Wadena Café Memories — Saskatchewan History & Folklore Society

Jennifer Yee Hwang and David Yee with their grandmother, Eng Kan hai (Grandpa Yee’s mother), in the Wadena Café, Wadena, Saskatchewan.

Wadena Café has special memories for me and my family. I fondly remember going on road trips as a child to visit my Grandma and Grandpa Yee and my Uncle David who lived upstairs the restaurant.

The early days for the restaurant at 77 Main Street were tough as most business tended to go towards the south side of Main Street, where the connector roads were located. Wadena Café was located on the north side of Main Street. Originally the Wadena Café had four business partners. One by one, the partners left, leaving it to my Grandpa Yee in the mid-1960s. He brought his extended family over from Hong Kong, including my Grandma Yee, Aunt Freda Louie and mother Jennifer Yee Hwang, in 1964.

In the early 1960s, most of the clientele were men who were travelling along the highway. Things would drastically change in 1972 when a brand new co-op grocery was built across the street from the café, drawing the traffic north of Main Street. My Uncle David only knew the restaurant as a raging success in the 1970s. He remembers the entire co-op staff coming over lunch and for coffee breaks.

“All of its (Co-op) staff, thirty some people would come over. During Fridays and Saturdays nights, I remember endless steaks. I remember throwing dry ice cages of lobster tail. I remember the fish truck coming in and seeing large, large halibut: the kind of fish that would stun people because the overall value of it,” he says.

Serving Quality Food Draws Crowds

According to my Uncle David, Wadena Café, and the entire province of Saskatchewan, enjoyed the agricultural heyday in the 1970s. Agriculture, the price of land, and the price of agricultural commodities were at thier highest. The café drew in wealthy farmers. They were not ordering hamburgers. They were not ordering fries. They were ordering t-bone steak and lobsters. Their wives were often ordering halibut steak and lobster tail.

The Wadena Café and the Yee family connected with their regular customers over the food.

My Uncle David remembers one regular customer who liked to eat Western and Chinese cuisine of the restaurant. The café served western food and Canadianized Chinese food. But the Yee family ate authentic Chinese food in the back of the restaurant. One regular customer, Steve, liked the authentic food as well, including salted fish, shrimp paste, Chinese hot sauce and things made out of garlic.

“Steve would often come in during our supper hours, sneak in while Grandma Yee wasn’t watching. And I would be sitting there eating supper. Steve would often sneak in through the back door and I would look at him and smile and he would, with his fingers, not utensils, pluck food off of the plate. He would give a little bit of a chuckle and run out the back door. He was a regular in the restaurant in the front end. And an uninvited regular to the back end of the restaurant,” remembers my Uncle David.

Relatives recall it was a busy place during mealtime and coffee time. Sometimes, it was so busy that there were no seats available. My Aunt Freda says that the restaurant’s business was so good that people came from as far away as 200 miles to eat the food.

My Uncle John Yee, my mother, Jennifer Yee Hwang and aunt, Freda Louie, helped out however they could, including peeling potatoes and washing dishes as there were no automatic dishwashers yet. My uncle recalls doing dishes upon dishes, including getting bleeding fingers from the huge loads.

“Went through a lot of rubber gloves. I never counted how many dishes we did. On the busy times, sometimes you have to keep up with the usage. Sometimes you wash for hours,” he says.

My mother agrees.

“Everything was done by hand. Every fork, every plate we had to wash and rinse it and dry them. Can you imagine in those days,” she says. “A lot of us, the waitresses, and us, helping out, we didn’t have time to eat lunch. It’s way after lunch time we could sit down and have lunch.”

Later on, Grandpa Yee bought the first automated dishwasher in town in 1971. He understood how simple and how easy it was to operate which is why he was willing to give my Uncle David the opportunity to work. You just set up the dishes in a tray and slid them to your left and pulled down the gate that closed and washed the dishes. My Uncle David, who was just six years old at the time, was entrusted with the task of operating this automated dishwasher, which was his very first job.

