a few weeks before Pennyweight’s grand opening. She recalls being peppered with questions, including one from a 10-year-old girl splashing about in the shallow end who was under the impression the former locale’s beloved “candy island” was about to become a thing of the past. The second Friesen told the youngster not to worry, that the colourful array of gummies, licorice and chocolates wasn’t going anywhere, she came bounding out of the pool to give her a big, albeit wet, hug.

Music producer Lloyd Peterson waiting to get back into his home studio

Music producer Lloyd Peterson waiting to get back into his home studio

Behind every great entrepreneur… is an even better mom

Mother knows best.

If you’ve ever bothered to sneak a glance at this feature’s byline — and for the life of me, I don’t know why you would — you may have noticed it reads, “David Sanderson.”

That’s a typo. For as long as I can remember I’ve answered to Dave. Unless you’re my wife, who has a few other select, er, pet names for me.

Here’s the thing, though; six months after I started writing for the Free Press in 2003, my mother called, stating she had a bone to pick: apparently, she didn’t appreciate that my byline read “Dave” as opposed to David, the name she and my father chose for me. “It just doesn’t look right,” was how she phrased it.

Chelsey Palmer's sly, sharp-tongued home furnishings are a huge hit

What a difference a year makes.

Last Mother’s Day, Chelsey Palmer, owner of Jagged Little Pillows, an online store toasting its fifth anniversary, sold a slew of gifts bearing the sentiment, “Home is where your mom is.”

Twelve months later, the Swan River entrepreneur’s No. 1 bestseller is a tad more succinct: a stemmed wine glass that reads — pardon her French — “Mother of the f---ing year.”

“I figured that was a good one for COVID. It just kind of sums everything up, wouldn’t you agree?” muses Palmer, whose line of home furnishings is often as saucy as it is chic.

City pest control giant's roots date back to the early 1900s and one boy's quest for vengeance

No foolin’ with Poulin? Damn straight.

Napoleon Louis Poulin, founder of Poulin’s Pest Control, currently celebrating 75 years in business, was born in 1894 on a farm south of St. Malo. He begged his mother and father for a dog while growing up but their answer was always the same: maybe next year.

In the summer of 1902 he found a stray on their property. He befriended the pooch and kept it in a grain shed, out of his parents’ sight. One morning he rolled out of bed bright and early to feed his new best friend, only to discover it had been viciously attacked by rats during the night.

“It all started when I was a little boy,” he told a reporter from the Winnipeg Tribune in 1962, three years before his retirement and five years before his death at age 73. “I had a little puppy dog and the rats chewed him to bits. Ever since then I’ve been killing them back.

Bottled cocktail potions have proven you can teach old spirits new tricks

Shane Masters was scrolling through the New York Times online a few months ago when the headline “What if Cocktail Mixers Were Actually Good?” jumped out at him.

The accompanying article centred around how interest in creating quality cocktails in the comfort of one’s own home has skyrocketed since April 2020, what with so many bars and restaurants being forced to close owing to COVID-19. While poking fun at neon-green, sugar-rich margarita mixes sold in grocery stores, the story alerted consumers to healthier, tastier options — small-batch, craft cocktail mixes prepared with freshly squeezed juice, homemade syrups and all-natural ingredients.

The first thing Masters thought after reading about ventures such as San Francisco’s Fresh Victor and Washington, D.C.’s Charismatic Creations was, “Hey, what about us?”

Masters and his fiancée Marie-Pier Racine are the founders of Angel’s Share Cocktail Co., an 11-month-old biz that markets creative, preservative-free cocktail mixes, close to 50 in total. How inventive is their output, produced in a commercial kitchen at Riverview Community Club? Well, if you’ve ever fetched a bottle of gin and said to yourself, “If only I had some elevated beet juice to go with it,” they’ve got you covered.

Home, screen-printed home

Good news for ex-Winnipeggers living in Toronto who haven’t been able to get back lately owing to... you-know-what: that city’s Canvas Gallery now carries the work of Eric Ouimet, a silkscreen artist whose creations are often as Winnipeg-centric as a Sals Nip or slice of Jeanne’s cake.

Megan Less, Canvas Gallery’s director, grew up in Silver Heights. The first time she laid eyes on one of Ouimet’s pieces, it brought back “all the memories,” she says.

“My friend, an interior designer, sent me a shot of Eric’s Winnipeg airport scene, Departures; she loved the clean lines and I loved that it was the airport,” Less says, referring to a contemporary-looking print depicting a stretch limo dropping travellers off at the old terminal, since razed but fondly remembered for its modernist classic design.

According to Less — who, despite leaving the city in 1979, still carries a torch for Assiniboine Park, Old Dutch chips and smoked goldeye — people familiar with Confusion Corner aren’t the only ones attracted to Ouimet’s compositions. His bold, limited-run prints, which combine photography, computer graphics and hand-drawn illustrations, capture images that are relatable whether you’re from Manitoba’s capital or not, she says.

Streetheart members used COVID time out to write and record new tunes

Guitarist Jeff Neill and Streetheart founding bandmates Darryl Gutheil and Spider Sinnaeve used the COVID time out to write and record new tunes, so... Action!

Radio host Tom McGouran has been cracking up listeners for decades

Tom McGouran, a self-described good Irish-Catholic boy, will have a couple of reasons to raise a pint or three when St. Patrick’s Day rolls around later this week.

First of all, 2021 marks the veteran radio personality’s fifth anniversary at 94.3 The Drive, where he and Vicki Shae co-host Tom & Vicki Mornings weekdays from 6 to 10 a.m. Secondly, it’s been 40 years, give or take, that local listeners have been treated to his trademark cackle, as recognizable a roar as there is in the biz.

About the “or take” part of that equation...

In September 2012, McGouran was let go by 92 CITI-FM along with Joe Aiello, his on-air ally of 18 years. The news wasn’t all bad. He received an 18-month severance package, the catch being he couldn’t work for another Winnipeg station while he remained on CITI’s payroll. No biggie, he thought; he’d simply treat it like an extended vacation and when the day rolled around, he’d get back to doing what he does best, cracking wise and introducing tunes.

As it turns 79, Cantor's Quality Meats and Groceries going strong

It’s Monday morning at FreshCo on Regent Avenue, one of three stores, a number that will soon double to six, that the Ontario-based, discount grocer has established in Winnipeg since May 2019.

We’re waiting our turn to get some luncheon meat when we notice a fellow ahead of us in line pointing toward a red-and-white sign reading “Cantor’s Express” affixed to a refrigerated display unit loaded to the hilt with steaks, ribs, pork chops and assorted cold cuts.

“Cantor’s?” he remarks to a masked employee reaching down for a chub of salami. “Is that something new?”

Er, not exactly.

Winnipeggers who crafted part-time businesses wood be pleased to meat you

Remember how your parents used to scold you at mealtime, telling you over and over again not to play with your food?

Well, at the beginning of February, San Francisco-based Columbus Craft Meats shared tips on Instagram how to create a charcuterie chalet using their products: Italian sausage as roofing shingles, walls fashioned out of prosciutto, a honey ham doorway, cheese window frames... you get the idea. A company spokesperson said the appetizing abode was in direct response to a just-released report that listed “creative charcuterie” among 2021’s top food trends, labelling it as perfect for small, household gatherings in a pandemic-ridden world.

A bit closer to home, Cassandra Carreiro, founder of Sharecuterie, a seven-month old gourmet charcuterie delivery service, shakes her head when asked if she’s always had an artistic side, given the eye-catching manner in which she folds provolone to look like a rose, and arranges blackberries, dried apricots and olives to mimic a painter’s palette.

“No, not at all. Back when I was preparing (charcuterie) boards for myself, I would just slap everything down, not really caring what it looked like,” she says with a chuckle. “But after I started researching this as a potential business, I quickly realized making everything look attractive is something tons of people are really into now; that they enjoy posting pictures of their loaded boards on social media. I figured I’d better learn how to make salami look like a flower, or else.”

