Interview with Jessie Radies from the Blue Pear
“In Edmonton we are inundated with chains. It’s important to raise people’s awareness. Letting them know what their choices are, making it easy for them to make an independent restaurant a choice and then making sure that they are getting delivered a quality meal. If we can steer them in the direction of making sure they’re delivered quality when they expect it, they might be willing to try something new. I think the health of the community and city can be monitored by small businesses.”
-Jessie Radies
Jessie Radies began her career in the restaurant business as a Kentucky Fried Chicken Employee. Since her humble beginnings in the fast food sector, Jessie and her husband Darcy Radies opened Blue Pear, a boutique restaurant that offers a beautiful five course meal. Committed to the importance of supporting local businesses, Jessie has helped strengthen Edmonton’s Independent business scene by founding Original Fare and more recently Keep Edmonton Original.
1. When did you first become interested in the restaurant business?
It was totally by accident. My girlfriend wanted to work at a resort for the summer and she couldn’t drive, so I drove her. I was sixteen. While I was there, I figured that I may as well fill out an application too. The next day I got a call with a job offer in Waterton. It was a few hours away from my house, and I hadn’t even told my parents that I had applied for a job because I really didn’t think I�d get it. So I had the owner of KFC on the phone, offering me a position and I’m like, “Mom, can I go to Waterton and work for the summer?”
My mom and dad look at each other and said okay. So that’s how I started in the restaurant business. I was painfully, painfully shy. They tried to put me on cash and I couldn’t even ask the customer what they wanted. I would burst into tears. The staff had a little conference, and everyone said, “We think Jessie needs to be a cook because then she doesn�t have to talk to anyone.” So I learned how to be a cook at KFC in about two hours. I hated it. It was greasy and dirty, and after working as a cook for a week and a half I said, “Okay, yeah, I think I can do cash now.”
By the end of the summer my mom said, “What happened to you?” Because I couldn’t stop talking. I think part of it was living away from home. I lived with a bunch of other girls and we partied quite a bit. It was fun. I went back again the next summer and worked there again. In my career I spent 15 years working at KFC. For franchises and on the corporate side of it. I ended up in middle management doing their twinning of the KFC/Taco bell concept in Edmonton. So it was a long way from being cashier. But that was long time ago too. That would have been 23 years ago.
2. How did Blue Pear come into being?
I had taken a severance package from KFC. I had worked on a big project for them for about three years, and it had come to an end. I couldn’t get along with my boss. I’m much better at being self-employed than I was being an employee. I had decided to take a year off to kick back and relax. I had met Darcy a month or two before I took the severance package. I had just turned thirty and called it my half-time break. I didn’t know what I was ready to do, but I knew I wanted a change.
When I met Darcy he was a chef over at Jack’s Grill which was my favorite restaurant in the city. When I met him and he told me where he worked, I kind of laughed. Kimberly, a good friend of mine had been in fine dining for a long time, and so when I met Darcy I thought, maybe the change I’m looking for is a life-style change. So we started dating and got married. Then within the first year of getting married I was working at Starbucks. I was working from 7-2 and Darcy was working at Jack’s from noon until midnight, and we never got to see each other.
So we started looking around for a place to open a restaurant. It took us almost a year to find a place. We found this little tiny restaurant, had enough money to swing it financially and thought we’d try to see what would happen. So here we are. We’ve changed the name and we’ve taken it away from being a French Bistro. We wanted to be one of the premier dining spots in Edmonton. It takes a really long time to get your reputation for consistency and quality built. And I think we’re getting there now.
When we first started I said, “I hope we eventually have a $75 check average.” And we’ve totally exceeded that.
3. What are the most significant joys and struggles of being an independent restaurant owner?
The joys are the lifestyle it offers. Not the financial part of it, because we’re not there. We have two kids, a three-year old and a five-year old. It offers us flexibility that we would never have if we were employed by other businesses. The quality of life has been the best part.
The struggles are the cash flow and the unknown, because it is a fickle business. You start seeing some trends, and hope that they continue, but you always have to hope for the best and plan for the worst. 9/11 hit us really hard. We were in the process of changing our name when that happened. It was brutal for our customers. People stayed at home, they stopped spending money. We couldn’t have planned a name change at a worse time. For probably two years it affected us. It took a good year and a half to pull out of that. After the name change we became the “new kid in town” and got some good reviews, and our regulars maintained traffic to us, so that was good.