“I remember asking Grandpa Yee if I could help. So when you’re living there 24/7 day after day, including your weekends, seeing so much activity, a young person with energy, what you want to do is be involved. So he went and got for me an old Coke wooden crate which held 48 individual bottles of coke. He turned it upside down so I could stand and wash dishes,” he says.

According to my mother, there were two other Chinese restaurants, a pizza place, ice cream parlour and the hotel restaurant. Of these places, she was told Wadena Café was the busiest. Customer service and portion size were contributing factors to the raging success of the restaurant.

“I think what made the difference is mom was a good cook. She served huge portions. Who doesn’t like huge portions? She was a good cook too, I must admit,” says my mother.

One of the signature dishes my Grandma Yee made was sweet and sour spare ribs, which had a secret recipe. Grandma Yee had learned it from a famous chef in Hong Kong when she took cooking lessons before coming to Canada.

“I used to like the sauce so much that I used it when I had my potato chips. That was my gravy. I like to dip it. It was so yummy,” recalls my mother.

Generosity and Hospitality Extends to All People

Years later, my Grandma Yee told my mother that some Wadena folks ran into Grandpa Yee in Saskatoon. The former customer told Grandpa Yee how much he missed the sweet and sour spare ribs, so Grandpa Yee made a huge pail of ribs and sent it off to him by bus to Wadena.

“Dad was very generous by nature. Very kind man. Very kind to the little ones. Give little kids lollipops when they come in. People loved him. He got along with all kinds of people always had a smile for people. Because of their work ethics and their personality, their generosity towards people, they were rewarded,” says my mother.

“Both my parents worked very hard. They treated their customers like their family. I can see it’s such a happy place in the restaurant. Mom and dad served good, fresh food, fresh meat, vegetables and good cooking. That’s good cuisine. People like that,” says my Aunt Freda Louie.

Grandpa and Grandma Yee served customers well and treated everyone the same - whether they were rich or not. Grandpa Yee’s generosity also extended to those who couldn’t afford basic food. My mother remembers the restaurant had a section that featured canned goods. Some people just didn’t have enough money to buy those canned goods. These regular customers would ask my grandpa to give them the food now and they could pay for him later.

“Dad says that’s no problem. He was willing to help out the people in need that way,” says my mother.

“Grandpa Yee said they must be in need, if they cannot pay,” noted my Aunt Freda.

My grandparents’ generosity extended to off business hours as well. My Aunt Freda remembers one night at 2 am, a drunken customer came knocking on the café’s door. My Grandma told my aunt that person must be very hungry. My aunt begged not to let that customer in.

“I was very unhappy about serving that one customer, but that person was so satisfied. I learned a lesson that no matter what you do, do it faithfully. No matter who the customer is, treat them like royalty. I learned that from my hard-working parents,” says my aunt.

Childhood Shenanigans

My Uncle David Yee has memories of the restaurant as a young child. He recalls being in one of the bedrooms above the café, particularly the window that looked onto the roof.

“When I was a little more adventurous, I would go out onto the second floor window from that bedroom, walk out on the roof of the restaurant to watch various events that were happening in the town, be it high school students cruising around on Main Street on Friday and Saturday night, major town events like a parade, and instead of watching the parade on the sidewalk, I viewed the parade from a rooftop,” says my Uncle David.

He got in trouble for hanging out on the roof. One time, he had invited some friends to see the roof as he thought it was one of the coolest things about the restaurant. The roofs of most buildings on Main Street were flat.

“Our neighbour at the time was a MacLeod store and a tire shop. And what we would routinely jump back and forth between the two buildings. The gap between the buildings on main street was only about two feet. We’d take a running start and take off onto the various roofs. As we got older, you could go all the way down to the end of the block roof to roof,” says my Uncle David.

Freda Louie in front of the Wadena Café.

