Profile: Rae's Bistro

Rae’s Bistro

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? 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? 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.

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? 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.

What is your favourite wine? As it gets colder, we have been drinking the Lo Nuevo La Flauta de Bartolo Monastrell, but our go-to special occasion wine is the Ployez-Jacquemart Champagne. The Cellar Master, Laurence Ployez, came in for lunch when she was in town, and we got to share a glass with her. We also love our local craft beers. We have 12 taps, and 10 of those pour craft.

What is next for Rae’s? We have been really busy, so we are looking at more space. Our next step is expansion: we are building a bigger lounge to host larger parties and do pass-around appetizers.

Dinner for two: Bdee Bdee Bdee, That's All Folks: Panko-fried pork chops

Photo by Ian McCausland

Chef's Cut: Croatia with Love: 12-oz New York Striploin

Chef’s Cut: Croatia with Love: 12-oz New York Striploin with gorgonzola cream sauce and homemade hickory smoked frites

Dinner for Two: Bdee Bdee Bdee That’s All Folks: Panko fried pork chops layered with house-made southern style cream corn and bacon peach jam

Chef Lorne Giesbrecht's Picks

Chef’s secret ingredient: Surprisingly, it’s cinnamon. It’s in my fried chicken, my barbeque sauce, any number of rubs and spice mixes. Often if a dish is just missing a little something, I’ll add cinnamon, and that gets it where I want it.

Chef’s favourite cookbook: I always have the Flavour Bible on hand in the kitchen, and I really like the Joe Beef cookbooks. They inspired the stack of pork chops we feature for sharing.

Chef’s favourite cooking gadget: It has to be my sous-vide. It allowed me to cook a 50-oz tomahawk steak for our sharing feature. There is no other way you could cook a piece of meat that large without having to preorder it.

Chef’s favourite current food trend: I like the fact that there is a return to good comfort food. I spent a lot of time working in a Cajun restaurant, and that’s exactly what Cajun food is: comfort food. Nothing against overly fancy and technical stuff, but knowing how to use quality, simple ingredients—that’s how I was trained.

Chef’s favourite food travel destination: New Orleans. Everything is comfort-food focused, but you can also get amazing fine dining there, and the food has influences from so many different cultures: French, Spanish, Italian, the Caribbean Islands, Texas BBQ.