4. What role do ethics play in your choice of products? Fair trade, organic or local?
I’d really like to raise awareness among restaurateurs about sustainability and buying locally. Also recycling. To give us a chance to talk to our customers about what we do. At the Blue Pear we recycle and compost all of our food scraps. We don’t tell anyone that, because that’s just what we do. We hardly have any garbage because we recycle almost everything. That’s something that I think the customers should know about but I’m not going to stand at the table and talk about it. Some people make dining decisions based on things like that. I think we have an opportunity as independent restaurants to lead that.
5. What inspired you to come up with the idea for Original Fare?
It was after 9/11. I found out I was pregnant on September 10th, and September 11th was the crash of the world-trade center. We had been in the business for about a year and we wanted to take a vacation because we knew with the baby coming in May, it was going to be a busy time. We were still relatively newlyweds. So we went to Tucson for a holiday. It was relatively warm which fit my criteria, but we could still access healthcare if I needed it. We didn’t have to fly too far, so we felt it was a safe alternative. Darcy had made a list of some of the restaurants he wanted to eat at while we were in Tucson.
We had checked into the hotel and I was flipping through one of the hotel magazines and there was an ad that said please support Tucson’s independent restaurants. There was a list of restaurants, and a couple of the ones that were on our list were on that list. I thought, “This is brilliant.” We used it as a guide to eat while we were in Tucson. Coincidentally, one of the restaurants we ate at was called Cafe Terra Cotta. They do a newsletter, and I picked up a newsletter that they produced for their customers. I thought, we need to do something like this in Edmonton. With all my years in franchise I knew the benefits of people working together and the efficiency of scale and volume. So I talked to a couple people in the business. Peter from Jack’s Grill was the first person I approached. He was lukewarm to the idea, but he listened. So I had the baby and kind of started planning it in my head, how it would work and everything.
Then I found out I was pregnant again and so it went onto the back burner. I had my second child in 2004, and while I was sitting at home with my newborn baby and my two-year old, I knew I had to get it going. So I started making phone calls, sending letters, and I managed to sell fifteen of my colleagues on the idea. I didn’t have a name, I didn’t have a logo, I didn’t have anything. It was an idea at this point. We all contributed to an advertising pool and started doing some marketing and promotion and stuff, and it’s grown from there.
It’s been really interesting. I’ve gotten to know some of my colleagues. Some interesting perspectives, because we all have very different restaurants. It needs to be and I really want it to be a diverse group of the best restaurants. The restaurants that are doing quality meals. It is all about flavour and supporting other small businesses. It is so important to our community.
6. If that’s what inspired you, what keeps you going?
I think it’s really important. Small business is critical to our country. I grew up on a farm. I know how important agriculture is to our country. You see the globalization of our economy, the issues of urban sprawl and global warming. Also, I think the perpetuation of sameness bothers me. At a lot of chain restaurants, the food is all the same. There’s nothing authentic and original. Independent restaurants really offer culinary diversity and choice. It’s really important to our culture that independents stay financially viable. I think we have to do this. We have to make people aware that the choices they make have an impact. If we get an extra couple in our restaurant, it makes a huge difference to us. And all independent restaurants are like that. Whereas, if a chain restaurant gets an extra couple, it doesn’t make a difference to them.
7. What do you wish to improve about Original Fare?
I’d like to expand our number of restaurants and the variety of restaurants. We don’t have too many ethnic restaurants. I’d like to see some of the smaller Salvadorian, Chinese, Vietnamese, Thai, some of the real gems in our city become a part of Original Fare. I’ve tried, but a lot of ethnic restaurants are kind of disconnected from the mainstream restaurant scene so they don’t see us at wine tasting, and they don’t have that informal connection. Often when I first approach them they think that I am trying to sell them something. It’s hard to get past that, to show them the benefit that Original Fare would give them and their staff. It’s a slow process.
8. How did you go about choosing the restaurants for Original Fare?
It started out with restaurants that I liked to eat at. From there it spread to restaurants that my customers talked about in a favorable way. Then once some of the restaurateurs were on board, they would have recommendations. At this point I have restaurants calling me, wanting to be part of the group. We try not to make any changes after the beginning of the year. It is way more cost effective to keep the advertisements the same. If a restaurant wants to drop out, they can, I ask them to give me sixty days notice because there is a long lead time on some of the published ads and it takes about two months to get everybody off of the postcards and that kind of thing.
