Rima Devitt jokes now that growing up she always thought she would end up being a rock star, while her husband John Williams had aspirations of becoming a Jazz musician. Destined for greatness they were, but not in the genre of entertainment that they might have expected. The two have been married for fourteen years, now have two young boys, and together have established the Blue Plate Diner a success.

1. When were you first interested in the restaurant business?
RIMA: I’ve always loved going to restaurants. Really loved going out for dinner and enjoyed the wine, the music, and people coming together. I guess it started there. John and I always worked in restaurants going through university, and we always kind of felt like we knew more than the people we worked for-as I’m sure everybody does. I went to university in Arizona, and my brother and I would take road trips in the southern United States. Often times we’d look for a great place to go for breakfast. We’d pick a semi-truck trailer and we’d follow it until it pulled into a joint. That would always be the best place because the truckers know the good places to go. I guess that’s when it started. John and I used to own an Italian restaurant and that’s sort of how we got our feet wet in the industry. We really learned managerial skills that way. That’s how we started thinking of and talking about opening our own. It was one of those things where we woke up and thought, “How can we make our lives even more difficult and way more complicated. I know, let’s have kids and open up our own restaurant.”
JOHN: (Laughs) And we’ve always liked change.

“Lots of things have happened in this building. Back in the early 90s there was a dance factory called “Sublime” downstairs that was a notorious all night after hours dance club. I think there are ghosts in this space. All of the night time servers say they’ve heard the doors open on their own. It’s not bad or anything. It’s all part of the history of this place.”

– Rima Devitt

2. What interested you about this particular kind of restaurant?
RIMA: The truck stops that I went to with my brother were usually family owned places, where the owners would always know all the customers by their name and what their usual dishes were. I’ve always loved that. The great restaurant, really homey and people want to come there all the time.
JOHN: We had always worked in more high dining style places, and so we tried to marry the two together. It’s not just about home-style for us, but also elegantly prepared. We had this vision of uplifted diner food, well cooked simple food.
RIMA: When we were looking at this space, it was in high demand from people much more established than us. But the guy who owned it, I think he really like our passion. He was a bit of a risk-taker himself and an independent guy, and I think he just decided he wanted to take a chance on us.

3. Who have been some of the instrumental people who have really supported and encouraged you through the starting and maintaining of the restaurant?
JOHN: My parents.
RIMA: We had financial help from our families, and we did everything in the cheap. We did everything we could, ourselves. Our friends helped us. Greg Pretty, a friend of ours did all the design work. Our chefs helped us expand on our vision of the menu. They’ve been with us. Dwayne has been with us since the beginning. He helped us with the renovations. They’re like family to us.

4. What have been the most significant joys and struggles of being an independent restaurant owner?
RIMA: In the very beginning we lost an important staff member. She was basically running the kitchen–she was our chef. We were already working crazy hours, and then she had to leave. We were working about 80 hours a week trying to create time for the family, worrying about customers coming and wondering, “Are we going to be able to make it to Christmas?” It was scary because of all the work we had put into it.
JOHN: Nowadays the issue is labor prices. Labor prices have gone up a crazy amount in the past year so menu prices have to go up.
RIMA: The economy is not like this everywhere. It is kind of unique to Alberta right now. Other chains can absorb losses, but independent chains can’t so we either need to raise our prices or absorb the financial loss. I would say having to deal with those issues have been really really challenging. The biggest joys have been the small things. After working a crazy brunch and with our kids are at Grandma and Grandpa’s, having dinner and a glass of wine sitting at a table pretending we’re customers and watching other customers come in and enjoying their meals and loving what we’re doing and getting into the music. To me that’s the best thing. But we have to work a lot and it is very rare that we get to do that. I think it is that moment that makes everything worth it-to realize that we have created something that people are really getting.

5. How are you involved in the community around you? Do you support any charities?
RIMA: We are constantly giving gift certificates away, to auction off. We donate food platters. It is harder for us to donate our time.
JOHN: We don’t donate too much time on a home-based community level.
RIMA: We used to and we used to be quite involved in our neighborhood which is a developing neighborhood. We used to be quite involved in the community action project and things like that. Since we opened up this place and having our kids, it has been hard to find the time.
JOHN: The kids and I, we deliver local newspapers.
RIMA: I wish we could do more. There’s only so much you can do though. The most important things to us have to be our family and our business. Our family right now is number one and our business is number two. We put ourselves at number three, isn’t that crazy?

