Jenny Kang (Orchard, Calgary): A Decade in Other Kitchens
Jenny Kang signed a lease on a restaurant space at the base of Calgary's SODO building with a May 2020 launch date. Two years of planning, a decade of working under other chefs, a lifetime of thinking about food. Then a pandemic shut everything down.
She opened five months late, in October. Orchard sold out for two straight months.
The Farm Outside Seoul
Kang grew up on a small farm outside Seoul, South Korea. That detail matters because it explains something about how she cooks. Mediterranean food built on seasonal produce, grounded in what's growing right now, isn't an intellectual exercise for her. It's how she learned to eat.
She moved to Calgary and enrolled at SAIT's culinary program. From there, a decade of kitchens: Teatro, Catch, Bow Valley Ranche as head chef, then Shokunin under Darren MacLean. At each stop, she absorbed something different. French technique at Teatro. Seafood precision at Catch. The confidence to run a kitchen at Bow Valley Ranche. And at Shokunin, a Japanese-inspired approach to ingredient respect that would reshape how she thought about her own cooking.
MacLean later pointed to her as one of the people making Calgary a global food destination. But at the time, she was just the head chef at someone else's restaurant, building skills she didn't fully know she'd need.
Better guest experience. Bigger nights. $299. Once.
Opening at the Worst Possible Time
The plan was always to have her own place. When Kang and her partners at Syndicate Hospitality Group found the space at SODO, a luxury residential project on 10th Avenue in the Beltline, they signed fast. May 2020 was the target.
COVID arrived in March.
For most people eyeing a restaurant launch that spring, the move was obvious: pull back, wait, reassess. Kang and her partners pushed the opening to October instead. Not a cancellation. A delay.
That decision tells you something. Opening a restaurant during a pandemic isn't brave in the motivational poster sense. It's a bet that the work you've put in is strong enough to survive bad timing. Kang had spent ten years proving she could cook at the highest level in Calgary. The food was ready. The concept was ready. The world just wasn't cooperating.
Orchard opened on October 8, 2020, in a Sturgess Architecture-designed room filled with greenery and chandeliers. It sold out almost immediately. Two months of packed tables before Alberta's second-wave restrictions forced them back to takeout.
The Globe and Mail reviewed the restaurant's takeout in early 2021, noting how well the food travelled. Her roasted broccoli with beet yogurt and za'atar, tiger prawns in crispy rice coating with lemon aioli: these were dishes built to hold up, designed by someone who understood that the food had to work even when the circumstances didn't.
Mediterranean Through a Korean Lens
The menu at Orchard gets described as "Asian Mediterranean," which is accurate but incomplete. What Kang actually does is cook Mediterranean food the way someone who grew up in Korea would cook it. The flavours are French and Italian at the foundation, but the instincts are Korean: yuzu in the aioli, a lighter touch with dairy, fermented depth where you'd expect cream.
It's not fusion in the way that word usually gets thrown around. There's no clash of cuisines for novelty's sake. It's one person's lived experience on the plate. Kang grew up eating Korean food on a farm. She trained in French and Italian technique. She worked under a Japanese-inspired chef. All of that shows up in the cooking, not because she designed it to, but because that's who she is.
This is something independents often get right that bigger operations miss. When the chef is the owner, the food doesn't have to be focus-grouped or positioned for a target demographic. It just has to be honest. Kang's food is honest.
What a Decade of Patience Looks Like
By the time Orchard opened, Kang had earned a gold medal at Calgary's Gold Medal Plates competition, won the Pig & Pinot event in 2018 with a dish called Sea Garden Eden, and built a reputation as one of the strongest cooks in western Canada. Canada's 100 Best listed Orchard in both 2021 and 2022. Avenue Calgary named it a Best New Restaurant. Western Living made her a Foodie of the Year finalist in 2021.
None of that happened fast. The distance between being a SAIT grad working the line at Teatro and being an award-winning chef-owner is measured in years of someone else's mise en place, someone else's menu, someone else's name on the door.
There's a pattern with independent restaurateurs who last. They don't rush to open. They learn the job by doing the job, in kitchens that aren't theirs, under chefs who push them. By the time they finally take the leap, the work behind them is so deep that even a pandemic can't sink it.
Kang opened at the worst possible time and made it look easy. It wasn't. Ten years of other kitchens made it possible.
Sources: Orchard Restaurant, Savour Calgary, Western Living, Canada's 100 Best, The Globe and Mail, Alberta on the Plate.
