CHEF

First Course

Walking into Kristy Olsen’s Eden Restaurant in Raymond feels like coming home.

This is true even if your actual home doesn’t look anything like the 120-year-old manor in the centre of this small southern Alberta town. And it’s true even if your own home doesn’t have chandeliers, antiques, fine china and small plastic dinosaurs hidden everywhere (that last feature is courtesy of Olsen’s 12-year-old daughter, Nohla).

That familiar feeling at Eden Restaurant has more to do with the warm welcome by the host, who quickly feels like a friend. It grows thanks to the comfort and calm of the surroundings and the white walls, wide windows and sunlight that floods the space. Before you know it, you’re offering fellow guests a drink and making your way to your place at the table – as easily as you would in your own home.

Then there’s the food. Olsen’s creations remind you that you are, in fact, at the restaurant of a talented and experienced chef. Whether you’re diving into pork belly served with a ginger orange glaze, pickled apples and a cauliflower coconut purée; duck breast served with cherry and rosemary bread pudding, parsnip purée and a sour cherry sauce; or a completely new creation – Olsen’s choices are simply stunning. And they’re always a surprise. She plans the menu each day based on what’s in season, what she can get locally, and what sounds like fun for her to prepare.

“Kristy’s amazing,” says Jodi Witzke (General Studies 2002), a regular guest at Eden Restaurant. “The food is unbelievable. There’s really nothing like it.”

Eden Restaurant started as an innovative solution to a problem faced by the entire restaurant industry at the start of the pandemic: how to keep running a business that is focused on bringing people together when it was literally impossible for groups to gather. Olsen’s solution? Open up a stately, historic home as a private restaurant serving a different menu every night for up to 10 people at a time (or less, depending on COVID restrictions).

As Olsen prepares to celebrate the restaurant’s second anniversary, she has realized her unique business model has also been an inspired way to have time to raise a daughter, return to her roots, reduce food waste and cover her bills, all while offering guests beautiful, interesting and remarkable meals.

“I love cooking. I never want to do anything else,” says Olsen, a 2013 graduate of Lethbridge College’s Culinary Careers diploma program, a 2015 grad of the Cook Apprentice program, and 2023 grad of the Baker Apprentice program. “And it’s the best feeling in the world when your house is full of laughter all day and night. Eden Restaurant is like a family dinner, in my house, five nights a week. It’s pretty awesome.”

Second Course

Kristy’s soup is something to die for,” says Brittany Noble (Business Administration – Management, 2009; General Arts and Science 2012), who has been a regular guest at Eden since 2021. “I don’t know if I’ve ever had soup that has so much dimension. The different flavours that you taste in every spoonful – it is beautiful.”

Olsen comes from a long line of chefs who could make a memorable soup. The first chef in her life was her grandfather Vern Olsen, a founder and builder of Lethbridge College’s nearly 60-year-old Culinary Arts program. He’s the one who started elevating the industry to new levels in Lethbridge in the 1960s, helping to launch food fairs, gourmet suppers and more. He also taught the program’s current chair, Chef Doug Overes (Professional Cooking 1987, Distinguished Alumnus 1992) as well as many of the program’s recent and current instructors. In a Jan. 22, 1975, article of The Endeavour, Olsen was heralded as “one of the best instructors in the business.”

Some of Vern Olsen’s story is shared in Lethbridge Community College: The First 25 Years, written by former Communications Arts instructor Georgia Green Fooks. She described how Vern Olsen helped launch the Food Fair, which at its peak in the early 1970s drew nearly 10,000 people to the college for a smorgasbord supper.

Overes remembers Vern Olsen as being “a hard man! He bullied and pushed you so hard that if you didn’t show grit and work ethic, he didn’t like you and vice versa. But if he liked you, he would show you the moon and stars – the cool stuff. He tried to break you so he could build you up bigger and better than before. Many of us who were mentored by Vern and taken under his wing are still in the industry some 40 years later. He is the sole reason I went on to hotel and restaurant administration, baking and cooking.”

Kristy Olsen’s connections to her grandpa can be seen on her hands, which are tattooed with the words “Yes, Chef,” his birth and death years of 1926 and 2013, and the numbers 8/6.

“’Yes, chef’ is a term of respect in the kitchen,” explains Olsen. “You say ‘yes, chef’ to everything. It gets ingrained in you when you are coming through the industry. Grandpa was a very influential chef in this area, but I didn’t really get to know him as a chef, just as a grandpa. I never got to experience him in the kitchen – he died in 2013, just as my career was starting. And in the kitchen, 86 is when you run out of something.”

One of the best parts about being at Lethbridge College for all three programs is that she has learned from instructors who were once her grandfather’s students. “Most of my teachers were taught by my grandpa,” she says. “Even now in the Bake Shop, I get to hear stories about him all the time.”