Category: Around town
Around town
It's the opening of an annual request, to give some poor, tough, confused teenager a gift for Christmas.
The Edmonton Sun’s Adopt-A-Teen program celebrates our community’s loving ability to give 8,000 teens living in poverty a small Christmas gift.
And it’s a time to appreciate the vows of near-poverty those working in the charitable sector have taken, and the unavoidable paradoxes any charity director must deal with.
The business of charity: Those working in charitable organizations do us a huge favour.
If it wasn’t for the charitable sector, government would be forced to care for so many more Albertans not so good at caring for themselves.
Were it not for charities, government would groan under the financial demand of three, not two ministries – not only Health and Education, but Human Services as well.
Executive in the charity sector make half to two-thirds of their earning power elsewhere.
Click here to donate.
Any new charity executive director rapidl ...
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Christmas can be the loneliest place on Earth.
Especially if you're a teen in a less-than-privileged family.
Chances are it's a single-parent home, one parent raising two or three children on less on a minimal income.
Chances are the kid will get new socks and underwear for Christmas -- that's all the mom or the dad or the guardian grandmother can possibly afford.
That's why the Edmonton Sun's Adopt-A-Teen Christmas Gift program for underprivileged teens was created 14 years ago: To give these underprivileged teens a Christmas gift.
With your help, Adopt-ATeen will make Christmas 2013 a much happier place for 8,000 Edmonton teens -- 10% of the total teen population -- who live in families eligible for Christmas Bureau or Salvation Army assistance.
Each child -- for that is what these teenagers are -- will received an Adopt-ATeen $50 Walmart gift card. It's all theirs, to spend as they want -- on themselves, their friends, to buy Christmas gifts for their brothers and sisters.
During the c ...
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Sabor Divino
10220 103 St.
780 757 1114
www.sabordivino.ca
Food: 4.5 of 5 stars
Ambience: 4 of 5 stars
Service: 3.5 of 5 stars
Dinner for two excluding drinks, tips and taxes: Basic, $80. Fully loaded, $110.
What a joy to return to Sabor Divino and find this restaurant has not only held up to its own impeccable standards, but continues to improve upon those standards — a first, first-class restaurant as it were.
In the downtown Boardwalk Building on 103 Street, Sabor Divino (Portuguese for “divine flavours”) has been practising the art of fine cooking for five years, on a contemporary Portuguese/Spanish base, but reaching far beyond.
It was one of the first restaurants to represent a new generation of culinary entrepreneurs. Co-owners chef Lino Oliviera and manager Christian Mena were skilled professionals who would have been successful at whatever they put their minds to. They are open to innovation, are leaders rather than followers, and are not afraid to char ...
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Cactus Club Café (Downtown)
11130 Jasper Ave.
587 523 8030
http://www.cactusclubcafe.com
Food: 4.5 of 5 Suns
Ambience: 3.5 of 5 Suns
Service: 4 of 5 Suns
Dinner for two (excluding beverages and tip), basic, $45; loaded, $75.
It’s the professionalism that’s so remarkable.
Everything at the Cactus Club Cafe — the new one on Jasper Avenue — is so well done.
It’s the chain concept taken to new heights.
The food is impeccable — everything is done just right.
They may be the same young ladies in the black cocktail dresses, but the servers are intensively trained for three weeks before they hit the floor.
Founder Richard Jaffray opened the first Cactus Club Café in Vancouver in 1988 with a concept that has remained constant to this day, especially in this, the 25th Cactus Club Cafe: To produce consistent, high-quality food at manageable prices.
Cactus Club was doing well in the food department. Then super-chef Rob Feenie set ...
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Review of Clybourne Park,
Citadel Theatre, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
Jan. 25 to Feb. 16, 2014
By GRAHAM HICKS
Much has been made of the racism aspect of Clybourne Park, the much awarded drama that has made its way to the Citadel's Shoctor Stage and plays through February 16, 2014.
Almost too much ... Because for all the discussion around the play, basically concluding that not much has changed in the 50 years between acts, Clybourne Park actually suggests much has changed. In the first act, the neighbourhood association is all white fighting to keep black folks out of the Chicago neighbourhood. In act two, set 50 years later in the same house, the neighbourhood association is represented by two black activisits, fighting to keep incoming white neighbours from tearing down old houses and "gentifying' Clybourne Park.
There's so much more to this show than an overly-trod-upon racism theme: There's the unusualness of the playwright placing the first act in 1959, the second act in the same h ...
