The Local Omnivore

Food shouldn’t be stressful – at least that’s what Ryan Brodziak thought. Ryan was working as a kitchen manager when he was given the perplexing task of finding blood oranges for a menu item. “I had to call every single grocery store in the whole city to find one that had blood oranges for god knows what price,"  Ryan explains. “There was so much stress that didn’t need to be there. Can we not just think a bit more logically on how to do that?”

The solution was simple – Ryan and his co-worker Mark Bellows hatched a plan to take the stress out of dining. They wanted to utilize local ingredients, reduce waste and learn to preserve as many foods as possible. So they opened up The Local Omnivore. “That’s really why we started and what we wanted to do,” Ryan says. “And we adapted all of our processes to follow that philosophy.”

Ryan didn’t initially set out to be a cook. He dropped out of business school at Grant MacEwan to be a musician and begrudgingly took up a kitchen job because he needed money, figuring he’d have more flexibility to book gigs and take time off for his music. But everything changed when he started his new job. “I fell in love with working on the line,” Ryan says. “I loved the excitement and how we’re all supposed to move to make this faster and make this more efficient and smarter.”

The Local Omnivore started as a food truck in 2013 and transitioned to a brick and mortar restaurant in January 2016. But it all started with a short and simple menu of poutine, sandwiches, burgers and cold smoked meats. Cold smoking is a lesser known preservation technique where meats are cured and then smoked without heat or cooking. When done correctly, cold smoking can preserve meat for months. “We can take whatever meat the farmers are left with and we can process it and cure it so it’ll never go bad,” Ryan explains. “Then we’ll all be able to make money off of it. And we can help the other guys out – the farmers who need to move their stuff.”