BY GRAHAM HICKS ,EDMONTON SUN
Sloppy Hoggs Roed Hus
10406 – 118 Avenue
780 477 2408
www.absolutelyedibles.com
(click on sloppyhoggs tab)
Food: 4 of 5 stars
Ambience: 3 of 5 stars
Service: 3.5 of 5 stars
Dinner for two (without beverages): Basic, $40; Multi-course, $60
Rejoice!
There is room still in this nutritionally correct world for a carnivore’s delight, for a plate spilling over with a juicy, tender, maple-smoked slab of meat, a heap of fries, brown beans and cornmeal, downed with an ale, followed by a Mississippi mud pie dessert containing at least another week’s worth of calories.
When you leave Sloppy Hoggs Roed Hus – sorry spell-checker, that’s the actual name - you will waddle.
Wear a belt with two extra notches. You’ll need ‘em.
Seriously, I couldn’t patronize this delightful hole-in-the-wall, tongue-in-cheek, southern-style roadhouse too often, for I’d rapidly become as wide as I am tall. Sloppy Hoggs ...
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BY GRAHAM HICKS ,EDMONTON SUN
Wave goodbye to the bitumen upgrader.
Hold a funeral for the giant “pre-refineries” that, until 10 years ago, were still expected to dot Alberta’s Industrial Heartland around Fort Saskatchewan, each employing thousands of construction workers for years on end, each pumping $7 billion or more into the Alberta economy.
Upgraders are so dead that oilsands giant Suncor has walked away from a staggering $3 billion – that’s 3,000 million dollars – it had already invested in its on-site Voyageur upgrader. Suncor officially cancelled the project last week.
New Suncor President Steve Williams couldn’t justify spending the additional $7 billion needed to complete the upgrader, not with better “opportunity costs” elsewhere in the oilsands, i.e. using the $7 billion to expand bitumen production.
Upgraders made sense right up to the building of Shell’s Scotford complex in the late ‘90s.
Running molasses-like b ...
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Hicks: Sorrentino's Garlic Festival another success
Sorrentino’s 22nd Annual Garlic Festival
Downtown – 10162-100 St. – 780 424 7500
South – 4208 Calgary Trail – 780 434 7607
West – 6867 170 St. – 780 444 0524
Little Italy – 10844 95 St. – 780 425 0960
Bistecca Italian Steakhouse – 2345 111 St. – 780 439 7335
Food: 4 of 5 stars
Ambience: 4 of 5 stars
Service: 3.5 of 5 stars
Festival dinner for two without beverages, $50 basic, $85 loaded.
Some dining traditions are just meant to be.
Like the 22nd Garlic Festival at the four Sorrentino’s Italian restaurants in town, plus Sorrentino’s St. Albert and the Sorrentino’s affiliate the Bistecca Italian Steakhouse.
At least a decade ago, Sorrentino’s Carmelo Rago and I had a long chat about this food festival. If garlic was to run its course as a theme, what would be an alternative?
Lobster or seafood? Saffron? Ethnicity?
H ...
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“Make Something Edmonton” works as an Edmonton slogan.It may be generic, but it keys in on the essence of Edmonton.We do make things happen in this city and region. (References to "Edmonton" in this column means "Greater Edmonton." We're all in this together.)As slogan originator Todd Babiak points out, there’s no aristocracy here. We’re not glamorous, but we’re not phony. An urban “barn-building” culture means we get things done.The trick will be to spread the “Make Something Edmonton” expression beyond the downtown artisan community, to make the attitude expressed in that slogan a point of pride in the entire business community.Make Something Edmonton isn’t wishful thinking. It's reality.The git-‘er-done attitude and accomplishments of our entrepreneurs over the past decade has been remarkable. And in researching the “git-‘er-done” success of Edmonton, surprises have emerged.Mayor Steve Mandel has brought all the players onto the same page and pointing in the same direction. Before his watch, we squabbled e ...
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Nosh Café10049 156 St.780 757 7550Food: 3.75 of 5Ambience: 1 of 5Service: 4 of 5Dinner for two (without beverages): Basic, $20; loaded, $30.It’s pretty terrific to see the entrepreneurial immigrant spirit alive and well.The story line is familiar.South Asian chefs who are trained at five-star hotels in Indian, or on cruise ships, come to Canada on foreign worker visas. They manage after a few years to get regular work visas, then landed immigrant status.Once free of contractual obligation to the original sponsoring restaurant, off they go to work for somebody else. Because of their training — you name it, they can cook it — they’re in demand.Instead of heading off for higher wages, a couple of immigrant South Asian chefs have opted to work for themselves and opened their own, hole-in-the-wall place.Nosh is nothing to look at, just another store in a rundown commercial strip on 156 Street south of Stony Plain.But it’s been getting an excellent word-of-mouth reputation for i ...
