Winnie Chen (Fu's Repair Shop, Boa and Hare): The Recipe Trap
Winnie Chen did not want to be the chef at Fu's Repair Shop. Her bosses kept asking. She kept saying no. Her whole career had been French rooms, Italian rooms, steakhouses. She had never cooked Chinese food professionally, and the assumption that she would be naturally good at it because she was Chinese annoyed her enough that she dug in.
So she decided to prove she was the wrong fit by cooking them something they could not refuse.
She called her dad and asked him to teach her his three-day braised beef noodle soup, the dish her family had served decades earlier at their own noodle shop in Edmonton's Chinatown. The dish she had eaten as a child whenever her father stood at the stove. She walked her partners through the process, served them a bowl, and watched the plan collapse in real time. They wanted it on the menu the next morning.
That is when she realized she had a problem. The recipe belonged to her father. She could not just hand it over. "And that's when everything backfired on me," she told Taproot Edmonton. "I couldn't just give away this recipe. It belongs to my dad. That's when I was like, OK, I'll come on to the project, but I need to be a partner."
That is how Mr. Chen's Beef Noodle Bowl ended up on the menu, and how Winnie Chen ended up co-owning Fu's Repair Shop.
A Career Built In Other People's Cuisines
Chen started cooking at 19. It was supposed to be a part-time job to get her through school. By her mid-twenties she was deep into the kitchens she had no plan to leave. As she has told Edify, her food background is "French, Italian, and steakhouses." That is the resume of someone who took the long apprenticeship seriously: classical technique, butchery, sauce work, the kind of training where you spend years before anyone trusts you to put your name on anything.
There is a quiet point inside this. The expectation that any Chinese cook in Canada must be cooking Chinese food is one of the most persistent assumptions in this industry. Chen's career was a refusal of that expectation, until the moment she chose otherwise. When she finally did say yes to a Chinese concept, it was on her terms, with her father's recipe at the center, and with an ownership stake that meant the work could not be taken from her.
That is a different kind of pivot than the one most owners describe. It is not "I always knew I would do my own thing." It is closer to "I was building skills for years, and then a single dish forced the question."
Better guest experience. Bigger nights. $299. Once.
Fu's Repair Shop, And A Restaurant That Carries Memory
Fu's Repair Shop opened in early 2022. The name comes from the shopfront aesthetic, the analog-to-digital nostalgia of a Chinatown that no longer exists in the form Chen grew up around. The room is dressed with hundreds of red lanterns and the kind of ephemera that signals affection rather than pastiche. The food sits in the same register: dim sum, wok hay small plates, signature cocktails, and the beef noodle bowl that started everything.
The reception was loud and quick. Edify named it Best New Restaurant. It landed on enRoute's longlist of Canada's best new restaurants. Forbes wrote it up. The cocktails picked up their own awards. By 2024, Edify named Chen herself to its Top 40 Under 40 issue.
What is interesting about Fu's is not the awards. It is what the restaurant is doing with the awards. Chen grew up in McCauley, the neighbourhood next to Edmonton's Chinatown, riding her bike over for dim sum at the Pacific Mall banquet hall. The restaurant is built out of that childhood the same way Mr. Chen's beef noodle bowl is built out of her father's stove. It is a Chinese-Canadian restaurant made by someone whose memory of the place is specific, not symbolic.
Boa and Hare, And The Chinatown Bet
In December 2024, Chen, her brother William, and their partner Wilson Wong opened Boa and Hare inside that same Pacific Mall on 105 Avenue. The mall is mostly quiet now. Foot traffic in Edmonton's Chinatown has thinned for years. A lot of operators look at a space like that and see risk. The trio looked at it and saw the room where Winnie used to eat dumplings as a kid.
The concept is a café from 9 to 3, a cocktail bar from 5 to 11, Wednesday through Sunday. The name comes from the Chinese zodiac animals of the two co-owners who are not Winnie: snake and rabbit. Wilson and William had already taken over the old Van Loc sandwich shop on the same block a couple years earlier. Boa and Hare is the next bet on the same street.
Around the same time, Chen was named chair of the Edmonton Chinatown Business Improvement Area. That is the kind of role most chef-owners avoid. It is unpaid, it is political, and it eats hours that could be spent on the line. She took it anyway, because by that point the restaurant project and the neighbourhood project were the same project.
What Other Operators Can Take From This
A few things sit underneath this story that are worth saying out loud.
The first is that long technical apprenticeships do not lock you into a single cuisine. Chen spent years cooking food that had nothing to do with what she would eventually become known for. Those years were not a detour. They were the technique that lets her now do dim sum and wok hay at the level the awards require. The apprenticeship transferred. It almost always does.
The second is that ownership stakes are not always something you set out to win. Sometimes the leverage finds you. Chen did not negotiate her way into a partnership. She had a recipe her partners wanted that they could not get any other way. That is its own kind of moat, and it is worth thinking about for anyone weighing whether to share their best work for a salary.
The third is the kitchen culture piece. Chen has been clear that one of the things she is most proud of is the team she runs. She has built it deliberately to push back against the toxic kitchen norms a lot of cooks are still living through. That is not a marketing line. It shows up in her staff retention and in the way the restaurant feels.
The fourth is the neighbourhood piece. Chen's two restaurants, the BIA chair role, her brother's sandwich shop, the lanterns at Fu's, the Pacific Mall location for Boa and Hare. None of it reads as branding. It reads as someone slowly stitching back together the place she grew up in, one storefront at a time. That is the part of her story that other independent owners might recognize most clearly. The restaurant is rarely just the restaurant.
She came in through the back door of her own family's cuisine, with a bowl of soup she did not want to give away. Five years later, Edmonton's Chinatown is one of the things she now answers for.
Sources: Taproot Edmonton — Fu's Repair Shop, Taproot Edmonton — Boa and Hare, Edify — Top 40 Under 40, Edify — Boa and Hare, Alberta on the Plate — Winnie Chen.
