Col. Mustard’s Canteen 10802-124 St. 780 448 1590 www.colmustards.caFood: 4 of 5 starsAmbience: 3.5 of 5 starsService: 3 of 5 starsDinner for two (without beverages): Basic, $35; fully loaded, $65Make new friends, but keep the old. One is silver, the other is gold.Over on 124 Street, marvellous things are happening.The Duchess Bakery has attained celebrity status, The Makk has just opened, with the new Canteen restaurant hot on its heels.With dozens upon dozens of interesting shops, galleries, restaurants, espresso bars and yoga studios, 124 Street is evolving along with the downtown 104th Street into the city’s second and third destination neighbourhoods after Old Strathcona.Which is all terribly exciting.But amidst all the excitement, don’t forget your old friends — the ones who never let you down, who are always there when you need them, who wait patiently as you are bedazzled by dashing, new acquaintances.Col. Mustard’s Canteen is now 16 years old. Brad Pipella has supervised the kitchen a ...
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A Christmas Carol - through Dec. 23, 2012
Citadel Theatre, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
As adapted by Tom Wood, Directed by Bob Baker and Geoffrey Brumuk
Ticket information at Citadel Theatre
Nothing is quite such a Christmas classic as Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol.
And in Edmonton, nothing has become more of a Christmas classic than Tom Wood’s stage adaptation of A Christmas Carol for the Citadel Theatre.
A Christmas Carol premiered 13 years ago. The initial year was an herculean effort that darned near killed everybody. the huge production was mounted in six short weeks, as technically complicated and as artistically vast as theatre can get and all done for the first time. No matter. A Christmas Carol was an artistic and box-office triumph from opening night on.
A Christmas Carol was designed to be an annual event – it had to run for a few years if only to recover its production costs – but nobody expected it’d be so popular as to continue, non-stop, for 13 Christmas ...
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Blanket statements about doing business in Alberta are dangerous things.Conventional wisdom says manufacturing, outside the oil patch, is impossible.We can’t compete against the Chinese. We can’t compete against the oil patch for wages. We can’t compete in transportation. And our input costs are too high.The business folks who don’t actually make real stuff have accepted these “truths” without critical examination.There’s a minor problem. Those truths are not true.Plastic products manufacturer Drader Manufacturing Industries Ltd, 55 years old, is not only going strong, but has expanded into Ontario. Most of Drader’s customers are not oil patch-related.Drader is hardly alone. According to Stats Canada figures passed on by EEDC, an astounding 1,791 manufacturers with less than 100 employees have plants in Greater Edmonton. How many serve customers outside the oil patch is not broken down.Drader caught my attention at the ASTech Awards in November, honouring scientific achievement in Alberta.It was the only indu ...
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Wild Tangerine
10383 112 St.
780 429-3131
Wildtangerine.com
Food: 4 of 5 stars
Ambience: 3.5 of 5 stars
Service: 3.5 of 5 stars
Dinner for two (without beverages): Basic, $40; fully loaded, $100
Where does it come from?
In what crazy brain space does Wild Tangerine chef and partner Judy Wu mix ‘n’ match like no other chef in Edmonton?
She has dreamed up, and perfected, one-of-a-kind dishes that are signature staples on the Wild Tangerine menu: Octopus salad with spicy tangerine vinaigrette, marsala-masala spiced lamb chops, bison short ribs slow-cooked in salted rice wine.
Judy shows no outward signs of culinary sophistication. Style is her brother and restaurant co-owner Wilson Wu’s department. He’s the talker. Quiet Judy stays in the Wild Tangerine kitchen, a plain black scarf always round her head, apron round her waist, cooking and cooking and cooking.
Her E ...
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Former premier Ed Stelmach used to call it 'the invisible industry."
Even excluding urban water/sewer lines and residential gas lines, we have more pipelines running through the extended Greater Edmonton neighbourhood than just about anywhere else in the world.
Maps attempting to illustrate all of central and northern Alberta energy pipelines are just about useless. If the colour blue is used to show all the pipelines, that map would be near solid blue from Red Deer to Fort McMurray. All of Alberta – excluding urban services – has about 400,000 kilometres worth of pipeline.
Collector lines are everywhere in conventional oil/gas producing areas; from wells to mini-hubs, mini-hubs to bigger hubs, to major pipes heading to rural primary processing plants, to even bigger pipes transporting crude oil or natural gas into local refineries, or to the super-highway pipelines that send raw or processed hydrocarbons out of province.
