Page 24 - 07_October 2024

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24 EDify. OCTOBER.24
By the Time I Get to Saskitoba
Nisku is home to one heck of a Ukrainian buffet
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 under- stood.
“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 restau- rant 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 recog- nize. Beetniks, little buns wrapped in beet leaves and cooked in a dill cream sauce, are a Canadian- Ukrainian dish invented when new- comers were working with the ingre- dients they had on hand to create hearty farm food. Nalysnyky, sauer- kraut and bacon, stroganoff and, occa- sionally, dessert perogies also make appearances in the buffet rotation.
SOME OF SASKITOBA’S “RICH, FILLING MEALS;” (TOP RIGHT) CHYNNA AND CANDY GALAY