One Edmonton Building Runs Three Restaurants by Daypart

Conrad Brown / v2com

The signal: Three adjacent venues split one residential building’s hospitality demand by daypart, moving guests from morning bakery-café to dinner restaurant to late-night lounge instead of forcing one concept to serve every occasion.

At Edmonton’s Citizen on Jasper, chef Daniel Costa’s hospitality group runs three adjacent concepts as one day-long sequence: Va! for morning coffee and Roman-style bakery food, Olia for evening Italian dining, and Mimi for late-night drinks, jazz and DJs. Residents can enter privately from inside the residential tower while the public uses street-facing entrances. The unusual idea is not one restaurant doing everything, but three specialised venues sharing one building and dividing the day between them.

The Concept

Citizen on Jasper does not use a single all-day restaurant to cover breakfast, dinner and nightlife. Instead, the ground floor is organised as three neighbouring hospitality concepts with different jobs. Va! is the daytime entry point. The official café describes itself as an Italian forno and caffè, open daily from 8:00 to 15:00, with panini, pizza al taglio, coffee and large-format pizza options. Its role is quick, casual and repeatable: breakfast, coffee, lunch and takeaway.

A few doors away, Olia takes over the evening. Chef Daniel Costa’s Italian ristorante opens daily from 17:00 to 22:00 and serves a seasonal menu built around antipasti, handmade pasta, secondi and an exclusively Italian wine list. It is deliberately slower and more formal than Va!, giving the same building a full dinner occasion without asking the café to stretch into evening service.

Mimi then carries the sequence later. The cocktail lounge opens from 18:00 into the night, with walk-ins, snacks, cocktails, live jazz, DJs and occasional music programming. Its operating model is closer to a lounge than a restaurant, including standing room and a limited number of reservations for larger groups.

The three venues are physically related but retain separate identities, menus, hours and atmospheres. Ste Marie’s design connects them through a common hospitality language while programming each for a different tempo. A further layer comes from the building itself: residents of Citizen on Jasper have private internal access, while outside guests enter from the street. The result is a hospitality ecosystem embedded directly into residential life, with the building generating several distinct food-and-drink occasions across the same day.

What Is Actually New

Restaurants routinely extend their opening hours, add breakfast, introduce happy hour or convert into bars after dinner. Citizen on Jasper takes a more modular approach: instead of making one brand change personality several times a day, it assigns each major daypart to a separate specialist concept.

That separation is the first genuinely interesting mechanism. Va! can optimise for speed, coffee, bakery display and takeaway without becoming an evening restaurant. Olia can focus on seated dinner, handmade pasta and wine without carrying breakfast infrastructure. Mimi can operate as a low-light cocktail and music venue without asking a dining room to transform after service. Each concept is therefore allowed to become more specific while the building as a whole still captures demand from morning into late night.

The second unusual element is the relationship with the residential tower. Residents have private internal access to the hospitality spaces, while the public arrives from Jasper Avenue. That makes the venues simultaneously neighbourhood businesses and an amenity layer for people living directly above them.

Multi-concept restaurant groups and mixed-use developments are not new, so this should not be framed as a world first. What is more distinctive is the concentration: three strongly differentiated concepts, operated by the same chef-led group, placed side by side and deliberately sequenced by time of day. For operators, the transferable idea is that daypart expansion does not always require forcing one restaurant to become an all-day brand.

Why People Want This

The consumer appeal begins with relevance. The same address can serve very different moods without asking customers to accept a compromised all-day format. Someone can use Va! for a fast coffee or slice of pizza, return to Olia for a slower dinner, then move to Mimi for cocktails and music. Each visit feels purpose-built for the occasion rather than like another menu bolted onto the same restaurant.

That creates discovery without much friction. Guests who already trust one concept can encounter the others literally next door, giving the group a natural way to move customers between brands. The progression also supports different lengths of stay: minutes at the café, hours at dinner, then a less structured late-night lounge experience.

For residents, the proposition is even more unusual. Private internal access turns the restaurants into an extension of the building’s amenity set without making them residents-only. That combination gives people the convenience of having serious hospitality downstairs while preserving the energy and variety that come from a public venue.

The strongest psychological draw is therefore choice with coherence. Customers are not choosing among three unrelated businesses; they are moving through related environments with distinct identities. The concepts offer familiarity at the group level while still changing pace, service style and social intensity across the day.

WBC Verdict

The strongest idea at Citizen on Jasper is organisational rather than technological: one building behaves like an all-day hospitality platform while each individual restaurant stays specialised. That avoids the common problem of an all-day concept becoming mediocre at several occasions instead of excellent at one. The model is not automatically scalable—three adjacent venues require enough density and demand to support separate teams and identities—but it is worth watching for mixed-use developments. It shows how restaurants can be treated as a coordinated portfolio of dayparts rather than isolated tenants competing for the same hours.