Weathering pandemic, couple opens shop celebrating all there is to love about city

In almost any other year, founding an apparel shop dubbed We Heart Winnipeg just before Valentine’s Day would have been seen as a savvy marketing move, akin to establishing a costume retailer in the days leading up to Halloween, or a fireworks outlet ahead of Canada Day.

Suffice to say, owners Ryan and Jessica Bowman didn’t exactly draw things up that way.

“We were originally scheduled to open at the beginning of April last year but for obvious reasons, that didn’t quite work out,” Ryan says, seated behind their sales counter, the front of which is adorned with their official logo, a stylized heart consisting of two sets of diagonal lines running in opposite directions.

We Heart Winnipeg, 3-660 Osborne St., officially opened to the public during the last week of January, soon after the province announced retailers in southern Manitoba could welcome customers through the doors for the first time in almost three months. The shop, wedged between the Oakwood Café and a take-out pizza joint, stocks the couple’s personal line of T-shirts, hoodies, crewnecks and accessories, every last stitch of which is a homage to the city and province they call home. Ryan promises he’ll try not to come off as cheesy or cliché when, someday down the road, he tells their two-old-daughter Naia the story of how mommy and daddy once opened a non-essential business in the height of a worldwide pandemic.

Winnipeg couple marketing high-end wood storage for vinyl-records

“The pandemic has been very, very good for vinyl sales,” blared a headline in early January.

The accompanying, online article cited a year-end, Nielsen Music/MRC Data report that indicated sales of vinyl albums shot up substantially in 2020, “as music fans spent much of lockdown adding new favourites to their collections.”

The piece went on to state that for the week ending Dec. 24, just over two million vinyl albums were purchased in North America alone, making that the format’s biggest sales week since Nielsen began tracking that information in 1991. (Got to get you into my life, indeed: leading the charge was Sir Paul McCartney, whose latest release, McCartney III, debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard top album sales chart, and accounted for the third-largest seven-day sales figure for a vinyl release in 30 years.)

At the end of the day it doesn’t really matter whether you are a seasoned crate-digger who has been scooping up fresh slices of vinyl for decades or a person relatively new to the hobby; you have to put your wax somewhere. That’s where Winnipegger Ian Park comes in.

Dough not wait to order gourmet baked behemoths

The always-informative website www.weightofstuff.com tells us there are a surprising number of objects that tip the scales at .45 kilograms, among them a can of kidney beans, a football and a roll of wallpaper.

Sweet tooths will be pleased to learn they can now add two gourmet cookies lovingly prepared by Sabrina Reid to the list. Reid is the founder of Cookie Craving Co., a few weeks-old biz that turns out treats made with premium ingredients such as organic cocoa and Ferrero Rocher chocolates, each of which weighs 225 grams, about a half-pound. Which leads us to our first question: what would have been so wrong with a quarter-pound cookie?

“Hey, bigger is always better, especially when it comes to cookies, right? That and I wanted to make something unique, something you couldn’t just pick up at the grocery store,” Reid says, seated next to her husband Grant in the Island Lakes abode they share with their two dogs, Lola, an eight-year-old boxer, and Kona, a six-year-old chocolate lab.

If you’re still scratching your head over what to get your better half for Valentine’s Day, Reid’s latest brainstorm, an eight-centimetre-tall, red-velvet cookie stuffed with chunks of white chocolate and topped with vanilla cream cheese frosting, the latter made from scratch, wouldn’t be a horrible place to start. But you’d better act fast. Since launching Cookie Craving Co. in early December, Reid has sold every last confection she’s turned out. (That’s right, the 28-year-old St. Mary’s Academy alumnus has created a bit of a cookie monster.)

CTV Winnipeg's Colleen Bready makes weather newscast look easy

It’s Sunday afternoon at St Vital Park, where it’s partly cloudy with a temperature of -11 C, a relative humidity of 77 per cent and winds from the north at 15 km/h.

The reason we know all this is because our walking companion is Colleen Bready, who later this year will toast her 10th anniversary as CTV Winnipeg’s lead weather personality.

Little surprise, Bready, whose idea of a picture-perfect day is “28 and sunny,” is nothing if not sensibly dressed.

“I knew today was a bit on the chilly side so underneath my parka I’m wearing a thermal top, and under my jeans I have matching thermal pants,” she says, giving her ankle high North Face boots a gentle kick against a bench to loosen some snow caught in the treads. “Obviously I have my tuque and gloves on, and because I try to get my steps in every day, I’m also wearing my Fitbit.”

Zen, and the art of chocolate

National Chocolate Cake Day falls annually on Jan. 27 but before we get around to the story of Chocolate Zen, a boutique bakery at 553 Osborne St. where chocolate is the name of the game 365 days of the year, co-owner Douglas Krahn would like to take this opportunity to apologize to VH1’s 15th greatest pop culture icon of all time if he came off as aloof or standoffish the lone time the two of them met.

In 2003, Krahn worked as a pastry chef at Green Gates on Roblin Boulevard. That summer he was commissioned to prepare a birthday cake for actor Richard Gere, who turned 54 while he was in Winnipeg shooting the romantic comedy Shall We Dance?

Later, a crew member approached Krahn again, this time to ask if he’d be interested in working with Susan Sarandon, cast as Gere’s wife. One scene called for Beverly (Sarandon) to give her husband John (Gere) a chocolate cake for his birthday. Peter Chelsom, the film’s director, wanted the writing on the cake to be in Sarandon’s own hand so they were hoping Krahn could show the Academy Award winner how to properly use a piping bag.

He’d be happy to, and one afternoon while he was hanging around the set, Jennifer Lopez, who was playing Gere’s character’s dance instructor, approached him to say hello. Only problem: he had been given strict instructions by the production crew not to interact with J Lo, no ifs, ands or buts.

Bean there, done Stak

WINNIPEG BEACH — It was the moment she’d bean, er, been waiting for.

Suzan Stupack is the owner of the Stak Co., an Interlake-based operation with the slogan, “You’ll never look at beans the same way again.” In November, following close to five years of research and development, coupled with thousands of hours spent peddling her wares at farmers markets and craft sales, Stupack saw her dream come true. Her gluten-free, vegan line of dry soup, burrito and chili mixes, wholly prepared with legumes grown in the southern part of the province, was finally going to be available at retail outlets across Manitoba and as far east as Thunder Bay.

Only thing was, with all that was going on in the world in regard to COVID-19, the married mother of two and grandmother of one didn’t feel comfortable trumpeting her achievement on her social media platforms. It wasn’t a time to celebrate, but rather a time to assist those less fortunate, she says, seated in the living room of her Winnipeg Beach abode, which she shares with her husband, Andrew, and their eight-year-old Maltese-Yorkshire terrier cross, Peanut.

In early December Stupack partnered with Kevin Burgin, host of The Main Ingredient, a foodie-centric radio program that airs on 680 CJOB, and chef Ben Kramer, the force behind Made with Love, an initiative that provides healthy meals to people in need. Their idea: a virtual chili cook-off using Stupack’s non-GMO bean blends, with all proceeds from a suggested $10 entry fee — many of the participants gave far more — going to Made with Love.

Let sleeping dogs… run

It was around this time last winter when Cathlynn Rule slipped on a patch of ice, causing her to tumble and badly injure her left shoulder.

Since then, she’s been hesitant to walk Rocky, her two-year-old shorkie (Shih Tzu-Yorkie cross), because whenever he tugs on the leash, even slightly, a sharp, shooting pain goes up her arm. Feeling like a neglectful pet owner, she was pumped to learn about Dog Dash, a Winnipeg-based, dog gym-on-wheels her boyfriend came across on Instagram in early December.

In a nutshell, Andres (Tito) Ramirez-Urbina, who founded Dog Dash with his partner Mike Iezzi, shows up at your residence at an appointed time. You turn your pet over to him and for the next 30 minutes or so, depending on its endurance level, Ramirez-Urbina puts your pooch through its paces by encouraging it to run on a doggie treadmill bolted down in the back of his and Iezzi’s retrofitted passenger van. Don’t think your dog is up to the challenge? Neither did Rule.

“The first time Rocky tried it he was hesitant. But after a few steps he caught on and pretty soon, he was running so fast he didn’t want to give up,” Rule says.

