Saskitoba was never intended to be a Ukrainian buffet restaurant, but that’s what it’s become. And Nisku wasn’t where Candy Galay and Robert Walker were planning to open their restaurant, but when a fully fitted-out location — complete with pots, pans and tables — became available, it felt like the right opportunity.
They had years of experience feeding workers at camp in northern Alberta, so the working Nisku lunch crowd were customers they understood.
“We do hearty, rich, filling meals,” Galay says.
The diner is named for Manitoba and Saskatchewan, where their Ukrainian ancestors settled before they each headed to Alberta. When you walk in, there’s a huge art installation of a vinok, a Ukrainian floral crown, on the wall. Sunflower vines hang from the ceiling amongst simple tables and chairs. And at the back of the room there’s the buffet, the showpiece of it all, offering all sorts of Ukrainian dishes. The restaurant has no set menu and the buffet changes daily, with an updated daily list of dishes posted on Facebook.
The well-known Ukrainian dishes are there, of course: perogies, pyrizhky, kubasa and borscht. They make both sour and sweet holubtsi, cabbage rolls, with fillings like bacon or beef with rice. There are also less-known dishes like the spring-and-summer seasonal zeleny borscht, green borscht, with a sorrel herb base that some might nostalgically recognize. Beetniks, little buns wrapped in beet leaves and cooked in a dill cream sauce, are a Canadian-Ukrainian dish invented when newcomers were working with the ingredients they had on hand to create hearty farm food. Nalysnyky, sauerkraut and bacon, stroganoff and, occasionally, dessert perogies also make appearances in the buffet rotation.
“We’re an ingredients restaurant – we use what is around and in season to decide what we’re going to make,” Chynna Galay, Candy’s daughter, says. The restaurant works with the Montana First Nation to source all its dill and lettuce from a hydroponic garden. Customers have dropped off their excess sorrel, beet and cabbage harvests, and when the restaurant put out a call for beet leaves on social media, “this man phoned and said he had a trunk full. We didn’t know he meant a literal trunk full of beet leaves. It took three of us to carry them into the restaurant in a king-size sheet!” Candy laughs.
The business had to pivot for COVID-19 shutdowns one month in. “We didn’t even have a sign,” Chynna says, “and then we’re trying to figure out how we’re going to feed people who aren’t allowed to come to our just-opened restaurant.” When things got really rocky in the pandemic, Candy came up with the idea to hold a “Help Us Pay Our Rent” event. The post received thousands of views on Facebook and helped the business through. “People lined up two metres apart across the parking lot and stood for hours,” she describes with tears in her eyes. “We were so grateful for the community who showed up to support us.”
Saskitoba
1501 8 St #1, Nisku | 780.770.8884 | saskitoba.ca
This article appears in the October 2024 issue of Edify