6. Where do the ideas for your food come from?
JOHN: We try to concert a dish and boil it down to its basic formula. It is hard to describe. You come to me and say I’d really love to do a smoked duck. We think pure and simple. We think, how do they do it in China? Once we figure that out, then we bring it to a family level, instead of a shishy restaurant level.
RIMA: John and I are vegetarian, so it is really important for us to have a large segment of the menu dedicated to vegetarian items. We think that the vegetarian items should be really satisfying and delicious. We do this in really creative ways. Vegetarianism is so commonplace and mainstream these days. People from all walks of life are vegetarians. A lot of people will come here and eat a vegetarian dish and not realize that it is vegetarian. Because the emphasis is not on the fact that it is vegetarian. It is delicious and it just happens to have no meat in it. Our chefs are really interested and passionate about food. They do a lot of reading and internet research. Our chef Ken took a trip to Montreal and he did a lot of exploration on restaurants.
JOHN: Shishy stuff. And then he takes it down a bit so that we can use it. We reinvent it.

7. How large a role do ethics play in your choice of products? Do you buy locally/organically/fair trade?
JOHN: We try to buy as locally sourced as possible.
RIMA: We have this incredible farmer’s market on Saturday, right outside our door. So we’ll take a cart and buy tons of stuff. Beautiful, lovely produce and the chefs will build a special based on the stuff found at the farmer’s market. We have local suppliers as well, and they’ll call us and let us know when they’ve got something really exciting.
JOHN: We like to use local butchers, when we can. Our volume is very large and so we do have to sometimes use commercial suppliers.
RIMA: We’re so lucky in Alberta because of all that’s available in the summer. I love that the whole farmer’s market thing is growing. It’s really important to support local food. As for the vegetarianism, we’ve been vegetarians for quite a while. I guess initially I was a lot more activistic about vegetarianism when I first became a vegetarian. At this point in my life, this is just how I eat. I don’t make judgments about people who aren’t vegetarians. We serve meals that have meat in them. That’s part of how we make a living. To me it is also important to expose people to the fact that food can be deliciously prepared without meat in it. It’s not really activistic; it is more to make our lives easier because this is what we love.
JOHN: The meat stuff is great, and the veggie stuff is great. Between the two of them everybody is happy.

8. Did you go to university/what did you study?
JOHN: Did we go to school for the restaurant industry? No. I studied music performance at Grand MacEwan.
RIMA: He wanted to be a jazz musician (laughs). I was in university for three years. The first year I majored in international relations, the second year I majored in English and the third year I majored in journalism. But I was never really happy. I was constantly thinking when I was in class, “What am I going to eat for lunch? When’s class going to be over so that I can eat?” I was so bored all day working at a computer or on papers or listening to lectures. I didn’t feel like I was using my whole body. I like the rush and adrenaline that happens in the restaurant business.
JOHN: You’ve got a job to pay the bills, but sometimes its gets under your skin and will never quite let you go.

9. What are some of your interests and hobbies outside of the restaurant?
JOHN: I used to play the trumpet in a band but I had to give that up because the balance between having a restaurant and young kids is really hard.
RIMA: I’ve always been a bit of a junk collector. I’m really into old certain types of dishes and lamps. Especially that funky, retro-ey look. It gives me so much satisfaction to find a great coffee cup. Every coffee cup in here is hand picked. I love it when people respond and say, “Oh this cup reminds me of my Grandma’s cottage!” Writing. I don’t really write anymore. Being in school cured me of that. I would get my articles completely edited to the point where it wasn’t an expression of me anymore and I found that really hard. I like the idea of having the luxury to take up painting to have a bit more self-expressionism. Having young kids is a big time commitment though, on top of having the restaurant.
JOHN: Yeah. The problem now is trying to keep some semblance of family life.

10. How did you guys meet?
RIMA: We knew each other as acquaintances for a few years. Friends of friends. I had never really considered him romantically at all. The first time we actually met was under an underpass by 109th street and Jasper. It was like an urban sewer. I was going home from work because I worked at Earl’s Tin Palace and John was with a friend of mine. So we met and talked.
JOHN: Then we saw each other at parties and would be like, “Oh hey, how are you?”
RIMA: But we never really clicked and then all of a sudden we did. We met mutual friends at Jasper hotel and all of a sudden…it was probably alcohol fueled passion. We started living together two weeks after that and then got married 6 months after that.

11. Where does the restaurant’s name come from?
JOHN: We wanted to have a diner. That loose concept embodied what we had in mind. We read up on diners and each diner had their own version of the blue plate special.
RIMA: Traditionally in diner talk, the blue plate special was the day’s special and it was always served on a blue plate. The name is a play on words because here we have such a variety of colored dishes, and people come in and wonder where the blue plates are. The dishes are mismatched and they’re not blue. It’s kind of ironic, you know?

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