Ukrainian Deli in Transcona dishes up perogies and holopchi that would make a baba proud

The same way people were discouraged from gathering in December to celebrate Christmas, Kwanzaa or Hanukkah, those who follow the Julian calendar are being instructed not to hook up with friends and family later this week to observe Svyatvecher, more commonly known as Ukrainian Christmas.

Still, if you are planning to sit down with your bubble-mates for a traditional Ukrainian Christmas Eve meal this Wednesday and are in a pinch for perogies, Sevala’s Ukrainian Deli at 126 Victoria Ave. W. has that covered.

“Ukrainian Christmas isn’t as big in Winnipeg as it once was, which is kind of sad, but what we’ve been trying to do the last several years is take some of the less commonly seen Ukrainian dishes and make them available for customers who still celebrate (Ukrainian Christmas),” says Del Demchuk, whose late mother, Sylvia Beck, founded Sevala’s — which, despite the deli part of its tag, has always been takeout only — out of a two-car garage in Transcona 35 years ago.

Nalysnyky, a cottage cheese crepe, is one of the things they regularly whip up this time of year, as are sauerkraut soup and beet leaf buns, Demchuk says, seated next to his wife Bernadette (Bernie) and their daughters Amy and Samantha, all of whom are heavily involved in the bustling shop’s day-to-day affairs.

Reconnect with fascinating people featured in 2020

Have globes, will travel.

In early July we profiled Ande Brown, founder of I-Co Globes, a two-year-old enterprise that turns out eye-catching, 20-sided world globes fashioned out of wood, cork or brass. An hour after the story appeared in the online version of the Free Press, an ex-Winnipegger who now calls Saskatoon home reached out to Brown, hoping to purchase globes for her two adult sons, both of them seasoned travellers.

Following a bit of back and forth that included settling on appropriate names for the one-of-a-kind orbs (readers may recall that upon completion, Brown christens her creations with whatever positive word pops into her head at that precise moment), Brown and her correspondent got around to discussing shipping options. The woman was in no rush; Canada Post would be A-OK, she said. Brown, also a well-travelled sort who has visited all seven continents, had a different idea.

“At the time, I was more than a little sick of being cooped up in the house because of COVID, so I asked if she’d care if I hopped on my (motor) bike and brought them to her in person,” says Brown, who, when there isn’t snow on the ground, tools around on a Honda CB500X. “She was more than a little surprised by my suggestion but after I explained that I was really in the mood for a ride and how it would do me a world of good, she was, like, ‘sure, why not?’”

A pizza champion's tough first year, and the science behind why pineapple is problematic

If Thomas Schneider, co-owner of Tommy’s Pizzeria at 842 Corydon Ave., had his druthers, nobody would be eating his creations in the comfort of their own home.

Don’t take that the wrong way. Schneider, named Canada’s No. 1 pizza chef at an international competition held in Italy in the spring of 2019, can’t say enough good things about how Winnipeggers have supported his and his brother Michael’s 11-month-old business during its inaugural year. It’s just that when Schneider, also a World Pizza Champions team member, opened his namesake resto in January, he envisioned it becoming a meeting place of sorts, the type of Cheers-like haunt one could gather with friends to catch up over a pint and a pie, versus the pickup and delivery operation it has turned into of late in keeping with the province’s COVID-19 code red restrictions.

“Originally, we had no intention of offering delivery at all. The plan was to be strictly dine-in, as we wanted our customers to taste our pizzas hot out of the oven,” says Schneider, 29, seated in their 86-seat locale, currently open Wednesday to Saturday only. “We had Sinatra playing in the background, our team was committed to amazing customer service... we wanted it to be an experience to come to Tommy’s. Unfortunately, everything changed because of COVID so like a lot of others, we’re doing what we have to do in order to survive.”

● ● ●

Winnipeg piano man has a regular gig down at his Pandemic Lounge

Matt Budoloski, the multi-talented singer/songwriter responsible for a virtual piano bar that airs online every Saturday commencing at 9 p.m., chuckles when it’s mentioned how appropriate it is that Billy Joel’s signature hit Piano Man is a central part of his own sets, given the tune’s opening lyric, “It’s nine o’clock on a Saturday…”

“Until you brought up the fact that I play the piano and start at nine on Saturdays, I had never put the two together,” says Budoloski, reached at home in St. James. “But now I think I’ll actually kick off the show with Piano Man just for that reason, so thanks.”

On the contrary. We’re the ones who should be thanking him.

Ten months into a global pandemic that has made it nigh on impossible to kick back and enjoy live music, Budoloski’s weekly gigs, as long as three hours some evenings, are a melodious breath of fresh air. Because let’s face it, you haven’t really heard ZZ Top’s Sharp Dressed Man or the Killers’ Mr. Brightside until you’ve heard ‘em performed as toned-down ballads, with piano accompaniment only.

Her best shot

‘What? Not drinking?”

After Leanne Kisil gave up alcohol completely in November 2017, her friends continued to ask why she didn’t have a beer or glass of wine parked in front of her when they were out for a bite or gathered at somebody’s place.

It felt odd to field the same question over and over, Kisil says. If she had been a smoker and was suddenly eschewing nicotine, she doubts anybody would have cared why she wasn’t sitting there, puffing away.

“Or they would been all, ‘Hey, good for you,’ if I’d quit cigarettes versus booze,” she continues, dressed in a parka, jeans and tuque, swaying back and forth to keep warm during a distanced outdoor interview in keeping with the city’s code red COVID-19 restrictions. “It’s almost as if we think it’s healthy or perfectly normal to drink when we all know (alcohol) is a toxin.”

Coupon book a boon to local restos, charity

Shaun Jeffrey, executive director of the Manitoba Restaurant and Foodservices Association (MRFA), doesn’t have to think long and hard when asked about dining spots in the city that were forced to lock their doors for good in 2020, owing to the fallout from COVID-19.

Besides Hermano’s Restaurant and Wine Bar in the East Exchange and Stella’s Café and Bakery’s flagship location in Osborne Village, Jeffrey cites a Stradbrook Avenue mainstay that was once voted among the top 100 restaurants in the country. “It’s sad to lose even one, but when a place like Segovia closes, it’s time to act because quite frankly, we can’t afford to lose any more (restaurants),” Jeffrey says when reached at his office.

In time for holiday gift-giving, the association, which represents more than 500 restaurant owners in the province, has teamed up with the Dream Factory, a charitable organization devoted to making dreams come true for children battling life-threatening diseases. The fruit of their labour is the Dine Manitoba Restaurant Guide, a savings book that may look somewhat familiar to those who prefer to let someone else do the cooking.

“A lot of people remember those Entertainment coupon books that schools and sports teams used to sell as fundraisers, so we thought, why not put together something similar, something that would require little to no explanation how to use,” Jeffrey says of the coil-bound book, which, beginning this week, can be ordered through the MRFA’s website.

No call from the hall? The gall!

The 2020 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony, originally scheduled to take place in Cleveland in May, finally came to fruition Nov. 7, albeit in a virtual sense only.

The two-hour, made-for-television event, currently available to HBO and Crave subscribers, salutes the latest class of artists chosen for recognition, which include the Doobie Brothers, Depeche Mode, Nine Inch Nails and the late Whitney Houston. The ceremony definitely had a different feel this time around, what with live performances being shelved owing to COVID-19. One thing remained unchanged, however: the heated debate over who made the grade and who didn’t. (Currently leading the list on a webpage devoted to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s most egregious snubs are four-time Grammy Award winner Pat Benatar, new wave pioneers Devo and German outfit Kraftwerk, long heralded as one of the innovators of electronic music.)

Readers outraged that acts such as Duran Duran, the Pixies and (hey, hey, we’re) the Monkees remain on the outside looking in will be displeased to know that when it comes to rebuffed rockers, things are no different here in the Great White North.

Since it was founded in 1978, the Canadian Music Hall of Fame, located in Studio Bell in Calgary, home of the National Music Centre, has welcomed 57 members to its ranks, none of which is named Trooper, whose 1979 greatest hits package Hot Shots shattered all sales records for a homegrown artist, achieving quadruple-platinum status.

