Food Notes for June 9, 2025

Openings

• Canada’s first location of Gordon Ramsay’s Hell’s Kitchen will open at the River Cree Resort & Casino in early 2026.
• Bar Trove, the restaurant from Lauren Kyle-McDavid, opened on June 6 at 10126 100 Street. The Score had an article about Kyle-McDavid’s ambitions from an early age.
• Candid Coffee Roasters opened their second café, located in Highlands, over the weekend. Find it at 6419 112 Avenue (the former Mandolin Books).
• The Growlery’s Downtown location opened last week in the basement of the Mercer Warehouse. The Growlery was one of the three recipients of the Downtown Retail Project grant back in 2023.
• Mr. Waffle celebrated their kiosk grand opening at West Edmonton Mall on June 7.
• Toronto-based Kinton Ramen will be opening its first Edmonton location in Terra Losa this summer.

Closures

• Woodshed Burgers announced the closure of their Ellerslie location. The last day of operations is June 29. Woodshed’s three other locations remain open in Cameron Heights, 124 Street, and in Sherwood Park.
• Shumka’s Kingsway Mall location has closed after 37 years. It’s Namao Centre location remains open.

Upcoming Events

• The next Friends of the Royal Alberta Museum event is Dining with Artists on June 19th for a conversation about Juneteenth with poet, playwright, and performer Titilope Sonuga. Tickets are $125.62 per person.
• Save the date for this year’s Alberta on a Plate, a province-wide dine around festival that runs August 8-17. So far, 11 Edmonton and area restaurants are participating.

Local News

• Tu Le of Jack’s Burger Shack and winner of the Big Burger Battle on Flavour Network, shared that he is “getting ready to retire from cooking professionally” in order to spend more time with his family in the future.
• Happy Beer Street brewers consider setting up an entertainment district of their own on 78 Avenue (following in the footsteps of Rice Howard Way and 104 Street Downtown).
• The latest issue of Modern Luxuria highlights Bernadette’s, and has a photo gallery of Bar Trove’s media opening.
• Edify lists 20 meals for under $20.
• Don’ya Ukraine’s Kitchen is serving up fun rainbow-themed perogies for Pride Month.
• Even this late into the playoffs, Oilers-themed merchandise is still being introduced – such as these orange and blue caramels from Jacek.
• I love that the Edmonton Riverhawks adopted an alternate identity jersey as the Green Onion Cakes, a tribute to Siu To who introduced green onion cakes to Edmonton.
• CBC Radioactive interviewed a co-owner of The Common about the tenth anniversary of the Streetcar Cask Series and two women involved in Migrante Alberta’s new cookbook with recipes from migrant women called the Hands to Table Cookbook.

What I Ate

• • Mack and I finally tried Chick-Fil-A for the first time before a movie nearby on the weekend. It was underwhelming to say the least, and neither of us really understood the reason for the extreme hype when they first opened in Edmonton last year. But the fanfare never seems to match the product quality with these American chains.

Chick-Fil-A meal

• • Our family headed out to the Van bLoc party on Sunday. We loved all of the kid-specific activities they brought in this year, such as the EPL2Go van, and Emily and Ellie loved the sand pile. It was distracting enough so I could really dig into my favourite noodles from Gui Lin.

Instant noodles with minced pork from Gui Lin