Eye-catching Facade Attracts Customers

But his most vivid memory of the restaurant was my Grandpa’s colour scheme: green and orange horizontal stripes. It was a very distinctive paint job with distinctive colours.

“There was no way you could drive by Main Street of Wadena and not see Wadena Café. The green and orange actually created a lot of tension in your eyes. So everybody could see it whether it was early in the morning or late at night, you could find that landmark,” he says.

When he talked to Grandpa Yee about these colours, he said he picked those colours intentionally because they were really hard to miss. My uncle thinks that this was probably Grandpa Yee’s attempt to do visual marketing. He was trying to make a statement for the restaurant itself beyond what he normally had, and the door front facade provided a certain amount of real estate on the sidewalk. He also had a pink neon sign.

“So if you could imagine the colour scheme in the evening, it was pink, bright green and orange. But he was looking for something. So the largest part of space he could occupy was the front facade. So he put colours that created a lot of tension that attracted your eye,” says my uncle.

Even recently, people who frequented the café still remember those striking colours of the café. Sometimes they remember Grandpa Yee and his family, but what they all remember is the colour of the facade of the restaurant.

Working in the Kitchen with Little Knowledge of English

Grandma Yee came from a well-to-do family. She was the youngest of a large family. However, it was a shock for her to come to Canada, leaving her elevated status of life to starting from scratch. Unfortunately, my Grandma Yee had a limited working knowledge of English. My Grandpa Yee was fluent, as he dealt with customers. So my Grandma Yee had to figure out a system to understand the orders to cook meals with her meagre languages. She couldn’t read English, but she had a strong memory.

She required everyone who worked with her to call out every single item on all of the bills. She broke down her workplace into functional blocks - the stove, the deep fryer, the oven, the toaster - to figure out what tasks she needed to do. For example, if there were orders for fries, she would count out how many orders of fries she needed to make. Or she figured out how many burgers she needed to put on the oven. Once she knew how many burgers were on the grill, she would ask another round of questions to clarify which burgers and what kind of burgers were ordered next.

“Is it a bacon burger, a mushroom burger, is it a cheese burger, is it a double patty deluxe burger, whatever it was. And that’s how she did it,” he says.

Secret to Restaurant and Family Success

Grandpa Yee was focused on how the business could become a vehicle or a pathway for his family, an opportunity for his family.

“Even though it’s not a lot of fun, it’s not a glamorous lifestyle, and working your way in a kitchen and just serving people food is not everyone’s cup of tea, he found a professionalism and a consistency in a way to do it,” my Uncle David says.

“What made Grandpa Yee so successful was that he made sure he did everything that he could do to make people safe and comfortable around him. He adapted to their ways, language, food styles in public. In private, he maintained his culture and traditions. But what made the family successful and Grandpa and Grandma Yee so successful, was that their public and private lives didn’t mingle so much. Their public life made everyone around them feel very very safe. It was a formula for their business being a success. People got exactly what they wanted and exactly what they expected from Grandpa and Grandma Yee,” he says.

But behind the Wadena Café was a family trying to balance a public and a private life.

“There’s a lot more to this particular family and there’s a lot more that happened under the roof of Wadena Café that had very little to do with restauranting and restaurant customers and the people that they would normally associate with the family inside of a restaurant,” he says.

My Uncle David remembers going on late night Sunday drives for an hour or an hour and half to neighbouring towns when Grandma and Grandpa Yee would debrief about work and life. They relaxed and escaped restaurant life for a brief while.

“As a small child sitting in the back seat, sometimes you could participate in the discussions, but mostly I sat there and I listened to the stories. I listened to the discussions between my parents. It gives you a really interesting look at how a family comes to grips with working in a restaurant and how you balance the restaurant, which is all encompassing and where you live, with private times that you have … and private time that you could only realize because you jumped into a car and drive away,” he remembers.

Images courtesy of Florence Hwang and family.

Florence Hwang has a background in Canadian history, journalism, librarianship and documentary film. Currently, she is working as a media librarian in Regina.

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