City chef brings his passion for all things Argentina to city's food scene

Near the end of March, right around the time restaurant owners across the province began limiting the number of guests allowed inside their establishment or shutting down altogether owing to COVID-19, a regular at Corrientes Argentine Pizzeria, 137 Bannatyne Ave., poked his head through the door, glanced around and started to cry.

“Half the chairs were resting upside down on top of the tables, there were maybe two people here and he said it made him very sad to see our place, which is usually full of life, looking like that,” says Alfonso Maury, who earlier this year celebrated his fifth anniversary as owner of the attractive, Exchange District resto, known for its overstuffed empanadas and South American-style, thin-crust pizzas.

Maury, who runs things with his wife Roxana, is the first to admit the past eight months haven’t been easy. Restaurant sales are down close to $200,000 compared to 2019, due to in large part to the cancellation of popular, nearby events such as the Winnipeg Fringe Theatre Festival, the Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre season and the Winnipeg Goldeyes’ home schedule, goings-on that typically bring in hordes of diners. And while Corrientes’ sprawling, outdoor patio helped offset losses during the summer months, ever since the province issued a code orange designation for the Winnipeg region in late September, things have been, in his words, dead all over again.

“But it’s OK. We are positive people and we know there are better days ahead,” says Maury, who also owns and operates La Pampa Empanadas, a takeout shop with two locations in the city. “When that fellow looked at me with tears in his eyes and asked if we were going to be the next (to close) I answered no, that wasn’t going to happen. I assured him as long as we have life we have hope.”

Smokehouse blues

Following a 2013 fire that charred or destroyed an exhaustive collection of records, musical instruments and assorted rock ‘n’ roll keepsakes, friends and family reached out to Alan Ollinger, telling him they were sorry for his loss.

Even a neighbour who was in the hospital battling cancer expressed sympathy that items Ollinger spent years amassing had literally gone up in smoke. That’s OK, he told everybody, always adding that at the end of the day it was “just stuff.” A few months later, however, once the initial shock had subsided somewhat, the married father of three admits to, in his words, snapping.

“One morning I woke up and yelled out, ‘Yeah, it was just stuff. But it was my stuff! And it was pretty cool stuff!’”

This is the story of Ollinger’s “stuff,” and to borrow a line from Don McLean’s American Pie, the day the music died.

Taking her best shot

For years, Agata Robb has driven to her 91-year-old grandfather’s home in the North End on a weekly basis to check up on him and to discuss whatever is going on in their individual lives.

During one such visit about 14 months ago, the married mother of two and founder of Juice Me, a five-year-old venture that turns out all-natural, nutritional products, let on that she was feeling a bit overwhelmed, as though she was being pulled in “10 different directions.”

Her grandfather expressed concern, inquiring why that was the case. She reiterated to him that while her self-run biz started solely as a cold-pressed juice company, it had since grown to include a food truck-type operation, a line of flavoured teas as well as so-called “super shots,” which are frozen cubes prepared with a variety of healthful ingredients such as ginger and turmeric that can be added to hot water, smoothies or carbonated soda to offer flavour, or to help stave off coughs and colds.

“I told him I’d been so busy trying to grow my little company into something big that I didn’t have as much time for my family as I would have liked, and was thinking of scaling things back. But I wasn’t sure if that was a smart move or not,” Robb says, seated in the dining room area of the two-storey abode she shares with her husband Adam, their children Anaya, 13, and Adam Jr., 11, and a 10-month-old husky-cross that answers to Stevie.

Why won’t these earworms stay dead?

The first five words out of singer Stevie Nicks’ mouth in Dreams, Fleetwood Mac’s blockbuster single from 1977, are, “Now here you go again.”

How apropos, considering the reflective, Nicks-penned tune, all about love gone B-A-D, is currently enjoying a rebirth thanks to a pair of unlikely props, namely a skateboard and an oversized bottle of Ocean Spray juice.

In September, Nathan Apodaca, a 37-year-old Idahoan, made a name for himself after recording a 22-second TikTok video that shows him riding a skateboard down the highway, quenching his thirst with cran-raspberry juice (no sugar added!) while singing along to Dreams, the lone Fleetwood Mac song to ever hit No. 1 on Billboard’s singles chart. Not only has the clip made Apodaca a viral sensation — at last count, it had been viewed more than 52 million times and had been re-enacted by thousands of people, including Nicks herself — it also sparked renewed interest in the 43-year-old, four-minute ditty.

On Oct. 13, Dreams paid a return visit to the charts, re-entering Billboard’s Hot 100 at No. 21 with a bullet, based on 13 million streams and some 22,000 downloads sold in the previous week.

No reprieve for turkeys this pandemic-plagued Thanksgiving, as restaurants cook up this prominent protein

The headline last week seemed like good news for turkeys, not so much for turkey producers: “Turkey trouble: farmers, meatpackers and butchers are all in the dark a week from Thanksgiving.”

The accompanying article touched on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s nationally televised address in late September, during which he stated that owing to COVID-19, it was highly unlikely Canadians would be gathering for Thanksgiving dinner the way we traditionally do, while adding, “but we still have a shot at Christmas.”

In a typical year, Thanksgiving accounts for almost 40 per cent of annual whole turkey sales in Canada, which works out to roughly 2.5 million gobblers.

In the days leading up to the holiday weekend, the country’s turkey farmers were expressing concern that demand for their product would be decidedly low given, as the PM intimated, people are expected to congregate in smaller numbers than usual, if they congregate at all.

A musician’s producer

Dan Donahue was fed up with trying to earn a living as a musician when he was asked to produce for someone else

Lost art of the live album

“Welcome back, my friendsto the show that never endsWe’re so glad you could attendCome inside! Come inside!”

— Emerson, Lake & Palmer

Let us all raise a glass and a Bic lighter in a toast to the live album, a collection of songs recorded in front of — get this! — thousands of people packed like sardines into an arena or music hall, singing along to their favourite tunes at the top of their COVID-free lungs.

Rockin' Richard Sturtz's twice-yearly markets drew music collectors for more than two decades

Every October since 2000, Rockin’ Richard’s Record & CD Sale has been held on the first Sunday of the month.

The rollicking affair, which typically draws audiophiles from coast to coast and from as far south as Minneapolis, was cancelled this fall owing to COVID-19. Sadly, even if it had been held, Rockin’ Richard Sturtz, the twice-yearly event’s namesake and co-organizer, wouldn’t be there joyously debating whether Revolver or Rubber Soul is the better Beatles album.

Sturtz died April 16 at age 74 from complications following heart surgery, four weeks after Rockin’ Richard’s annual spring event at the Victoria Inn.

Sturtz’s brother-in-law Alex Reid is the other half of the duo that, for the last 20 years, was responsible for putting on the second-largest sale of its kind in Canada. Sturtz was admitted to St. Boniface Hospital in late January with a leaky aortic valve, Reid says, seated in the living room of the spacious St. Andrews home the two of them shared since the death of Sturtz’s wife, Gloria (Reid’s sister) in July 2018. Ten days after being released from the hospital, the grandfather of two began to suffer a series of setbacks, Reid says.

Ashish Selvanathan left his nine-to-five life and set out on a mission to introduce Manitobans to real Indian condiments

Poke through most refrigerators in town and you’re almost guaranteed to spot a container of mustard resting next to a bottle of mayo sitting next to a jar of relish.

Ashish Selvanathan, founder of Cheeky Foods Co., a two-year-old, home-based operation that turns out all-natural Indian foodstuffs based on decades-old recipes originally developed by his mother, grandmother and great-grandmother, is hoping to add chutney to that list of everyday condiments.

“In India, chutney is the type of thing you would pick up each time you go to the store, much like how milk and butter are here,” he says, seated in a St. Mary’s Road coffee shop, dressed in a dark sweater and jeans. “In Canada it’s more of a specialty item people grab only when they’re having something like samosas. My goal is to change people’s mindset, to get them thinking about using chutney on burgers, hot dogs, eggs... anything they’d normally top with something like ketchup or salsa, pretty much.”

