In the spring of 2020, just as the world was shutting down, chef Jesse Gado was preparing to open up.
Gado is one of the owners of Rosewood Foods (Edify‘s Best Brunch ’25), the downtown restaurant that has become a lunchtime favourite for coffee, baked goods and freshly prepared food.
But the success of Rosewood was anything but fated. Gado and his co-owners, his wife Angela Chau-Gado and his brother Noah Gado, launched their business less than a month after COVID-19 lockdowns went into effect. When they first opened their doors, they couldn’t serve customers in the space.
“When we opened we were just doing food deliveries,” says Gado. “We were using takeout boxes for the entire first year we were open.”
In the years since, Rosewood has weathered the aftereffects of COVID — including a diminished downtown crowd — to become a staple of Edmonton’s core.
As the restaurant goes into its fifth year in business, we talked to Gado about how things started and where they might be headed.
Edify: Do you remember what the reception was like in 2020, once you could have people in the space?
Jesse Gado: It was very jubilant. We had a warm reception, regardless of whether we could have people sitting here or not. That was special. It felt good to be supported right when we opened — especially under those circumstances. I don’t think that happens for everybody. I felt very fortunate that it happened for us.
Edify: Do you have a sense of what inspired that support?
Gado: We definitely established ourselves through our previous work experience — I worked at Lock Stock Coffee (Edify‘s Best Cafe, ’22) for a long time, my wife’s been working in restaurants for years. I think that we were bringing something different too — even just to this corner. We make freshly baked, freshly made food, where everything is being baked on site, and everything is being made from the ground up. I think it was a novel concept at the time.
Edify: You’re thriving downtown at a time when it has a reputation for being somewhere that people don’t want to go. Do you think that’s a product of your offerings, the community you built — or do you think it’s something else?
Gado: I think it definitely has a lot to do with the people that work here. All of our regulars love seeing them. We’re friendly, we’re approachable, we don’t change things. You know what you’re getting every time. We don’t really have a whole lot of space to do research and development on menus. We feel like the menu that we have right now is good, and people are comfortable with it, and they come in and they and they know that they can order almost anything off the menu and enjoy it. That’s the mission, right?
Edify: That makes me think about The Bear (the FX TV series), where Carmy is obsessed with changing the menu every day. There can be this mentality that keeping things the same hurts a business. What you’re saying is that for you it’s the opposite.
Gado: I see the benefits to both sides. I just think that at the end of the day you just want a restaurant full of happy people.
Edify: This is an industry that can be exhausting. The restaurant has been open for five years. Can you talk a little bit about how you maintain stamina and how you keep from burning out?
Gado: Taking scheduled holidays helps. We take a holiday every Christmas — we shut down for a couple weeks. We make sure that the staff are comfortable, we make sure we’re comfortable. Managing your hours is important too — making sure you’re opening at the right time and closing at the right time. When we first opened, we were open from 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. We trimmed that down to three o’clock to make prep easier at the end of the day. People understand, and it makes things better for us. It’s mostly the positive reinforcement that keeps you here every day.
Edify: One thing that is common for successful Edmonton restaurants is growth and expansion — opening one restaurant and then opening two more. How are you thinking about growth?
Gado: We’re considering it more strongly than we ever have in the past. For the first couple of years, we’re like, This is gonna be the only one for a while. We’re at the point where our staff’s really amazing, and we want newer roles for everyone to grow into. We’ve got all these ideas — we’ve been travelling for years, reading cookbooks — and there are all these things we want to try, but they wouldn’t fit at Rosewood. Now it’s like, How do we bring these ideas to life? It’s very daunting.
Edify: Do you like being in the kitchen, or is there a version of the business where you step back from front-facing work a little bit?
Gado: I have to be on the floor. I’m not a guy who can sit down and work. I usually have to be with people — in my kitchen, with the staff around me, talking to customers a little, making sure everything’s going out right. It can be pretty intensive, but you want to be here when you’re open. I’m not really an extroverted person, but when I’m here, I love it.
Rosewood Foods
Downtown | 101, 10150 100 St NW, Edmonton | rosewoodfoods.com
