By Lisa Gregoire / Photographs by Jessica Fern Facette
Look for a profile of Mimande in the February issue of Alberta Venture. Bacon closed in September of 2008. Her cookbook, We Eat Together, is an homage to local food and the community it inspires. It is available now through Poplar and Pine Press.
Julianna Mimande walks past 10-kilogram bags of black turtle beans and corn flour, past overhanging piñatas and soccer shirts, to the back corner of Paraiso Tropical on Edmonton’s 118th Avenue, where she scoops up two hulking three-litre cans of Empacadora San Marcos salsa verde.
“Making some tacos?” Jesus Gonzalez asks in obvious understatement.
“Yes,” she says, “and I’m looking for tortillas. Which ones are the good ones?”
They stare into the cooler. Gonzalez, who owns this family-run Latin American imports store, points to the Don Pancho brand and nods confidently, then tempts her with a container of homemade salsa roja casera. Of course she’ll take some. He helps her carry the goods to the counter and deposits them near a display of leather Che Guevara bags.
“It feels way more authentic to shop at these places,” Mimande says as we climb into her canola-powered, right-hand drive Toyota truck. “When you go to the giant wholesalers, it doesn’t feel like food. It feels dead. If you’re hungry before you go there, you won’t be afterward.”
That’s funny, because if you’re hungry before you enter Bacon, Mimande’s boffo little eatery, you won’t be afterward, either – but for entirely different reasons. You’ll be full of bison burgers and crisp tofu and organic greens. Bacon, which opened in April, is part of a small but growing trend: eco-conscious, sustainable restaurants such as The Coup in Calgary and ECOcafé in Pigeon Lake. Yet Mimande is not trendy. She’s just a stubborn gal who wears vintage dresses and rides a 1970s Raleigh Sprite bicycle she bought at a thrift shop for $20, and she wanted the business to reflect her values concerning waste, pollution, community and the planet. She has her own mind, as my mom used to say. So she gracefully ignored the statistics, the dubious business networking types and countless others who made the throat-slitting motion when she said she wanted to open a restaurant. So what if only one in eight restaurants survive its first few years? This wouldn’t be a fleeting hotspot on Whyte Avenue. It would be a neighbourhood joint supported by neighbourhood residents. And what better neighbourhood than her own?
Bacon, run by Mimande and her business partner, Cynthia Lilge, is located in a little 112th Avenue strip east of downtown Edmonton in Highlands, half a dozen blocks south of Mimande’s home. According to city and federal stats, more than a third of the community’s 2,666 residents are between the ages of 35 and 55, most own their homes, and many are teachers, healthcare workers and civil servants. In other words, prime restaurant patrons. They come in droves: tables of elderly ladies for soup and dessert, the twentysomething professional lunch crowd, and all manner of hungry customers in between.
The place is befitting a boss with her own mind. The menu is derived from fresh, organic and, whenever possible, local ingredients, or at least products purchased from local stores; there is neither Coca-Cola nor french fries; takeout containers, procured from Winnipeg’s Happy Planet Productions, are corn- and sugar-based, which means they’re compostable; staff compost food scraps and give the product away to gardeners; and, perhaps most importantly, the kitchen is free of the petty, gonad-wagging machismo Mimande endured for years as a server in more than a dozen restaurants. It took patience and perseverance to seek out unique suppliers and still make food that appeals to a wide swath of Edmonton. But anything’s possible when you’re Julianna Mimande.
“When I think of all the options I have and then I look around me, I think, ‘This is it. This is the best job,’” says Mimande, born and raised in Edmonton. “Like when you’re a kid and you play dress-up and you wear whatever you want. I feel like I’m playing dress-up every day.”
Bacon is proof you can open a restaurant and run it entirely your own way. OK, maybe not entirely. After insisting servers write their orders on paper for the first few weeks, she opted for a $3,000 Uniwell computerized ordering system. Prior to that, things were getting a little crispy at Bacon: cooks misread handwriting, orders went astray. “Everyone hated me,” she says. “And when we finally got it, I was like, ‘Hallelujah!’” She also refused to offer debit purchases and put a bank machine in the corner instead – another quaint notion that quickly bit the dust.
Both ideas were predicated on the belief Bacon would build a clientele slowly. But business was steady from week one. In a mere seven months, Bacon has prompted more media stories and reviews than the restaurant has tables (seven), and the cozy, multi-hued room fills to brimming nearly every night. She’s a bit giddy from it all, garnishing her success theories with words like “luck” and “serendipity.” But everyone who knows her knows the truth: she works hard. And she has a lot of generous friends who want her to succeed. Hell, half of them work a shift or two there every week, just for kicks.
Category: Entrepreneurship, Work
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Aw bacon, was one of my favourite restaurants, I was so sad to see it close. On the up side now I can get the cookbook!