• A new Funky Pickle Pizza is opening downtown at 10243 Jasper Avenue – it looks just about ready to open!
• I passed by a new coffee shop called Hardwood Cafe on Jasper Avenue and 110 Street – I can’t find any information about it though.
• The Bistro at both Sobeys Urban Fresh locations will be offering live music on Fridays and Saturdays from 5-9pm starting in April.
• Marianne and Charles of Loosen Your Belt and Eat Around Edmonton visited the new coffee bar at the downtown Italian Centre (10878 95 Street). I’ll have to check it out soon – hopefully when the sidewalks are a little more dry.
• A profile on Sonny Sung, Corporate Executive Chef of Sorrentino’s in Vue Weekly was informative – I can see how he scaled the ranks to lead one of Edmonton’s largest home grown chains: “I own the job, I don’t do the job. If something goes wrong, there has to be a reason. You figure out what’s wrong and you fix it.”
• Liane Faulder will be on a CBC drive-home radio show every other Friday called “Eating in Edmonton”.
• If you’re interested in becoming a vendor at an Alberta Farmers’ Market, think about attending a Brown Bag Presentation on March 26 at the Business Link.
• Foodie Suz posted about her renovated kitchen this week, and introduced a website called Use Real Butter that is profiling kitchens of food bloggers – cool insight into a variety of beautiful cooking spaces!
• Restaurant Widow, a food blogger out of Columbus, posed an interesting question this week – “Are women really treated different in restaurants? And why?”
• More on Scanwiches this week – Gizmodo went behind-the-scenes of the website to discover how their pristine photos are taken, and via Grub Street, another Scanwich site apparently came first.
• Via Urban Diner, a piece about a new high-tech restaurant in London called Inamo Restaurant. It features interactive touch-screen tables where patrons can order food, play games, and even order a cab!
• It’s the Eater edition of Food Notes! First up, Alberta Avenue must be an up-and-coming area, because they’re getting their very own Taco del Mar (9405 118th Avenue)!

 

Yet another Taco del Mar…

• A second outpost of Boualouang is in the works just down the street from its first storefront (10569 97 Street) in Chinatown.

 It looks a lot larger than the first restaurant

• The best news of all: Starbucks in the Empire Building (10080 Jasper Ave) has an oven, which will start offering breakfast goodies in May.

“The heat is on May 5, 2009”

Lots to share this week! Let’s get to it:

• One of the concurrent sessions at the food security conference I wished I could have attended was about the recently completed “Cost of Eating in Alberta” report. It was released this week, and the findings aren’t surprising: though the acceptable portion of one’s income to be spent on food is 15%, the report found that some households were spending upwards of 32% on food. Read more here.
• My piece on the Sabetghadam family behind Whyte Ave’s Sabzy Cafe was published this week in Vue Weekly. Vue also printed reviews of two relatively new restaurants – 100 and Culina Highlands.
• Liane finally continued her series that sees local chefs promoting their favourite blocks to shop. This week, Koutouki’s Chris St. Denis introduced 124th Street to readers.
• Local designer Lea Alcantara has created a page to try and answer the age-old question – is Tau Bay open?
• Also mentioned at the conference was Augustana Campus’s 100-mile cookie challenge, where all but one of the cookie recipe’s ingredients must come from within 100 miles of Camrose.
• Sometimes I like reading about the means and not just the ends to those means, and the Transcend Coffee blog is the perfect example of this. I love Poul’s recent post on how they are changing the way they sell their coffee, reflecting the learning that has gone on. Customers really reap the benefit of their passion and their willingness to share their growing knowledge base.
• The Globe had a story this week about pay-what-you-can restaurant menus popping up all over the world in the face of the global recession. While I don’t think local restaurants will go down this path any time soon, Manor Cafe is offering $30 3-course prix fixe meals after 5pm Sundays to Wednesdays. Now it starts.
• It’s always nice when local businesses get national recognition – Sylvan Star Gouda was featured in the Globe this week.
• The Go Organic Cookbook I wrote about two weeks ago can be ordered online after March 11. It features profiles and recipes of 55 local producers. At just $20, it’s a worthwhile purchase.
• I mentioned in February that Ruth Reichl is on Twitter. It turns out there are many other well-known food personalities on Twitter, including the NYT’s Mark Bittman. Eater has also started a new series called “A Movable Tweet: the latest from the industry Twitterati”. On the subject of Twitter and restaurants, I do think Soul Soup could benefit from using the service – they could Tweet their daily selection of soups, and remind local followers that they should be kept in mind as a lunch option!
• As seen in the latest edition of City Palate, Lola Canola has started a monthly newsletter on bees and honey. E-mail Patty Milligan to be added onto the list.
• The City of Vancouver just approved the keeping of backyard chickens. Will Edmonton (being lobbied by the River City Chicken Collective) be next?
• You may remember Todd Babiak’s article about the disruptive television screens in the city’s bars. It seems that while television-less bars in New York are a dying breed, there are a few that remain committed to maintaining a venue for conversation and entertainment without a screen.
• Starbucks began offering their value meals in the U.S. last week. For $3.95, customers could get a tall coffee and their choice of an egg sandwich, Perfect Oatmeal, or a slice of coffee cake (Serious Eats gives the egg sandwich a thumbs up). I hope something similarly priced debuts in Canada soon!
• On the heels of thisiswhyyourefat, another viral, visual site: scanwiches.
• An interesting blog post in the Village Voice about the proliferation of the tip jar, and the way some establishments try to guilt customers into filling them.

