Interview with Brady Weiler from Pipestone Food Company
“I think that good things are worth pursuing. Whether its food, quality of life or products.”
-Brady Weiler
Brady Weiler opened Pipestone Food Company after extensive experience in the restaurant business. Since opening, the restaurant has been the setting of many special occasions including an event where Brady proposed to his wife. Pipestone Food Company takes pride in featuring locally raised, steroid and hormone free meat and also boasts of being the first smoke-free pub in Alberta.
1. When did you first become interested in the restaurant business?
I got my first cookbook when I was twelve. After that I got a job at a submarine sandwich place when I was in junior high. I worked there for quite a while. I moved up to popcorn guy at the Coliseum. I did that for a few years in high school. After the popcorn gig, my friend’s mother who was a hotel spotter she said the best food in town was at The Four Seasons. Through work experience I managed to land a kitchen helper job there for three sessions.
A day after I finished my work experience I was working full-time at The Four Seasons as an apprentice. Once I was finished with the Four Seasons I was lucky enough to get a job in the Carribean, Cayman Islands. I was 21. The plan was to go for one year and I stayed for five and a half.
I spent the last year and a half on the Cayman Islands as a chef on a little port yacht.
After that I took three months, drove across the country, went back to Edmonton and tried my hand at a little management gig at a restaurant, The Ritz. That got my wheels turning I guess that I could maybe step up someday.
2. Who have been some of the instrumental people who have really encouraged you through the starting and maintaining of your restaurant?
After the hotel management thing, a friend of mine said there was a space available and that I should see it. At that point I had decided I’d do it maybe a year down the road, but she said I had to check it out now. It was a reality check. Fight or flight but eventually I got things going, I expanded. I tell people I started with a fridge and five tables. I expanded a little bit and we added twenty more seats two years into it. Now it’s six thousand feet and seating for up to about two hundred.
As far as people who inspired me for the restaurant, I think I sort of took everything I had seen and done and poured it all into this one space.
3. What are the most significant joys and struggles of being an independent restaurant owner?
The highs for sure is when you can have a dining room with fifty people in it or a hundred people in it and you get them their food and it’s quiet.
Struggles is that financially it’s not a glamorous job by any means.
4. What is your family’s involvement in the restaurant?
My wife runs the pub and helps manage the finances. Actually, I asked my wife to marry me at the restaurant. We have an annual seafood night for friends and family so we invited seventy or eighty people and she had no idea. When I asked her to marry me, I told everyone this whole thing is full of highs and lows. One of the best highs is when all these people are here together.
5. Where do the ideas for your food come from?
Absolutely the experiences and the food that I had in the Cayman Islands influenced the food. I was there for six years of my life, so I had the chance to really explore. I was able to travel to Mexico also.
6. Where does the restaurant’s name come from?
Actually, the first plan for my business was to have it at my house. We live on an acreage in Wetaskawin and it backs onto Pipestone Creek. Originally I was going to build a little shop in my yard with a commercial kitchen and offer catering and work on weekends, but that idea faded when this space became open. It’s actually a hundred year old building.
7. What are some of your interests/hobbies outside of the restaurant? Do you get a chance to enjoy these?
Absolutely. Just this year we did some evaluating and we decided to stop serving lunch. I was putting in sometimes 18 hour days, 15 average. We don’t make as many dollars, but the quality of life is what counts. So I took up some golf and got my pilots license. I started to get the license when I was in the Cayman Islands, so it took me about fifteen years. And I have a little boat so I fish as much as I can.
8. When you were young, what did you want to be when you grew up?
Even as a kid I knew I wanted to be a chef. I don’t know why. My mom started to teach me how to cook my own breakfast when I was in grade two. I was cooking scrambled eggs at six or seven years old. I used to tell my mother it was because she wasn’t a very good cook. She was busy all the time. She wasn’t the greatest cook in the world, but she did make some really good things. She did make the best lasagna on the block.
9. What is your biggest pet peeve?
Probably socks in sandals.
