From Amritsar to Vancouver on Terminal Avenue: The Story Behind The Kohi Bar
Jaswinder Kaur will tell you she’s been feeding people her whole life. Long before she had a food truck of her own, she was watching her grandmother, her mother, and her aunt cook in the family kitchen back in Amritsar. In Punjabi culture, she says, hospitality isn’t optional — anyone who walks through your door gets fed. That was the house she grew up in, and it’s the instinct that eventually built The Kohi Bar, the mobile coffee and food truck she now runs with her husband, Jaspreet Singh, on the streets of Vancouver. Both are graduates of WCC’s Bachelor of Hospitality Management (BHM) program, and their journey is exactly the kind of story we love to share.
Two Paths That Led to the Same Kitchen
Jaswinder and Jaspreet’s road to that food truck was anything but a straight line. Before coming to Canada, Jaswinder studied nutrition and dietetics at Lovely Professional University in Jalandhar, while Jaspreet studied agriculture at the same school — which is also where the two of them met. Neither had any background in business. “We do not have any background in entrepreneurship whatsoever,” Jaswinder says plainly.
What she did have was a habit of chasing an idea anyway. In grade eleven, she started baking cakes at home for family and friends, just for fun. When COVID hit and she was back home in India, that hobby turned into something more serious — she began selling cakes professionally, then landed contracts supplying bread and bagels to local cafés in Amritsar. Around the same time, her mother, who runs a school, was selling an old van. Sitting with her brother one day, Jaswinder floated an idea that seemed almost too casual to matter: what if they turned that van into a food truck? She wrote out a menu on the spot. Her parents, true to form, never told her no. “If you really wanna do this, we will make it work,” her dad said.
Three months later, Jaswinder moved to Canada, where Jaspreet was already living, and the food truck idea went dormant — but it didn’t disappear. In a moment she describes as pure manifestation, her father recently reminded her, during a visit, that she’d first dreamed up a food truck six years earlier. This year, it became real.
Building It Themselves, One YouTube Video at a Time
The couple bought their truck last November, almost by accident. They’d spotted a trailer for sale on Facebook Marketplace on Vancouver Island, listed for close to $30,000 — well outside what they thought they could afford — and walked away from it. Months later, after Jaswinder’s grandfather fell ill and she flew home to see him, a notification arrived: the seller had dropped the price. “This is the sign,” she told Jaspreet. “I don’t know where we’ll get the money from, but we have to do it.” They emptied their savings and bought it.
What they’d bought was, in Jaswinder’s words, in horrible condition. Neither of them was a carpenter or a plumber, but hiring one wasn’t really an option — quotes for something as simple as replacing a window ran to $5,000 or $6,000. So they became carpenters and plumbers, teaching themselves everything from YouTube: framing, plumbing, wiring, cabinetry. It took months of nights and weekends, on top of both of them working full-time jobs, to turn the van into a working kitchen on wheels. Then came the paperwork — business licenses, health permits, zoning approval, a commissary kitchen agreement — which took even longer than the renovation and involved refiling the same documents with two different cities before either would accept them.
All told, the build and the permits ran close to $45,000, including a $12,000 La Marzocco espresso machine, because Jaswinder wanted to serve genuinely premium coffee, not a compromise.
Where the Name Comes From
The name they landed on, The Kohi Bar, is a nod to her brother’s café back in Amritsar, called Kohi — Japanese for coffee. He opened it after training as a dentist and then walking away from the clinic to chase the same instinct his sister has; he now has locations in Amritsar and Mohali. Jaswinder is carrying the family name — and the family’s coffee-forward standard — to Vancouver.
What the BHM Program Gave Them
None of this happened in isolation from what Jaswinder and Jaspreet learned at WCC. Their Bachelor of Hospitality Management studies gave them more than technical training in food service — it’s where the idea of building something of their own started to feel possible rather than reckless. The program’s emphasis on entrepreneurship, on understanding a business from the kitchen to the books, gave the couple a language and a framework for what they were already inclined to do. When they recently returned to campus to speak with current BHM students, it wasn’t as outside experts — it was as graduates showing the next cohort exactly what the leap looks like, permits, setbacks, savings accounts, and all.
Five Years Down the Line
Ask Jaswinder where she sees herself in five years, and she doesn’t hesitate: more trucks, and eventually, retirement from the daily grind, on her own terms. “It is so rare for people to genuinely get to wake up and do what they love,” she says. “Nobody’s forcing me to do this. This is the life I always wanted.” For now, that life looks like a truck parked on Terminal Avenue, an espresso machine she fought to afford, and a business named after her brother’s café half a world away.
Western Community College is proud of our BHM alumni and the businesses they go on to build. Our Bachelor of Hospitality Management program is designed to prepare students not just for a career in the industry, but for the possibility of building their own. To learn more, visit wcc.ca