I’m taking a break from recapping this weekend’s conference for my regularly scheduled food notes, and to tell my readers that I likely won’t be continuing with my monthly post of Edmonton events. I didn’t put one together for January, and though I had some intentions to keep track of things for the month of February, it didn’t happen. My energies have converged into these weekly food notes, and between my other commitments, I don’t think I can do a good job. Luckily, in a few months, I think there will be a resource even better than my monthly posts. Keep your eyes open for ShareEdmonton!

On to this week’s notes:

• The biggest news this week was Rob Feenie’s visit to Edmonton on Wednesday. He was in town to promote two things – his return February 11-13 to be NAIT’s first Hokanson Chef in Residence, and the mid-April opening of Edmonton’s first Cactus Club Cafe in West Edmonton Mall (I visited the Bentall 5 location last summer, and was blown away). The NAIT media team did an unprecedented job utilizing social media to engage the public, by live-Tweeting the event (answering questions live submitted via Twitter with the hashtag #naitchef), and taking behind the scenes video, which can be seen here. Be sure to enter NAIT’s Feast With Feenie contest on their website; deadline February 5.
• My latest article about d’Lish, the newest meal assembly studio in Edmonton, was published in Vue Weekly this week. It’s one of my favourite pieces that I have written so far, if not only because Amanda gave me so much content to work with.
• I came across a new-ish restaurant at the Taste of Alberta at the Today, Tomorrow, Together conference called Le Cafe Entre Amis (8627 91 Street, 780-395-0015), near the Faculte St. Jean.
• The Hat will be offering brunch on Saturdays from 11am-3pm starting February 6.
• I thought I might be able to write a full review of Michael Pollan’s In Defence of Food, but with the way things are going, I won’t. So in short: I didn’t find it as readable as The Omnivore’s Dilemma (mostly because it reads more like an essay as opposed to a narrative), though it is just as valuable a resource for those looking for facts to support a change in the way that they eat. It also surprised me that the end of the book was as prescriptive as it was – yes, he intended it to be a manifesto, but what I liked about Dilemma was that he left it up to the reader to shift perceptions on their own accord.
• This is pretty cool: a printer that uses coffee grounds for ink!
• Open Table, the online restaurant reservation site, filed for an Initial Public Offering today.

• There’s a new Original Joe’s set to open in the new 23rd Avenue complex – their expansion is slow and steady, but I think their brand of casual fare is getting recognized.
• Foodie Suz received a tip on her blog about a second Careit Urban Deli opening up in March in Crestwood.
• Liane Faulder profiled the Prairie Mill Bread Company over the weekend (I have to agree with Mack about the poor usability of the Journal website – you would think a natural link in the above article would be to the bakery’s website).
• Sabor Divino garnered its first review in the mainstream media in See Magazine. It’s a thumbs up (guess I shouldn’t give the Journal too much flack; See doesn’t link to the restaurant either).
• Courtney and Brooke from Take it and Like it were profiled in last week’s Saint City News. Congrats!
• I perused the Edmonton section of Urban Spoon the other day, and it reminds me a lot of Yelp. Anyone started actively using it? Perhaps the iPhone app makes the site useful, but I have to say I still prefer Chowhound; there’s something about the message board format that appeals to me.
• This would be so useful, particularly if your office lunch room is equipped not with a toaster oven, but with a toaster: reusable Toastabags that help obtain the right crispy texture for everything from cookies to pizza.
• Andree over at are you gonna eat that wrote a thoughtful, balanced entry about dog meat that she tried on her recent visit to China. Worth a read.
• There is a bright lining in belonging to a smaller food community – not having to pay $10-12 for Vietnamese subs (as is the trend in New York right now).
• Of course, there are some trends that I hope land in Edmonton soon, like chocolate chip cookie dough shooters available at a coffee shop (for just $1!).
• Annie had a food-filled birthday party on Friday. Thanks to Mike and Virginia for the feast, and happy birthday Annie!

 

Hong Kong-style potato salad (my favourite dish of the night, featuring apples, celery, red onion, tomatoes, shrimp and potato)

 

Mike’s famous chicken wings

 

Beef and vegetable skewers, roasted on the Foreman Grill

 

Annie dishes out her Chestnut Cake from Garden Bakery