The owners of a beloved, longtime fixture of Edmonton’s restaurant scene, who have been the purveyors of vegan cuisine before plant-based food became a true force to be reckoned with in the food business, are reflecting on the year that was that saw them take their menu down the QEII to Calgary.
“There were a lot of people who used to live in Edmonton and now live in Calgary who knew about us, who had Padmanadi growing up — because we’ve been around for 21 years,” Maya Richmond, the owner and operator of Padmanadi’s first location in Calgary, said as she recounted the new eatery’s grand opening in September.
“Or we have people who live in Calgary, who (used to) drive up to Edmonton. So there was a little bit of a hype … like, ‘Oh my gosh, I don’t have to drive to Edmonton anymore.’ The first day of opening, it was huge.”
Richmond, whose mother and father opened the original Padmanadi restaurant in Edmonton’s Chinatown neighbourhood after moving to Canada from Indonesia over two decades ago, says she is hopeful for what 2024 will bring, and as 2023 winds down, she recognizes the parallels that have emerged between her life and her parents’ lives when she took a chance and opened a restaurant in a new city.
“It is kind of wild … now that I think about it because I also have a two-year old,” she said. “I was talking to my husband yesterday, about my mom, my dad, like, all over again, (we’re) opening a new restaurant in a new city.
“You know, we started everything basically from scratch, from zero, building a new community, building a new clientele, making new friends.”
Steven Sandor, the editor in chief at the Edmonton lifestyle magazine Edify, says Padmanadi has been featured in his publication many times and he is pleased to see the restaurant’s owners try to take its recipe for success to a place beyond the provincial capital.
“I just wish them the best of luck,” he said, adding that Padmanadi and other vegan or vegetarian restaurants are becoming more of a destination even for people who “are meat eaters but … want to sample or have a vegetarian meal.”
“And I think in a lot of ways, Padmanadi is like the OG, right? It’s been there for a long time. It’s really built its reputation.”
The flagship Padmanadi location first opened in the heart of Edmonton’s Chinatown as a 70-seat eatery.
“People were saying, ‘Oh my gosh, you must be crazy bringing your family here and opening a vegetarian restaurant. You’re not going to make it,'” Richmond recalled. “It’s literally like one of those immigrant stories where the kids — you know, I (would) come home from high school and I’d be bussing tables, cleaning tables, washing dishes and stuff like that, because we couldn’t afford to hire anyone.
“As time goes by, things … they looked pretty good.”
Things looked good enough that Richmond’s father moved the restaurant out of its original location to a 160-seat spot on 101st Street on the eastern edge of downtown Edmonton. Things continued to go very well and demand from loyal diners saw Richmond’s family announce plans to open a restaurant on Edmonton’s southside in 2019.
“I thought that there’s a demand for Calgary because … (of) the southside location,” Richmond said, explaining that the restaurant would take unusually large takeout orders at times and then when asked about it, customers would say they were taking the food with them and driving back to Calgary or another southern Alberta city to enjoy the food at home.
“That’s when I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, people in Calgary have an appetite for this.'”
While all three Padmanadi locations are owned and run by Richmond’s Indonesian family, the restaurants’ menus feature fare inspired by the rich culinary history of a number of other countries in Asia as well.
When Padmanadi’s Calgary location opened, the restaurant was featured in the Avenue Calgary magazine, which wrote that the eatery’s “standout dishes include the always popular ginger beef (made with soy beef) and the restaurant’s specialty, plant-based chicken tossed with an Indonesian yellow curry, potatoes and veggies” while noting the kitchen also offers “plenty of fried noodle and rice dishes like Indonesian staple nasi goreng and a variety of stir-fried tofu and vegetable dishes.”
Loyal customers
Richmond’s father, Kasim Kasim, still spends a lot of time at Padmanadi’s flagship location in downtown Edmonton, where he can often be seen wandering from table to table with a wide smile and engaging in lively conversation with regulars.
The restaurant’s regular customers are featured prominently at that location, with many of them having their photos on the wall to greet customers entering through the front doors. One of those regulars in the photos is Georges Laraque, a former National Hockey League player who is still beloved by many Edmonton hockey fans after he spent eight years playing for the Oilers.
“I love everything that they do,” said the former NHLer, who added he is always travelling back and forth between Edmonton and Montreal. “The food is amazing.
“Just talking about it right now is making me salivate because it is wonderful, you know, the creation and all the different flavours that they have.”
