Every month, The Urban Element offers a full schedule of cooking classes which are available on weeknights and weekends and their calendar changes quarterly to follow the seasons.
About C.A. Paradis- Chef's Paradise
Pierre Paradis, was a cutler who was born in Chartres, France, in July, 1604. He came to Ile D'Orléans, Québec, Canada to practice his trade. It is indeed a great coincidence that C.A.Paradis is operated by another Pierre Paradis. The twenty-first century Paradis is not exactly a cutler, but he certainly has adorned many a table with the finest in today's cutlery. Both Paradis' trade marks even share common graphic elements. Love for the elegant table top is certainly in our blood.
The company was established in 1921 by Pierre Paradis' uncle Charles August Paradis (C.A.Paradis), who was joined shortly after by Pierre's father, Ernest. Until 1971, they sold domestic products such as china and glassware from their Rideau Street location just east of Parliament Hill. Between them, they supported 16 children through the Depression and the Second World War.
Pierre Paradis, his parents' youngest and 11th child, still gets calls a couple of times a month to replace china or other items for customers who shopped at the old store that closed in 1971. "Many homes in Ottawa over 40 years old have something that came from that little shop on Rideau Street," says Paradis, who still has in his office a little wooden file box with his father's handwritten accounts receivable cards going back to 1921.
Pierre Paradis met his wife Diane in the store before he even worked there himself. His father used to boast about an attractive sales clerk in the gift shop, and when Paradis checked it out he ended up with a wife of 40 years. "My Dad not only picked my career," he laughs, "he picked my wife too."
Paradis started working for his father and uncle in late 1965, "only to discover that their sales were falling slowly and their profits dropping dramatically". "At my father's suggestion," he recounts, "I started to expand their miniscule restaurant supply division which consisted at that time of approximately 10 per cent of their total sales."
By 1971, his uncle had retired and his father had died. That summer he learned that the building was to be demolished to make way for what became the Rideau Centre. "They now concentrated all their resources in a new location and formed a more complete restaurant supply company at their present location on Bank Street."
Since that time more change has taken place and a partial return to retail has given the store a more timely offering of both retail and commercial products. Diane now operates a boutique within the store that specializes in wine related products from glassware to entire wine rooms. The retail section also offers an enormous selection of kitchen tools while the commercial division sells everything, including the kitchen sink, for all sorts of food service operations.
Excerpt from: The Ottawa Citizen, May 2nd, 1989
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