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We still don’t know how it all started.But we do know.Most of us have driven through white-outs, knuckles as white as the pelting snow, intensely aware that the slightest mistake on the steering wheel could send our vehicle caroming out of control with just a few thin strips of metal between us and eternity.In our imaginations, a massive ghost truck looms out the whiteness.There’s nowhere to go but straight into its headlights.RCMP still truly don’t know how it all started at about 11:30 a.m. on Thursday, March 21, not until every collision report is complete and every driver and passenger interviewed.On the Queen Elizabeth II Highway, 20 kilometres south of Leduc, 50 kilometres north of Ponoka, just past a rise, in the midst of a white-out, heading north, one vehicle must have collided with another.Vehicle after vehicle came over that rise, sliding helplessly into other vehicles – sedans, SUVs, pick-ups, bigger trucks, tractor-trailers, fuel-tankers, buses, cattle-liners.The lucky ones, about half of the 85 ...
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Battista’s Calzone Co.Corner 118 Ave. and 84 St.780 758 1808@battistacalzone►Food: 4 of 5►Ambience: 3.5 of 5►Service: 3.5 of 5►Lunch for two: $10 to $20El Rancho11810 87 St.780 471 4930►Food: 4 of 5►Ambience: 3 of 5►Service: 3 of 5►Dinner for two: $20 to $30There’s something about 118 Avenue’s restaurants and bakeries. From The Barbecue House at 97 Street to Uncle Ed’s past 50 Street are dozens of restaurants of every ethnic variation. The bakery cluster, from the Popular to the Handy to the Italian, creates more fresh bread choices than anywhere else in the city.The 118th Avenue blend of ethnic, artist and community has a small-town feel. But its low-income nature is a brake on gentrification, keeping rents affordable for family-run restaurants.These family restaurants are usually friendly, unpretentious and economy-priced. Trendy flatbreads or sliders don’t show up in these parts.Their village-style food, as typified by Battista Vecchio’s Calzone Co. at 118th and 84 Street and Dora Arevalo’s El Rancho Spani ...
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Before Christmas, using plastic products maker Drader Manufacturing as an example, this column highlighted a glaring regional business contradiction.Conventional business wisdom often declares that manufacturing (outside the oilpatch) in this neck of the woods is "impossible".If that's the case, hundreds of good businesses are indeed doing the impossible."That column hit a home run," responded Warren Sheydwasser of LogiCan Technologies. "Manufacturing can and does exist here. We manufacture electronic circuit board assemblies for companies all over the globe. LogiCan is a near-shore Edmonton-based company that has seen almost two decades of growth without a single loss."How does an independent Edmonton company flourish in such a ferociously and globally competitive business?How has LogiCan grown without a nearby, supportive, sector cluster? Other than MEMS (micro-electromechanical systems) manufacturer Micralyne, no similar business exists in Greater Edmonton.LogiCan, in its own building in the Edmonton Resea ...
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Select10018-106 St.780 428 1629www.selectrestaurant.caFood: 4 of 5 starsAmbience: 4 of 5 starsService: 4 of 5 stars(gluten-free options)Dinner for two (without beverages): Basic, $50; Multi-course, $90——How exciting to witness re-birth.Just over a year ago, the Packrat Louie group, led by managing partner Jodh Singh, purchased Café Select.Café Select … in the ‘80s and early ‘90s, this café/bistro on 106 Street just around the corner from the Avord Arms was one popular space. Its signature dishes are remembered by many - a vodka-spiked tomato soup, mussels, steak tartare and coquilles St. Jacques.From the outside, it wasn’t much. And it still isn’t today.But to enter then, as now, is to walk into a cosy Brussels or Prague café, with beautiful dark wood, gilded mirrors and antique light fixtures.Over the last decade, the café had deteriorated. Discerning diners lost interest. Things were fading to black.Enter the Packrat Louie gang. “I knew the restaurant was for sale,” says Jodh. “I went to dine. It was ripe f ...
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A few weeks ago, every mad dog in that online kennel known as the Hicks on Biz comment section was taking a chunk out of my sorry rear for the suggestion, the mere suggestion, that Alberta Premier Alison Redford was a pretty smart political cookie.Well, after that provincial 2013/14 budget announced on March 7, I apologize.The mad dogs were right.Her fiscal course for the coming year was politically expedient, but not what was right for Alberta.Redford took the easy way out.The 2013/14 budget was a watershed.Redford and her Conservative government could have introduced new taxes and at the same time kick-started the Heritage Fund.She had the perfect storm. The Alberta public was ready to accept short-term pain for long-term gain.Martha and Henry, Ralph Klein’s “severely normal” Albertans, have finally realized we can’t spend every penny of oil royalties and never save for tomorrow. With minimal new taxes and much the same spending, Redford could then have diverted 30% of oil revenues into savings, as envision ...
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