Laraque says he has been “100 per cent vegan” since 2009 and like Sandor, suggests Padmanadi has continued to be a destination for people who do not eat meat even as plant-based eateries are proliferating because it was one of the first restaurants in Edmonton to do so while also earning a reputation for offering delicious food.
“By my memory, they were the first,” he said. “So in the beginning, they were my only option.
“When I bring people with me that are meat lovers and I make them try some stuff, they barely even see the difference in some of the stuff that they have in the menu.”
Laraque says while he has numerous options now for restaurants that can accommodate his diet, he continues to go back to Padmanadi, in part, “because they were the first.”
“I kind of feel like I owe it to them to always come back … they’re so unique,” he said. “I’m glad that they opened up in Calgary and I hope they open all over the world — so then, people get to try the food and get to see that vegan food is good.
“Because the more that we see, the more options there are out there, the more people eat plant-based, the better it is for animals and for the environment and for their health.”
Richmond speaks about the bond that her family has with their customers and also acknowledges that relationships will take time to develop and nurture in Calgary.
“Back in Edmonton, I never had to do marketing,” she said. “We just never had to. We’ve been around for so long.
“In Calgary, it’s different. We’re literally a new restaurant that’s entering this market … There’s so many restaurants here.”
Connections with the community
Even as the family business expands and serves more and more repeat diners, it maintains a strong connection to the community at its flagship location in a part of central Edmonton that continues to see its share of issues arise as a result of high levels of poverty and addiction in the neighbourhood.
“Because we’ve been in (Edmonton’s) Chinatown for so long, we see a lot of vulnerable community members around the restaurant,” Richmond said. “And we see over the years the amount of people who actually just need food — really, they need somebody to actually give to them unconditionally.
“That’s why my parents and I stepped in because we have this restaurant, we have this giant kitchen.”
Richmond says years ago, her father started a tradition where once a month he would cook and give out food to people in the area who needed it. Because there was a limit to how much food he could afford to donate, he worked with others who wanted to take part in the initiative to allow for more people to get a warm meal.
“My dad was kind of raised poor,” Richmond said. “So one thing he told me, he’s like, ‘You don’t know what poor feels like. You don’t know what it feels like to have like nothing to eat … I knew how it felt like.’
“He wants to give because he feels like he owes it to the community that has been so kind to him for 21 years.”
Sandor suggests the fact that Padmanadi — or other restaurants — continue to thrive in a part of central Edmonton that “might be considered distressed” is important for the community.
“I can’t stress enough how important the dining scene is to economic recovery,” he said. “They are tied together.
“There is a reason that (Edmonton’s) Alberta Avenue does a dining passport. There is a reason that there’s a Chinatown dining week. It’s because these things are so important to neighbourhoods that need that hand up. And that’s so vital.”
Sandor notes that Padmanadi’s origins mirror a longstanding tradition of restaurants, often in the city’s core, where immigrant families have come to start over and where a “restaurant is one of the businesses that we see over and over (that is) chosen” as the way of starting a new life in a new country.
Richmond notes that her father’s work to give back goes beyond Alberta’s borders; he also has an orphanage in Nepal where he travels to visit.
“They’re so generous,” Laraque said when speaking about the family that owns Padmanadi. “They’re so nice. They’re so sweet.
“Every time I go, I see them. We laugh, talk, and they always make sure everything is OK … They’re nice with everyone. I see how they treat everyone.”
The future
“It’s been hard,” Richmond said when asked about what it’s been like to move with her husband and daughter and leave the rest of her close-knit family in Edmonton to come to Calgary.
Despite that challenge, Richmond says she has been enjoying getting to know the city she now lives in and taking trips to the mountains on her days off. She notes she has already developed a habit of avoiding Calgary’s Deerfoot Trail freeway “at any cost.”
“Traffic scares me,” she said with a laugh.
As she prepares for a busy year in 2024, Richmond says she is aware of the hard work it will take to grow her restaurant’s reach in Calgary but that she is embracing the challenge.
“It’s like, I am not opening just a regular restaurant — I’m opening a very specific kind of restaurant, a vegan restaurant — in Calgary,” she said. “It’s been very challenging for me entering this market. Calgary’s big, it’s huge, you know, in terms of population.
“(I am living) three hours away from my family, away from everything I know … (It’s ) just my husband, myself and my daughter — and it’s been hard, but I think it’s going to be worth it.”
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