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NAIT’s Culinary School outlets
Ernest’s Dining Room, Fresh Express, Retail Meat Market
Food: 4 of 5 Suns
Ambience: 4 of 5 Suns
Service: 4 of 5 Suns
Ernest’s
11762-106 St.
780 471-8676
www.nait.ca/54678.htm
There’s a culinary secret in this town.
The secret has been revealed time after time. Yet a secret it continues to be.
At NAIT, the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology, one can eat like a king at peasant prices, have champagne tastes on a beer budget.
A three-course “table d’hote” dinner in Ernest’s fine-dining room costs $35 per person and comes with an additional “amuse bouche” (a mini-appetizer unto itself) and a between-course sorbet to “cleanse the palate.”
At Fresh Express, a fragrant, light, made-from-scratch fish ‘n’ chips rings in at $6.75.
At the NAIT Retail Meat Store, beautiful cuts of fresh meat, from rib roast to rouladen, can be had at two-thirds the cost elsewher ...
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Just how much is food and dining out a part of our lives? Consider: Of the 240 packages in The Edmonton Sun/ATCO Christmas Charity Auction, running until 7 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 31, at least a third of them involve food.
Here’s the Weekly Dish’s food guide to hundreds of Edmonton restaurants who have donated to the Charity Auction. The number in brackets refers to the auction package number in the auction listings in today’s Sun print edition or at www.christmascharityauction.ca.
Steaks: Three of the city’s finest steakhouses – LUX (10), Ruth’s Chris (12) and Von’s (15) – are in the first 15 packages. LUX executive chef and Sun columnist Paul Shufelt is giving his guests cooking lessons, Ruth’s Chris is famous for its corn-fed steaks, Von’s kitchen is now supervised by extraordinarily creative chef Shane Chartrand. Don’t forget the Outback Steakhouse (107), hosting dinner with CHED’s Dan Tencer & Andrew Grose.
Fine dining: Thes ...
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(Update on this column: Two days after its publication, Don Iveson did win the mayoralty election in Edmonton, Alberta ...by a mile.)
What business wants from municipal politicians is so simple.
Create a business environment as good or better than other municipalities – physical, financial and regulatory. Be supportive, then get the heck out of the way.
Talk to any Edmonton business owner with skin in the game, and you’ll hear much the same.
Fix the potholes, roads and sidewalks; ensure top-notch core services; maintain law and order; enforce sensible regulations (i.e. environment, safety); help rather than hinder; keep taxes reasonable; create a city where employees want to live.
Then get out of the way! The less any of us have to do with bureaucrats, the better!
Business is most fearful of a city council or mayor so overly influenced by one interest group or ideology as to lose sight of the overall good.
Mistrust between socialist mayor Jan Reimer (1989 to 1995) and commer ...
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Belgravia Hub
7609 115 St. (one block west of the Belgravia LRT stop)
780 756 3344
www.belhub.com
(evenings only)
Food: 4 of 5 Suns
Ambience: 3.5 of 5 Suns
Service: 3.5 of 5 Suns
Dinner for two (not including drinks or tip): Basic, $40; loaded, $80.
Lively, up-tempo, energetic dining in the downtown, 124th Street or Whyte Avenue restaurant precincts is all fine and dandy. But sometimes — often — you want a little break, a little quiet, a little peaceful dining far from the madding crowd.
Which is why Belgravia Hub, one block west of the Belgravia LRT stop at the corner of 76 Avenue and 115 Street, and blocks south of the University of Alberta, will be with us for a very long time.
It’s a small, comforting yet elegant restaurant perfectly in tune with its neighbourly surroundings, framed with tall elms, side by side with what you’d think would be the competition of the Gracious Goods Café.
The surrounding community — all residential &mdas ...
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Blair Lebsack had scoured the downtown, looking for space to house his new RGE RD restaurant.
RGE RD is now open, just off 124 Street’s restaurant row. But downtown leases, Blair says, “just about doubled” during his 18-month location search.
Restaurants, pubs and clubs are an accurate, if anecdotal, indication of the downtown renaissance.
As Jim Taylor of the Downtown Business Association puts it: “Up until now it’s been ‘ready, set, wait a minute.’ Now we’re truly into the ‘ready, set, go’ stage.”
The new arena, to open early in the 2016-17 NHL season, is having an impact. The reality, suggests Colliers International realtor Perry Gereluk, is bigger than the arena. “Edmonton is growing, we have jobs, we have a vibrant economy.”
As it is, new storefront leases in prime downtown locations are closing in on Calgary, Toronto and Vancouver rental rates.
“There’s not much street space left,” says Tayl ...
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