•••

After 20 years, Planet of Sound is still in its own orbit around the world of music

According to a press release issued last week by the Recording Industry Association of America, for the first time since 1986 — the year songs such as Madonna’s Papa Don’t Preach, Peter Gabriel’s Sledgehammer and Falco’s Rock Me Amadeus were topping charts all over the globe — sales of vinyl records outstripped sales of compact discs for the initial six months of the year.

Hey, Mr. Mister, it wasn’t even close. The RIAA report stated that between January and June, audiophiles doled out US$232.1 million on vinyl albums as compared with just less than US$130 million on their digital counterparts. And while that bit of news was music to the ears of Planet of Sound owner Dave Wright, it certainly didn’t come as some big surprise.

“Vinyl is definitely on the upswing and has been for a while, which is precisely why we started carrying it in the store about 10 years ago,” says Wright, whose cosy, 800-square-foot shop at 1109 Henderson Hwy., which stocks a healthy number of LPs in addition to CDs, DVDs and Blu-rays, even an assortment of long-considered extinct LaserDiscs, will celebrate its 20th anniversary in November.

“It’s not just people who grew up listening to vinyl, either,” he goes on, sporting the office uniform: sneakers, dark jeans and an aquamarine-coloured, zip-up hoodie, the latter of which only partially conceals a well-worn, Joy Division T-shirt. “The other day there was a gal in here who I would have put at around 14. She picked up the Tea Party’s Edges of Twilight plus an album by the Wallflowers, the one that had their first big hit on it (we think he means Bringing Down the Horse). As she was taking out her debit card to pay I was like, how do you even know about these groups? Don’t they predate you by at least 10 years?”

Winnipegger's hybrid burger targets flexitarian consumers

James Battershill isn’t insulted when somebody tells him they can’t taste the difference between a burger made with Bump, the beef hybrid his parent company, Juno Food Labs, introduced to Winnipeg store shelves in March, versus one readied with good, ol’ ground round.

“No, that doesn’t bug me at all, because at the end of the day that’s the entire point,” he says nursing a cup of coffee in True North Square’s Hargrave St. Market. “Whenever I hear someone say their meatloaf or lasagna (prepared with Bump) tastes the same as it always did, I definitely take that as a compliment.”

Dressed in grey pants, white sneakers and a black T-shirt emblazoned with Bump’s official logo, Battershill, 35, says Bump, containing 70 per cent Western Canadian beef mixed with 30 per cent plant-based protein, is aimed primarily at flexitarians, people who are largely vegetarian but still enjoy chowing down on a steak every now and again, or wouldn’t dream of saying no to their grandmother’s turkey dinner.

“For health and environmental reasons, lots of people are taking steps towards reducing the amount of meat in their diet,” he says. “At the same time, many of them have a slew of time-tested recipes they know and love. So instead of having to adapt those recipes or ditch them altogether, they can use our product, while at the same time eating 30 per cent less meat.”

For these Winnipeg collectors of kids' stuff, it's all about show-and-tell

For these Winnipeg collectors of kids' stuff, it's all about show-and-tell

Corydon Club, Waverley Wrap emphasize Winnipeg roots at Nick's on Broadway

In February, Nick’s on Broadway was named as a finalist for a James Beard restaurant of the year award, long considered the Oscars of the culinary world.

The next day, Trevor Graumann, who handles social media for Nick’s on Broadway, a gourmet soup-and-sandwich nook at 287 Broadway run by his younger brother Nick, shared the good news on Instagram and Facebook. Here’s the catch: the Nick’s on Broadway that was up for the honour is actually located in Providence, R.I., not downtown Winnipeg.

“After finding out about it my brother decided to have a bit of fun and sure enough we were tagged in a few posts by people congratulating us on ‘our’ nomination,” says Nick Graumann, whose namesake eatery, currently open for pickup and delivery only, celebrated its fifth anniversary in January “before all the COVID craziness hit.”

If two spots named Nick’s on Broadway isn’t confusing enough, Graumann contends things were even more mixed up a few years ago when there was a third like-named resto, that one in the Big Apple.

Brothers' frozen pizza experiencing a pandemic-era popularity explosion

STARBUCK — According to an article that appeared on adweek.com in mid-April, frozen pizza was right up there with hand sanitizer, toilet paper and bleach when it came to commodities that began flying off store shelves not long after the first North American cases of COVID-19 were reported in late January.

Between March 8 and April 4, consumers in Canada and the United State scooped up close to $300 million worth of frozen pizza, a reported 92 per cent increase from the matching period in 2019. “I’ve been in this business over 25 years (and) I’ve never seen a spike like this,” said Dave Best, COO for Newman’s Own, the American food conglomerate founded by late actor Paul Newman, which saw sales of its line of frozen pies increase 190 per cent in March and April.

A bit closer to home, brothers Ray and Phil Mollot, owners of Archie’s Meats, say the increased demand for their thin-crust frozen pizzas, prepared from scratch at their grocery store/production facility in Starbuck using all made-in-Manitoba ingredients, caught them completely off guard, as well.

“We have been very busy and many people we have never seen before are placing all kinds of orders,” Ray said when reached at work a few months ago.

Rocking and rolling again at Roxy Lanes

Melissa and Robert Gauthier, owners of Roxy Lanes, weren’t the only ones who missed the clatter of strikes and spares while the 60-year-old, five-pin bowling alley was shuttered for close to 2 1/2 months owing to COVID-19.

According to Melissa, whose office is located in the bowels of the 10,000-square-foot, neighbourhood haunt at 385 Henderson Hwy., the 20-lane alley’s resident spirits weren’t too keen on the dearth of activity, either.

In late March, a week or so after the married couple was forced to close their doors to the general public to help stem the spread of the coronavirus, she was headed to the basement to catch up on some paperwork when a high-pitched voice called out, “Hello!” Halting in her tracks, she looked around, trying to determine whether an employee had popped by to grab a few of their belongings. Satisfied she was all alone she did what any other rational person would when they’re greeted by a spectre: she continued down the stairs, calling out, “Why, hello yourself!”

“They’re very nice ghosts who usually don’t have much to say but I guess they were wondering why it had been so quiet around here lately,” she says, noting a medium who visited the premises a few months after she and her husband purchased it 11 years ago confirmed the subterranean level is inhabited by a trio of ghosts. “Sure, it was a bit of a shock to the system the first few times I heard ‘em moving around but these days I don’t think twice. Mind you, if it ever gets to the point where we start seeing bowling balls floating around in mid-air I’m definitely outta here.”

Authentic shave ice business was sizzling, and then the pandemic hit

Frozen hands up if you remember the Frosty Sno-Man Sno-cone machine, created by the Hasbro toy company in the 1960s.

The cavity-inducing contraption worked like this: while depositing cubes of ice in Frosty’s hollowed-out, plastic noggin you would turn a crank that rendered the ice into slivers via a cheese grater-type device attached to the mechanism’s mid-section. Once there was enough shredded ice to fill a small cup, you’d then squirt a provided artificial sweetener — flavours included orange, grape, pineapple, blueberry and pink lemonade — over top of the ice, producing a chilled treat perfect for a hot summer day.

OK, maybe not so perfect.

A few years ago Tina Dixon, founder of Island Girl Shave Ice, a family-run enterprise that bills itself as the city’s first authentic, Hawaiian-style shave ice biz, was a registered vendor at ManyFest, an annual street festival held in downtown Winnipeg’s Memorial Park. (According to the ManyFest website, this year’s festival remains tentatively scheduled for Sept. 11 to 13.) During the course of the weekend Dixon and her husband Darryl heard it time and time again; people strolling past their booth, made to resemble a tropical oasis with its Tiki thatch umbrella, would give the set-up the once-over then mutter under their breath, “Oh never mind, that’s just a junky snow cone.”

Record store/barbershop the perfect shared space for husband and wife

Rock ’n’ roll never forgets.

Steve Ward, born and raised in Selkirk, has fond, teenage memories of shopping at Blaine’s Records and Tapes, a music store formerly situated in Selkirk’s downtown shopping mall, the Selkirk Town Plaza. Almost every Friday after school he spent a few hours poring through the shop’s album and cassette bins searching for audio treasures to bring home while chatting with staff, which at one point included fellow Selkirk resident Ellen Reid, later of the Crash Test Dummies.

