Winnie Chen has always loved cooking, but she really didn’t want to be chef.
“Growing up, my dad always had four or five odd jobs, and cooking was always one of them, so he knew how hard, and even toxic, that environment can be. The second he found out I got a part-time job in a restaurant, he was like, ‘I didn’t immigrate to Canada for you to just be a line cook.’”
In her limited experience at the time, Chen found her father was right — the hours are late and long, and “being queer, sometimes the guys would think that I’m one of them, and sort of loop me in on their misogyny.” But, while working part time at a high-end clothing store in West Edmonton Mall, she met the chef who would bring her into the business for good.
“Shane Chartrand was one of my clients, and we would just talk about food when he’d come in. One day, he invited me to help him out at a private dinner, and then he asked me if I wanted a part-time job at Murrieta’s when it was on Whyte Ave.”
Chen says working with Chartrand over the next few years was a “blur,” but it kept her in the culinary game until she started working at the Common with Lindsay Porter and Top 40 Under 40 alumna Kyla Kazeil, who were looking to open a Chinese takeout place next door. “I was like, that’s a really cool concept, but absolutely not something that I want to do, because I hate being up late and I don’t like serving drunk people.”
Chen also didn’t cook Chinese food — at home, that was her parents’ domain. But she wanted to help develop the new menu, in part because, deep down, “I wanted them to know that if I wanted this job, I could definitely have it.”
To really show her bosses how good she’d be at the job she was refusing, Chen asked her father to teach her the three-day process of making his beef noodle soup. As soon as they tried it, they wanted it on the menu. “And that’s when everything backfired on me, because I couldn’t just give away this recipe — it belongs to my dad! That’s when I was like, OK, I’ll come on to the project, but I need to be a partner.”
The takeout restaurant became Fu’s Repair Shop, where people dine in and Mr. Chen’s Beef Noodle Soup is a customer favourite. Chen hasn’t been able to avoid the late hours, but she now runs a kitchen that sources ingredients from Chinatown and has zero tolerance for misogyny. “It’s all about building community, in the restaurant and the city at large.”
This article appears in the Nov/Dec 2024 issue of Edify