Thanks to the oilsands northeast of Edmonton, and oil an ...
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Vicky’s Bistro | Wine Bar
Strathcona County Hall
100, 501 Festival Avenue
Sherwood Park
780 417 1750
Vickys.ca
Food: 4 of 5 stars
Ambience: 3.5 of 5 stars
Service: 2.5 of 5 stars
Dinner for two (without beverages): Basic, $50; fully loaded, $100
The Weekly Dish has witnessed the fading of too many restaurants due to complacency.
A restaurateur works his or her proverbial buns off for 10 years to build a good reputation.
Then he or she decides the establishment can run itself, and starts spending more time on the golf course than in the dining room.
In no time at all, quality slips, the reputation takes a hit and the eatery is a has-been.
So three cheers for Vicky’s. After some 30 years it has gone the opposite way.
Vicky’s changed location in Sherwood Park, and in the process has been invigorated and re-invented. The “old” Vicky’s w ...
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AIMCo is a fabulous Edmonton business success story.
We’re not talking about its rate of return on $70 billion worth of assets - a healthy 7.9% return that assures provincial and municipal employees their pensions are secure.
We’re talking about what AIMCo has done, in four short years, to create new wealth in Edmonton.
Rewind to 2008, when the Ralph Klein government, spurred by indomitable cabinet minister Shirley McClellan, gathered up its piggy-banks – its pension funds, the Alberta Sustainability Fund, the Alberta Heritage Savings Trust Fund and others – to create one arm’s length investment management firm. AIMCo, the Alberta Investment Management Corporation, is a crown corporation with its own board of governors and only one mandate: That it make money. There is no directive that AIMCo must invest (or not invest) in Alberta. In fact when AIMCo did make a multi-million dollar investment in Calgary-based Precision Drilling, there was momentary uproar ... until ...
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Mikado Downtown
10350 – 109 St.
780-425-8096
Mikadorestaurant.com
Dinner for two (without beverages): Basic, $25; fully loaded, $50
I fear the Mikado Japanese Restaurant has gone corporate on us.
It was one of Edmonton’s first ethnic restaurants, opening in 1972 on 116 Street in what’s now a tattoo parlour, moving to fancy new digs at 109th Street and 104th Avenue when Railtown signalled the start of the downtown renaissance.
The Mikado has since grown, and now encompasses the Mikado Downtown, Mikado South and Mikado West End.
No one family or particular personality has been associated with the Mikado. No Quons (Lingnan), Kapurs (New Asian Village) or Nobres (Spago) greet you at the door. It has been without a defining personality from the start.
But always the Mikado has been dependable — for its tasty sushi and sashimi, rice rolls, tempura and bento boxes.
Nothing’s ...
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Doom!
Suncor is hauling on the reins, slowing oilsands expansion plans to a walk, if not a crawl.
Gloom!
With no Keystone XL pipeline to the south and no Northern Gateway pipeline to the west, our bitumen and synthetic crude oil is stranded in Fort McMurray.
Toil!
North America is awash in oil. There’s more of the stuff thanks to new discoveries and new recovery technology in the USA. Consumption is dropping as the American economy remains stagnant and vehicles use less fuel. The price is dropping. Gasoline is below a buck a litre at the pumps. Great for Martha and Henry's day-to-day budget. Not so great if Henry loses his oil-services job.
Trouble!
The new, improved Environment Canada watch on Fort McMurray is reporting oilsand residue contamination in lakes 100 kilometres from oilsands activity.
Double trouble!
The Chinese have conquered us with their money. The Communists are taking over the oilsands.
If you were determined to paint a grim picture of ...
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Why, one asks after yet another fine bottle of Brazilian red has been sampled at a media gathering in the Pampa Brazilian Steakhouse, has there been so little Brazilian wine available in Canada before?
After all, it wasn't that difficult, after Pampa proprietor Oscar Lopez and his wine guy Nelson Gomes of FineVine Imports decided to focus on Brazilian wines in a restaurant specializing in Brazilian-style spit-cooked meat shop, to get the stuff.
They made a trip or two to Brazil's wine country to its south, met the growers and vintners, and simply fired up a not-too-difficult process of importing wine by the case from vintner to restaurant ... with a few bottles left over for FineVine to distribute through its retail network.
It appears that Brazil has not gone after the export market for its wines, which, in price and quality, can easily compete with the much better known Chilean and Argentinian brands from South America.
So the perceptive Mr. Lopez not only has a unique style of cooking and presen ...
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