Ward, 49, says there was a period in the mid-1980s when he was in a metal band and “probably” listening to too much Judas Priest. Hoping to broaden his horizons somewhat he began asking Blaine McVety, the store’s owner, and Richard Smolinski, a highly knowledgeable fellow who worked there, for recommendations.

“They were always more than happy to comply and before I got a job there myself in the early ’90s, they’d already taught me about jazz, college rock, British stuff like the Clash...,” he continues, recalling Rush’s A Farewell to Kings as the first record he ever purchased, simply because at age 8 he was drawn to the cover art.

Binge watch: For these horophiles, it's all in the wrist action

The first rule of watch club is you do not talk about watch club.

Rick, a semi-retired internet consultant, and Paul, a professor of medicine, are the founders of Winnipeg Watch Enthusiasts, an eight-year-old organization comprised of people who, according to the group’s website, “have a high level of enthusiasm” for timepieces of all descriptions. Because individual collections are often quite valuable, members refrain from revealing their full name while participating in online forums, let alone when they’re seated in Rick’s three-season sunroom, detailing the history of their club to a newspaper scribe.

Paul, whose internet handle is WpgWatchDoc, says the reason for the shroud of secrecy is simple. While one must officially belong to Winnipeg Watch Enthusiasts in order to post messages, you don’t have to be a member to peruse those same entries. So when a person is discussing a new $30,000 Rolex or 100-year-old pocket watch worth two or three times that amount, they prefer to maintain their anonymity, he explains.

Since the club’s inception in 2012, members have hooked up in a private room at a local restaurant or lounge every three months to talk shop while admiring one another’s latest finds. When large get-togethers such as theirs were temporarily shelved owing to COVID-19, Rick, or RickG as he’s known online, Paul and the rest of their horological gang, mostly age 40 and up, suddenly found they had, um... some time to kill.

Despite lockdown, restaurateur has a lot to celebrate with 30th anniversary

Joe Loschiavo, currently celebrating his 30th anniversary as the owner of Pasquale’s Italian Ristorante at 109 Marion St., is a hugger, always has been.

Knowing that, it comes as little surprise to learn the toughest thing for him lately hasn’t been devising a way to make ends meet during a pandemic.

Instead it’s been the inability to wrap his arms around his longtime regulars and give them a heartfelt embrace.

“When all this began to break, when we saw what was happening with COVID, we made the difficult decision to shut things down completely,” says the married father of three, seated in the main-floor dining area of his multi-level restaurant, which includes a spacious, rooftop patio overlooking St. Boniface.

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It’s often said one should avoid discussing religion or politics in polite company.

According to Jerry Olenko, member of the Facebook group “If you grew up in Winnipeg, Manitoba you remember...” you can add a log-shaped confection prepared with Belgian chocolate swirls, butter icing and a shortbread crust base to the list of topics almost guaranteed to spark a squabble.

“I don’t know what it is about Jeanne’s cake but people either love it or hate it. There doesn’t seem to be any middle ground,” says Olenko, referring to local institution Jeanne’s Bakery’s No. 1 bestseller. “I happen to think they’re the greatest cakes on the planet, but whenever somebody new to our group begins a post asking if others remember eating Jeanne’s cake on their birthday, I’m tempted to say, ‘Buddy, you don’t know the can of worms you just opened up.’”

High Tea Bakery's stiff upper lip means the treats are still flowing

When life gives you lemons, make lemon tarts. Or lemon squares. Or lemon cranberry scones.

Belinda Bigold is the owner of High Tea Bakery, a St. James institution well-known for its British-style goodies. On March 17, Bigold, who founded the business in 2003 along with her mother Carol Bigold, sat down with her management team to crunch numbers.

Between March 12, the day the National Hockey League announced it was temporarily suspending operations to help slow the spread of COVID-19, and March 16, by which time the term social distancing had become part of the everyday vernacular, High Tea Bakery, 2103 Portage Ave., lost $30,000 in pre-orders due to the sudden cancellation or postponement of myriad weddings, birthday celebrations and charity events.

Forced to immediately lay off three-quarters of her staff, Bigold told the remaining employees the bakery would honour any orders still on the books for that week. Then she posted a message on Instagram and Facebook reading, “Closed for now, not forever.” Practically overnight, longtime regulars of the bakery began reaching out to Bigold on social media, wondering how they were going to “survive” the days and weeks ahead without their usual fix of imperial cookies, gingersnaps or snickerdoodles.

Friendly flight insurance

This was going to be Carla McDonald’s year.

As the owner/operator of Travelling Guardian, a chaperone service that offers companionship to people nervous or reluctant to fly on their own, or assists those unfamiliar with Winnipeg’s Richardson International Airport get from Point A to Point B while remaining by their side until they board their flight, McDonald was just beginning to reap the benefits of 2 1/2 years of hard work when the new coronavirus turned the airline industry on its ear.

McDonald launched her one-person enterprise, which she believes to be the only one of its kind in the country, in September 2017, a month after retiring from a 38-year career as an airline customer service agent. Business coaches who’d been tutoring her along the way predicted it was probably going to take a couple years for her venture to, uh... take off. Their assessments were spot on, she says, seated in the living room of her neat-as-a-pin River Heights bungalow located seven minutes from the airport. Yes, she’s timed it.

At the beginning of March, McDonald was approached by someone who relies on a wheelchair to get around. He was hoping she could accompany him to an annual work conference in Quebec he’d always wanted to attend, but never had because he was fearful of travelling alone.

Well-seasoned barbecue man determined to succeed 

How’s this for a double-whammy?

Last October, Fraser Mason opened Sandy-Lou’s Barbecue, a no-frills eatery specializing in burgers, dogs and ribs, on the ground level of a historic, downtown hotel. Three-and-a-half months later, days after the building’s owner allegedly threatened to raise the rent by 35 per cent, Mason gathered his pots and pans and walked out the door. (Because the case is currently before the courts — both sides are suing one another for breach of contract — we’re not naming the locale-in-question.)

On March 1, Mason reopened his restaurant, this time dubbing it Sandy-Lou’s Diner, inside an equally iconic setting — the LaSalle Hotel at 346 Nairn Ave., a 106-year-old, three-story inn situated a stone’s throw away from the Louise Bridge. Of course, everybody knows what happened next. Beginning in mid-March, dine-in restaurants across the continent, Sandy-Lou’s included, were forced to close their doors, owing to COVID-19.

Given how things have gone during his first seven months on the job, we wondered if Mason, whose locale has remained open for pickup or delivery through Uber Eats, Skip the Dishes and Door Dash, feels completely snakebit? Not a whit, he replies.

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Two Thursdays ago, when the afternoon temperature in Winnipeg climbed to a pleasant 18 degrees, pedestrians and cyclists along Wellington Crescent near Lanark Street were greeted by a peculiar sight in a homeowner’s front yard: a two-metre-tall, topiary camel sporting a bright yellow surgical mask, surrounded by pots containing close to 4,000 flowers, every last one of which was free for the taking as per a sign that read, “Help yourself to some spring.”

We’ll get to the camel in a sec — that’s the real star of today’s story — but first, the flowers.

Dawn Stewart, who along with husband Paul, are the homeowners responsible for the bountiful bouquet and accompanying ungulate, works for a flower wholesaler that supplies local florist shops. Although florists have been allowed to remain open under the government’s Public Health Act that closed non-essential businesses, there has been a glut of unsold product at Stewart’s place of work lately, owing to the postponement or cancellation of celebratory events such as weddings, anniversary parties and birthday gatherings.

Early last week Stewart struck a deal — a floral arrangement, if you will — with her bosses. If she and Paul did most of the heavy lifting, they were welcome to take home 3,700 stems earmarked for the trash heap. There they could distribute the mix of daisies, spider mums, mini carnations and lilies gratis to those who habitually pause in front of their two-story abode to take selfies with their moss-filled camel, which, since it came onto the scene three years ago, has appeared as the Easter bunny, a Winnipeg Jets booster and one of Santa’s reindeer.

