Renée Girard (Shirley's, Winnipeg): what the barn taught her
The barn was hickory, and it sat on a farm outside Elie, Manitoba, and her parents turned it into a restaurant. That's where it starts. Not with a culinary school application, not with a first dishwashing shift, but with a grandmother named Shirley Tyrrell who ran the cooking and never used a measuring cup. Cookie after breakfast. Cake after lunch. Root-beer float after dinner.
Renée Girard grew up inside that barn. Shirley moved around the kitchen with the particular ease of someone who'd been feeding people her entire life — comfort food and desserts, generous portions, nothing precious. What Girard absorbed there wasn't a recipe or a technique. It was something harder to pin down: that food is the language people use to show love, and that a room full of people eating well is one of the best things you can build.
Shirley Tyrrell died in 2014. Last spring, Girard opened a 35-seat restaurant at 135 Osborne Street in Winnipeg's Osborne Village and named it after her. There's a framed photo of Shirley behind the bar. There's a pickle plate on the menu, rotating seasonal vegetables brined with care, because Shirley was famous for her pickling. This is how you honour someone.
The long way round
The years between the barn and Shirley's were exactly what you'd expect from someone who takes her work seriously: a lot of other people's kitchens.
Girard worked at Langside Grocery, managed the café at Forth, then landed at Harth Mozza & Wine Bar in St. Vital as sous chef, frequently running the pasta station. In 2019, The Globe and Mail named her one of "the country's next top chefs." She was building towards something. Then the pandemic arrived and her job disappeared.
Here's where a lot of talented cooks made a different decision. Girard didn't. In August 2020, she launched Made by Paste, a delivery-only operation selling fresh handmade pasta and condiments sourced almost entirely from local Manitoba farms. A Very Good Dip. Ragu with 'Ndjua. Three-cheese ravioli. An anchovy dressing. And what became something of a cult object in Winnipeg: the Black Market Crunch, made in collaboration with Black Market Provisions, still sold years later.
Made by Paste wasn't a pivot away from restaurants. It was a proof of concept. Girard was running her own kitchen for the first time, making her own decisions about sourcing and flavour, selling directly to people who cared what they were eating. She found out she was right about herself.
In 2023, she entered the Winnipeg leg of the Canadian Culinary Championship and podiumed with a hand-rolled carrot capunti in a braised Vietnamese beef broth, seasoned with her house-made 10-spice blend. She went to the national finals in Ottawa. When she eventually opened Shirley's, that dish made it onto the menu: adapted, refined, now as cavatelli instead of capunti, served with Thai basil, mint, raw red onion, and a wedge of lime.
Better guest experience. Bigger nights. $299. Once.
Thirty-five seats, on purpose
Shirley's is not a big restaurant. This is not an accident.
The space in a former Osborne Village tapas bar has sunflower-yellow tables, half curtains sewn by Girard's sister-in-law, millwork built by her partner Ken's family company Kane Millwork, and a room designed alongside her friend Beth Schellenberg. The staff are all people Girard knows: general manager Ali Vandale, chefs Zac Chizda and Maddie Magnus Walker, bartender Christian Lepp. The front door opens onto a shelf of Made by Paste products and imported tinned fish, which tells you immediately what kind of place this is.
The menu has 14 items. Entrees run $11 to $33. There are three pastas, each made by hand. The fries are brined before frying and served with a smoked mussel aioli. The beef tartare comes on pizza fritta, with anchovy cream. The carrot cavatelli is the one people talk about.
What the Winnipeg food press noticed almost immediately was a quality that's harder to manufacture than good technique: the sense that this restaurant was built for people to enjoy themselves, not to impress anyone. The reviewer for Peguru called it "a confident return to intimacy," and that feels right. In a food scene where ambition usually translates to more seats, bigger menus, louder concepts, Girard is betting on the opposite.
Shirley's made the Air Canada 2025 Best New Restaurants shortlist. Industry people have taken notice. None of which changes the pickle plate.
What the barn taught her
Her grandmother was a mother of seven and grandmother of ten who cooked in a hickory barn on a Manitoba farm for most of her adult life. She showed love through food. She was well-known for her desserts. She rarely reached for a measuring cup.
Renée Girard's restaurant carries all of this. The photograph behind the bar. The pickle plate. The 35 seats filled with people she knows. The shelf by the door where her pandemic condiments sit next to tins of European fish. It's inheritance made physical, not a tribute to a grandmother exactly, but a continuation of something she started.
That's what the barn taught her. Not recipes. The understanding that a room where people eat well together is worth building, and worth protecting. Even when a pandemic takes away your job. Even when you have to deliver pasta out of your house to prove you can still do it. Even when, finally, you have your own space, you choose to keep it small.
Small enough to do it right.
Sources: Peg City Grub / Tourism Winnipeg, Winnipeg Free Press, Peguru, The Posh Foodie.