Local producers sustained Julianna Mimande as a restaurateur. Now she’s returning the favour
by Scott Messenger
It’s 7 p.m. at d’Lish, an Edmonton foodie haunt just west of downtown, and despite the party having pretty much just started, the food’s gone. Empty dishes once containing carrot dip, a pork-on-potato concoction and wild rice cakes, all made with Alberta ingredients, attest to the quality of what was there or that there wasn’t enough. Probably both. The shop – a boutique meal supplier that furnishes discerning palates with take-home natural and locally sourced foods – is packed to the point that it’s best to find a few familiar faces and quit moving, even if it means enduring talk of how great the snacks were.
But no one came to d’Lish on this November evening specifically for the food, not even Julianna Mimande, there in the middle of the room in a striking black dress. She is, however, here because of it. For the past five months, the 32-year-old former restaurateur has been busy producing We Eat Together, the local- and seasonal-focused cookbook she’s signing when not celebrating its release with Gabe Wong, the book’s designer and co-author, and photographer Zachary Ayotte. The evening marks the end of five months of travelling, interviewing, writing and cooking that have positioned her as an enterprising community-builder for northern Alberta’s burgeoning “eat local” movement. But if she’s tired from the hectic drive to finish the book project in time for Christmas 2009, she doesn’t show it. Instead she smiles and hugs nearly everyone that greets her. This is, after all, a reunion of sorts.
Two days later, over coffee in a downtown café, it’s that aspect of the launch that causes Mimande to look back on the event as bittersweet. Besides friends and family, attendees included her former customers. In spring of 2007, she opened a restaurant called Bacon in the east Edmonton neighbourhood of Highlands. Set amongst streets of mostly post-Second World War bungalows, the place had the feel of a casual, drop-in diner, an atmosphere created in part by urban-rustic meals made with Alberta-produced meats, vegetables and grains. Then, in September of 2008, as the result of an ill-conceived partnership and the demands of the diner’s own success, it closed, abruptly ending Mimande’s relationships with customers who would bring in recipes and fresh, garden-grown ingredients. “You see these people regularly for a year and a half or two years,” she says, perceptibly misty-eyed, “and then you don’t see them at all.”
On top of that, she adds, “I miss that original idea.”
The idea embodied by Bacon, that it could remain sustainable while supporting producers from the surrounding community, goes back a ways. After graduating from high school, Mimande travelled to Jamaica as a volunteer with international development and education organization Canada World Youth. That primed her to begin picking away at a protracted political science degree, with a focus on globalization and governance at first and then, after an intervening jaunt through South America, international trade agreements.
Ultimately, she couldn’t settle on a career in the field. “I didn’t fit in because I wasn’t cynical enough,” she says. So she happily fell back on the waitressing and cooking that put her through school, convinced that, somehow, it could effect the positive change she once thought would come out of her poli-sci degree.
“The decision to open Bacon was me needing to follow up on my values. That was my way of incorporating those eight years of that study and those ideas into something that I could actually believe in.” And, Mimande adds, “I felt that if I could do my part, then I was doing a positive thing for someone who wanted to do their part. It encourages somebody to say, ‘Bacon’s great, but we need one of these…’”
The book is of the same spirit. While much of We Eat Together is a cookbook, it also comprises profiles of northern Alberta producers of vegetable oils, honey, wild rice, organic meats and vegetables, fruit wines and jam. Just as the restaurant was, the vignettes, collected during a month-long summer road trip by Mimande and the others, are a subtle invitation to re-evaluate how and what we eat.
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