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When the Manitoba government on March 30 ordered all non-essential services to close under the Public Health Act to reduce the spread of COVID-19, a measure that went into effect two days later, Shawn Bennett sprang into action.

The first thing Bennett, owner of Happy Tails Pet Resort & Spa, a doggie daycare with two locations in Winnipeg, did after learning about the order was openly wonder whether his four-year-old, family-run operation qualified as an essential service. It took some investigating, but near the bottom of a long list of businesses deemed crucial under the act — the 73rd of 74 entries — was the following description: “A business that provides for the health and well-being of animals, including farms, boarding kennels, stables, animal shelters, zoos, aquariums, research facilities and other service providers.”

“Before we knew for certain that we’d be allowed to stay open, we reached out to a lot of our clientele, many of whom work in the health industry, to let them know we weren’t sure what was going to happen,” Bennett says, speaking loud enough over the phone to be heard above barking in the background. “It was a bit humbling because to a person they said they were with us no matter what. If we stayed open, great, they’d see us in a day or two. If we were forced to close, no worries. They and their pet would be back when we reopened.”

Sure, business is down significantly at facilities such as Bennett’s, what with so many people either working from home or not working, period. But for that segment of the population that continues to head out the door day in and day out, Happy Tails and businesses like it have been a godsend, he feels, as they’ve given pet owners one less thing to worry about.

Online sports host show making a name for himself

In a perfect world, Jordan Rogodzinski would be spending his days at Miles Macdonell Collegiate, where he’s in his final year of studies, and his evenings parked in front of the TV, glued to the National Hockey League playoffs that, before the NHL season was suspended because of COVID-19, were slated to get underway earlier this week.

More importantly — at least to his loyal legion of fans — the affable 20-year-old would also be busily preparing to host the latest edition of Jordan’s 411 Sports Show, a one-on-one talk affair he began recording at school in 2015.

Unfortunately, the world is less than perfect these days. So instead Rogodzinski, a self-described sports nut who was born with cerebral palsy and a cognitive disability, is killing time watching some of his favourite sports flicks, movies such as Any Given Sunday, We Are Marshall and The Waterboy, for the umpteenth time.

He says he’s also listening to a lot of music, as well as watching his brother Jeremy play sports games on PS4.

Catching up with old friends

In October 2016, we profiled Garry Peters, an ex-minister who, at the time, was performing a job widely believed to have gone the way of the dodo.

“Whenever I tell somebody what I do for a living, that I’m a milkman, their immediate response is, ‘People still do that?’” Peters said in the wee hours of the morning while negotiating his refrigerated step-van through the streets of Fort Richmond, where he was dropping off milk, butter and assorted other dairy products to some of his 150 residential customers.

Well, not only do Free Press readers have a long memory in reference to that story — to this day, we continue to receive messages asking how to get in touch with “that milkman guy you wrote about” — so do our bosses. Last Friday, we were the recipient of a late-night email from a Free Press editor carrying the subject line, “How busy is the milkman right now?”

To answer that question: very. In other words, yes, the milkman still cometh!

Weird museums you can tour online

Online tours of museums' priceless art works and irreplaceable historical treasures are fine, but where can a self-isolating citizen of the pandemic find lovingly curated collections of notable barf bags? Exquisite moist towelettes? Well, friends...

Grand-opening delayed for cafe featuring nutritious doughnuts

This weekend, a new, nine-seat coffee shop specializing in plant-based, gluten-free baked goods was due to open in Osborne Village. Suffice it to say, that won’t be happening.

“The other day I was dropping off boxes of doughnuts to customers’ homes. Somebody commented that while I was preparing to open nothing could have prepared me for this. I was like, ‘Yeah, you can say that again,’” says Maureen Gelvis-Pflueger, owner of Monuts Café at 120 Scott St.

Two weeks prior to her scheduled March 28 grand opening — days before the COVID-19 virus turned the restaurant industry and, seemingly, everything else in Canada and the United States upside down — Gelvis-Pflueger, a married mother of three, invited Rev. Eric Giddens of St. Paul the Apostle Church over to bless her premises. After reading a passage from the Bible, he led her and her store manager through The Lord’s Prayer, then sprinkled holy water about the 690-square-foot space. Although she doesn’t refer to herself as “super-religious or anything like that,” she is counting on her faith to help get through the days and weeks ahead, until she can open the doors for real.

“I was raised Catholic and went to a Catholic school,” she says, when reached by phone. “I no longer go to church on a regular basis but I do pray on my own almost every day. That’s how I connect with Him. Am I disappointed we’re not opening (today)? Of course. But Winnipeggers are being so kind. They’re not just ordering a dozen doughnuts (for delivery), they’re ordering three, four, five (dozen)...

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Just in time for St. Patrick’s Day, the Irish Association of Manitoba has added some new, olde selections to its pub menu.

Besides coddle, a sausage-based dish that calls for potatoes, onions and rashers, er… back bacon, the club’s headquarters (654 Erin St.) is also serving colcannon, bangers on a bun and shepherd’s pie. Of the four, the latter choice is certain to spark the most debate among members, according to association president Joseph Savage.

“More than any other Irish dish I can think of, everybody seems to have their own idea of what should go into a shepherd’s pie,” Savage says, referring to a hearty offering prepared with ground meat and vegetables topped with mashed potatoes. “While ours has peas and carrots in it, a traditional shepherd’s pie would not. Considered a poor man’s dish 100 years ago, it generally consisted of whatever meat was left over at the end of the week combined with a bit of onion if there was any and, of course, potatoes.”

Never mind a recipe; people also quarrel over what it’s called, he continues. Some maintain that in order for it to be a true shepherd’s pie the key ingredient must be ground lamb. Substitute lamb with beef or any other type of protein — a quick Google search turns up versions done with ground chicken, ground turkey, even tofu — then what you have resting on the plate in front of you is cottage pie, they contend.

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You probably don’t want to kick back and watch old movies with Lorraine Iverach, one of close to 70 vendors and collectors taking part in the seventh Winnipeg Doll Extravaganza Sunday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. at the Viscount Gort Hotel.

Iverach, a mother and grandmother, collects a wide variety of dolls: everything from modern-day American Girls to 19th-century china dolls to long-limbed boudoir dolls — also called flapper dolls— which, when they first became popular more than a century ago, weren’t playthings as much as they were decorative pieces for the home, often positioned on a bed or chaise lounge in the same manner as a throw pillow or seat cushion.

“You spot them quite often in films from the 1930s and ‘40s, which can make it frustrating to watch TV with me at times,” Iverach says, seated next to Kimberly Scutchings and Hedy McClelland, the Winnipeg Doll Extravaganza’s chief organizers.

“My husband and I will be enjoying a show when I’ll suddenly grab the remote and pause the screen. He’ll ask what I’m doing and I’ll point to a doll in the background. If there’s one thing I’ve learned in all the time I’ve been collecting, it’s that it’s very important to have a patient spouse.”

Couple hoping their high-protein critter powder, roasted flavoured insects leap off shelves

We’ve heard of dog yoga, goat yoga and even horse yoga. But cricket yoga?

Ryan and Lesley Steppler are the owners of Prairie Cricket Farms, to their knowledge the only operation in Manitoba that raises and sells crickets for human consumption. Prior to building a production facility in the lower level of their Miami-area home, the married couple relied upon a commercial kitchen at Manitou Elementary School, where Ryan teaches grades 1 to 6, to process their arthropods into a protein-rich powder that can be used as an ingredient in granola bars, muffins, even spaghetti sauce.

Two years ago, Ryan was cooking up a storm in the school kitchen when he was called to the gymnasium down the hall, where an adult yoga class was in full swing. Every so often when he’s harvesting live crickets at home, a few will cling to his jacket or pant legs without him noticing, he explains. He guesses that’s what occurred on the night in question because when he stepped inside the gym, the yoga instructor asked if he was missing anything, pointing at a number of crickets nonchalantly hopping from mat to mat.

“It became a bit of a running joke in town, how the school was now offering yoga with insects,” Lesley says, playfully poking Ryan in the ribs.

