Livin’ on the Edge

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This article was published 18/01/2020 (1557 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Exciting and elevated — yet approachable and accessible — comfort food with a down-home sensibility is what you can expect to come out of Prairie’s Edge’s kitchen.

In the back-of-house of the picturesque Kildonan Park restaurant, longtime friends Grant Danyluk and Adam Mysak are making inspired dishes — and names for themselves in the process — in the same neighbourhood they grew up in.

“We met when we were like three, so we don’t really remember that meeting,” Danyluk laughed, seated next to Mysak in the restaurant on the second-last day of a two-week planned closure after New Year’s Eve.

The 27-year-olds have been friends for nearly their entire lives, from playing on a soccer team when they were four and attending preschool together to spending countless hours together as chef de cuisine (Danyluk) and sous chef (Mysak) of the eatery on the edge of the park’s duck pond.

They attended Riverbend Community School together before Danyluk moved to Vancouver, and reunited upon Danyluk’s return at 10 years of age, which he remembers specifically.

“It was 10 years old because we had my birthday party at Grand Prix Amusements — we went go-karting, you were there,” Danyluk insisted to Mysak, who admitted he didn’t remember the party 17 years ago.

They went to the same middle and high schools. As typical teens, they’d hang out at Tim Hortons and film videos and skits — including one on how to make cookies.

The video, shot in Mysak’s kitchen, while long-lost, was perhaps the precursor to their culinary careers.

Mysak later moved to Calgary, where he got his first “restaurant” experience working at a New York Fries in a food court.

Upon returning to Winnipeg, he and Danyluk landed at The Keg’s Garry Street location when they were 17. Danyluk started as a dishwasher, while Mysak started a step up — perhaps thanks to his experience slinging pommes frites — as a salad maker.

They both moved up at The Keg in the five years that followed — Danyluk made salads and appetizers before advancing to the grill, while Mysak worked just about everywhere, including on the line, on the broiler, and at lunchtime. But the latter didn’t enjoy his work.

“I was miserable, I felt like I was stuck in a rut,” Mysak admitted. “I was just like ‘ugh! I don’t know if I really want to be doing this…’ I was just kind of frustrated and didn’t know what I wanted to do.”

Mysak decided to go Australia, ironically, to get out of cooking. Soon enough, though, he realized he needed money.

“I didn’t have any other experience, so I had to get a job cooking,” he recalled.

While in Sydney, after helping open a restaurant called Thirty Fish that failed within two months, he got a job at a café called Paramount Coffee Project in the Surry Hills neighbourhood. In his seven months at Paramount, he rediscovered his passion for food.

“I got to see a lot of different styles of food,” he recalled. “I was eating at a lot of really good restaurants at that time… it opened my eyes up a lot.

“I didn’t realize food could taste that good… I wasn’t exposed to that kind of elevated cuisine (before) I was in Australia.”

Reinvigorated, Mysak returned to Winnipeg and — after briefly working at The Keg again and at Alt Hotel — decided to get serious about making cooking a career.

He enrolled in a culinary program at Red River College and apprenticed at River Heights small-plates bistro Chew, ultimately spending three years there.

“That was really new and exciting to me. I had never seen or cooked food like that before. We were doing scallops, and bluefin tuna, braised beef, braised short rib,” he gushed.

Danyluk, meanwhile, had moved on to Exchange District hot spot Peasant Cookery. That’s where, like his friend in Australia, he had “eye-opening” experiences.

“That’s when I started learning to be a chef, I think,” Danyluk said of working at the rustic-chic restaurant, where everything was made from scratch and prepared in the classical French style.

“We were butchering pigs and grinding meats to make sausages and (making) charcuterie and making pastries…”

At Peasant, he had many new experiences, from making mayonnaise and cooking briskets to breaking down chickens and shucking oysters.

In 2017, Danyluk and Mysak began to collaborate. They crafted special multi-course, ticketed dinners on a pop-up basis at places such as Chew, Forth, and The Handsome Daughter, to great success.

