Royal return for ‘bastion of Ukrainian comfort food’

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This article was published 03/02/2018 (3120 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The former North End Ukrainian eatery that served up perogies so good actor John Candy would have them shipped to California, is returning to Winnipeg.

Alycia’s, the McGregor Street mainstay that dished out kubasa, cabbage rolls and perogies for 34 years, will reopen its doors in the city sometime this spring.

Except this time around, the iconic Winnipeg restaurant will be handing its customers plates piled high with Ukrainian comfort foods on the main floor of the Royal Albert Arms Hotel in the Exchange District.

“To be honest, I haven’t met anybody yet who I’ve mentioned it to who doesn’t love the food and who isn’t excited about the news,” said Neil Soorsma, who purchased the Royal Albert for $1.35 million last November. “They bring immediate recognition and an established name. I’m really excited and I think it’ll bring people into the area and onto the street. From every point of view, I think it’s a really good thing.”

Name recognition and an established customer base was important to Soorsma when selecting someone to partner with in his efforts to rejuvenate the Royal Albert.

Soorsma, who has a successful history of redeveloping buildings over his 30-year real estate career, hopes to take the ailing Winnipeg hotel and return it to its former royalty.

Alycia’s, which shuttered its original location in 2011, had the name recognition he was looking for and seemed like an obvious fit. That’s why he decided to go with the former North End institution, hoping the two iconic spots could help bring one another back to life.

“It wasn’t a decision that was taken lightly. Once we bought the hotel, we had a number of people interested. But my hope was always to find somebody just like this,” Soorsma said. “There have been a lot of people travelling out to Gimli for the food and now, they won’t have to.”

The reference to Gimli stems from the fact a direct descendant of the restaurant’s founders had been operating an Ukrainian diner at the lakeside community since 2016.

There, they’ve been feeding dedicated customers using the same recipes that tickled the tastebuds of former Free Press restaurant critic Marion Warhaft enough to call the original location a “bastion of Ukrainian comfort food.”

The connection to the original North End restaurant comes through Aaron Blanchard, the grandson of Alycia’s founder Marion Staff.

Blanchard first started working at the restaurant with his grandmother as a teenager and, following her death in 2004, kept the place running — with the help of his mother and stepfather — until it finally closed in 2011.

In June 2016, he opened a restaurant in Gimli, where he was living with his wife, under the name New Alycia’s. The only problem was a few years prior, Blanchard had lost an arm in a work-related accident and the task of running the place quickly became too much for him.

That’s when he asked his mother-in-law, Colleen Swifte, also a restaurateur, if she’d consider taking the place over. She agreed, moving New Alycia’s to its current home, 14 kilometres north of Gimli, at the junction of Glen Bay Road and Evergreen Avenue, since March 2017.

In a previous interview with the Free Press, Swifte said she didn’t so much feel like the owner of the much-loved restaurant, but rather its caretaker. In that role, she’s kept the place tied to its roots, sticking with the dishes that made it a popular Winnipeg restaurant for more than three decades.

ryan.thorpe@freepress.mb.ca Twitter: @rk_thorpe