Celebrating 35 years, Bernstein's Deli initially started out as a grocery store

There is a memorable scene in the movie Five Easy Pieces when Jack Nicholson’s character asks for some toast to go along with his omelette. Upon being told the roadside diner he’s at doesn’t serve side orders of toast, he requests a chicken salad sandwich instead, instructing the server to hold the mayo, butter and lettuce. When she asks him in a snarky tone if he’s finished, he replies no; he wants her to hold the chicken, too, preferably “between your knees.”

That’s a bit what it was like — minus the PG rating, of course — the first time a customer requested a sandwich at Bernstein’s Meats, the predecessor of Bernstein’s Delicatessen, which celebrated its 35th anniversary Feb. 1.

Two years after Marla Bernstein and her husband Tony, now her ex, opened a Jewish-style butcher shop in a converted Safeway outlet at 1700 Corydon Ave., a customer asked Marla for a corned beef on rye with hot mustard. Sorry, she informed him, they didn’t make sandwiches there, they were a grocery store.

To which he shot back, but you have corned beef, bread and mustard, don’t you? Touché.

City crafter binds journals and sketchbooks with her own unique selection of materials

For years, Seattle resident Hannah Cole has travelled to Winnipeg on an annual basis to spend time with her godmother, Debra Frances Plett, founder of Debra Frances Book Arts, a home-based enterprise that produces one-of-a-kind sketchbooks and journals, the jackets of which are fashioned from materials one might not expect, including timber, copper, ceramic tile, even detritus such as rusted chains.

Following one such visit, Cole treated her grandfather Tore Vollan to pictures she’d taken of Plett’s handiwork, which, in the artist’s own words, “challenge people’s ideas of what a book is.” Vollan, an accomplished carpenter who moved to the Pacific Northwest from Norway in the 1950s, was particularly intrigued by a set of books boasting covers made with sections of driftwood Plett collected during a summer camping trip to Ontario.

“In his younger days, he built furniture, clocks, jewelry boxes, you name it, but now that he was in his 80s, he’d largely slowed down,” says Plett, seated in Café Postal, 202 Provencher Blvd., one of a handful of spots in the city that sells her eye-catching tomes on a consignment basis. “But after learning what I was up to, Hannah said it sort of gave him a new lease on life. Practically overnight he started shipping me all these gorgeous pieces of exotic wood he had stored in his workshop, which he would cut down to size for me to use as book covers.”

Vollan was diagnosed with leukemia in April 2018. When it was clear the 87-year-old didn’t have long to live, family members began showing up at his bedside armed with stacks of old photographs; shots of loved ones as well as pics of items he built during his long, distinguished career. Mostly he smiled and flipped from one photo to the next without comment, Plett learned later. A few days before he died, however, he paused to examine an image of a book cover done with wood he’d sent Plett’s way months earlier.

Cubism with a twist (of the wrist)

A fateful decision he didn’t know would radically change his life is how John Haché dramatically describes the morning 12 years ago when he asked his father to drive him to Kildonan Place so he could purchase a Rubik’s Cube.

“I can’t even remember why I wanted one in the first place; maybe I’d seen somebody playing with one on TV or in a movie and it just looked like fun,” says the 26-year-old mechanical engineering technologist, seated in the North Forge Fabrication Lab, an Exchange District facility that serves as the unofficial headquarters of the Winnipeg Puzzle Club, a loosely organized group of individuals who, like himself, get a kick out of deciphering three-dimensional brainteasers such as Rubik’s Cubes.

Well, not only did Haché persuade his dad to escort him back to the mall the following weekend to buy a second cube, one with a different colour scheme this time, he did so the week after that and the week after that. Some 800 puzzles later, it’s safe to say Haché has the largest collection of 3D puzzles, also called mechanical puzzles, in the city, perhaps the country, examples of which draw oohs and ahhs from other “cubers” in the room who are witnessing the broad scope of his cache for the first time.

For today’s meet-up, Haché didn’t just bring along Rubik’s Cube-style, twisty puzzles.

Critics gave Beaujena's six months but 11 years later, the resto is still going strong

With Valentine’s Day right around the corner, Beaujena Reynolds of Beaujena’s French Table, the romantic, Mediterranean-flavoured restaurant she and her husband Randy Reynolds own and operate all by their lonesome, has a bit of advice for any budding lovebirds out there considering their St. Boniface establishment for their first date: you may want to make reservations elsewhere.

“If you come here for dinner, you have to be prepared to stay for between two and a half and three hours. So, if this is the first time you’re out together and things aren’t going smoothly, it might turn into a long night,” she says with a chuckle.

Know the movie Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? At Beaujena’s, 302 Hamel Ave., it’s more a case of guess what’s coming for dinner. Since 2009, the Reynoldses, soon to be in their 15th year of business, have offered table d’hôte service, meaning for a fixed price customers receive a pre-selected five- or seven-course meal with no option for substitutes. And because a big part of the attraction is determining what’s on one’s plate — Beaujena, the head server, doesn’t provide any clues when she’s setting down a fresh dish every 20 minutes or so — it’s a gastronomic experience unlike any other in town, they promise.

“I know it sounds odd but truthfully, 99.9 per cent of our customers choose not to know what I’m bringing them in favour of trying to figure it out for themselves,” Beaujena says, adding she can’t count the number of times people have told her they never would have ordered a particular item — hello, beef hearts — if they’d known what it was ahead of time. “One woman couldn’t believe she’d just eaten escargots and loved them. Another person was adamant that what was actually chicken was wild boar. So it almost always makes for a fun night out, even if it does take a little while.”

St. James spot offers delightful cocktail made with music and bingo

Just take those old records off the shelf; and while you’re at it, fetch your bingo dauber.

It’s Friday night at the 4th Line Pub and Grill, 3025 Ness Ave., the first establishment in Winnipeg — check that, the province — to offer a fast-paced, interactive game called Music Bingo. Because there isn’t a soul in the packed house who has played Music Bingo before, emcee Tim Grant, who doubles as the hockey-themed locale’s events co-ordinator, wants to ensure everybody present is on the same page.

After getting the crowd’s attention, Grant, decked out for the occasion in gold MC Hammer pants and matching bling, explains that Music Bingo is similar to the type of bingo played in church basements and seniors homes with one major difference: instead of calling out numbers from 1 to 75, he’ll be serving up 30 to 45 second snippets of popular tunes from a wide variety of genres, all of which are stored on an officially licensed tablet.

If you recognize the song being played at random and it’s listed on your bingo card by title and artist, mark that space with a coin or provided felt marker, he instructs, stressing this isn’t a trivia competition: if you’re not familiar with what you’re listening to, feel free to ask a neighbouring table or utilize a music recognition app such as Shazam or BeatFind to help you out. Also, if it’s a ditty you’re particularly fond of — as a warm-up, he cranks the volume on Sweet Caroline — don’t be shy to sing along or, better yet, get out of your chair and shake your moneymaker.

Tribute act has had a ticket to (Free) Ride on 40-year magical mystery tour

Not long ago, Wayne Hlady, the lone, original member of Free Ride, a multidimensional tribute act that will toast its 40th anniversary Jan. 10 with an all-ages show at the Club Regent Event Centre, responded to an online ad posted by a person selling a pair of loudspeakers.

Upon hooking up, the fellow behind the ad studied Hlady, recognizable by his perfectly coifed mop top hairstyle, up and down before excitedly announcing, “Hey, you’re that guy from Free Ride, aren’t you?”

Hlady acknowledged that was indeed the case; at which point the man relayed a story about seeing Free Ride, whose members mimic the Beatles, Rolling Stones and a fictitious, ‘50s-flavoured greaser outfit dubbed Harry and the Armpits, often all three on the same night, for the first time in the early 1980s at a nightclub in St. Vital.

Furthermore, he mentioned taking his family to see the band in 2010 when Free Ride appeared as the Fab Four at the Manitoba Museum as part of a travelling exhibit called The Beatles! Backstage & Behind the Scenes. He wanted Hlady to know the effect that particular performance had on his teenage son, whom he described as a “complete Beatles nut.”