“It was awesome, it was the coolest thing ever at the time,” Danyluk remembered. “Looking back on it, we do that all the time (now). It’s kind of weird that two years ago it was like the coolest thing ever that we had this menu of our own and now we’re running a restaurant.”

It’s a restaurant that Danyluk and Mysak have increasingly made their mark on in the past year. They’re already running a new dinner menu with plenty of local proteins — a smoked goldeye pasta, a pickerel cheek salad, a bison burger and stew — and are working to consolidate fairly lengthy breakfast, lunch, and brunch menus into one streamlined brunch menu.

“With Grant and Adam, what they’ve injected is an energy and enthusiasm into the place,” general manager Brian Unick said as he puttered behind the bar. “What they’re doing is taking comfortable food, Prairie food, but kind of bringing it to life a little bit more.”

“We try to be as nice and creative as we can be, but still be comfortable and approachable,” he continued.

Danyluk said they’re striving to find that balance and not alienate the residents of the neighbourhood they know so well.

“We don’t want to scare anyone away but we don’t want to have something that they’re going to make at home on a Tuesday night either,” he said, using an Arctic char dish with a braised lentil and sweet potato hash, and soubise (an oniony cream sauce) as an example.

“When we can, we use all local stuff,” he continued. “We are in a park, so you have to be accommodating and accessible, because everyone comes here, all types of people. You don’t want anyone to feel left out, obviously, but at the same time, it’s a nice restaurant. You want to have food that people will talk about and be interested in.”

Danyluk, who got the position at Prairie’s Edge — which like Peasant Cookery, is owned by WOW Hospitality Concepts — last April, said there was “no doubt” he wanted Mysak as his right-hand man.

There was just one little problem: Mysak was all set to move to back to Calgary. He’d even sublet his apartment and sold everything he had except his bed and couch.

“This is a crazy story,” Mysak said before they both recalled a serendipitous sequence of events.

“I was walking out of 529 Wellington, and I was going to call Adam to ask him to come be sous-chef here,” Danyluk said, even though he knew Mysak was planning to leave.

Before he could call Mysak, the two literally bumped into each other on the street.

“That had never happened. We always planned to meet,” Mysak said of the unlikely encounter.

Danyluk didn’t make the most eloquent pitch. “I was like, ‘Oh hey. Do you wanna do this?’” he recalled asking his friend, who had been working at Maque on Stafford.

That day, Mysak was on the way to the bank to change his address to the Calgary one.

“I talked to him and I didn’t end up going to the bank,” Mysak said.

The fire-forged friends agreed that their differing styles and skills complement each other well.

Danyluk said he tends to make bigger meat-and-potatoes-style dishes, while Mysak said he prefers to make lighter, smaller dishes with a focus on balance and harmony. Their cooking styles fit their personalities: in the interview, Danyluk was a bit more brash and animated than the reserved and soft-spoken Mysak.

When asked about Mysak’s biggest strength as a chef, Danyluk’s response was that “he’s very detail-oriented. I can be a little scatterbrained sometimes and overlook details… he fills in that gap of mine.”

Mysak, when asked the same question, said Danyluk “can see the bigger picture and he’s got that can-do attitude. I feel like I’m more like ‘can we do this?’ and Grant’s like ‘we can do this!’”

“He’s got that willingness to just jump in and do things, take charge.”

The twosome haven’t gotten sick of each other even though they’ve dedicated long hours, side-by-side, to the endeavour they hope is a long-term one. They still spend plenty of time together outside the kitchen, Danyluk said.

While their new menus will align Prairie’s Edge closer to their overall vision, they want to keep being creative in 2020 to avoid becoming too comfortable.

For example, they want to do more special menus such as they did on New Year’s Eve — when they served up ’60s-inspired selections such as oysters Rockefeller, shrimp cocktail, chicken ala king, magret duck, and cherries jubilee. They also want to try growing veggies and herbs on the rooftop.

Regardless of what they do, their GM has confidence in them.

“These guys can cook,” Unick said. “They know food — no doubt about that.”