PROFILE
Rae’s Bistro Photos by Ian McCausland
Jillian Flynn spent her childhood running around her stepfather’s restaurant in Selkirk. When she met Danny Van Lancker as teenagers while training at the newly minted Selkirk Boston Pizza, a life-long partnership launched. Since the early 2000s, the two pals have been working their way through the Manitoba hospitality industry as servers, managers, trainers and consultants. When Danny pulled Jillian into a consulting project in May 2018, neither had any idea that this would be the project where they would put their 30 years of collective restaurant experience and unparalleled energy into the passion project that would become Rae’s Bistro. Chef Lorne Giesbrecht contributes his years of experience cooking in diner and Cajun-influenced restaurants, as well as fly-in fishing lodges, to the elevated comfort food concept at Rae’s Bistro. When did you know that this restaurant consulting job was going to turn into so much more? Danny: We bought it and we were just going to flip it, but somewhere around five months into the project, we fell in love with the neighbourhood. We thought: “We could actually do this,” and in August 2018, we committed to building this into our own place. How did you approach making this space your own? Jillian: The day we decided to buy the restaurant, we celebrated with a bottle of tequila, which led to us unrolling toilet paper to map out how we wanted the floor plan. We created everything in the space with our own hands. Danny: We used a lot of upcycled materials: electrical conduits, fir posts from underneath my grandfather’s house, fir trim from my dad’s cabin. Jill assembled the tables while I painted the walls and chalkboards. We worked non-stop for 27 hours to put this room together. What is your vision for Rae’s menu? Danny: We do elevated comfort food with the freshest ingredients we can find. We change the menu quarterly to adjust to seasonal ingredients, so we are always serving local and fresh. We serve our menu as well as our chalkboard specials, which always feature an appetizer, a burger, a pizza, and entrée, a Chef’s Cut of steak and Dinner for Two.
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