After working at Duchess Bake Shop for five years, Kelsey Johnson was ready to open a restaurant of her own. The self-taught chef spent years refining her skills as a cook, butcher and restauranteur. So when the opportunity arose, she opened Café Linnea as the sister operation to Duchess. “I loved the owners of Duchess Bake Shop so I knew I wanted to combine the two and open up a place of my own,” Kelsey says. “I approached them a couple of years ago with the idea and they agreed.”
Café Linnea opened July 4, 2016 as a farm-to-table restaurant and merger of Kelsey’s own Scandinavian-French background. The menu stars seasonal, locally sourced ingredients prepared with French techniques and Scandinavian influence. “It’s the marriage of the two,” Kelsey explains. “My background is French and Scandinavian – that’s my parents’ two sides. So growing up eating their food in the community I grew up in influenced everything that I do here.”
Kelsey grew up in a Scandinavian community near Pigeon Lake and has been around farms her entire life. She developed a passion for homegrown ingredients like the vegetables from her grandma’s garden and has been partial to local produce ever since. “When I was younger my grandmother always had a garden and it was where the best food came from. You’d pull up a carrot with a bit of dirt and that’s what makes it taste so good,” she says. “I wanted that to be the main focus and I wanted the local farmers and local produce to really speak for what we were doing.”