Greetings from Kelowna, home (for the past eight years) of the Canadian Culinary Championships. Our Ottawa Gold Medal Plates winner, chef Briana Kim of Café My House, is here with her team, ready for the weekend long competition that will see a new Canadian culinary champion wrest the cup and the honour from Calgary’s Jinhee Lee.
Kim will be up against 10 other winning chefs from regional competitions from coast to coast.
The kick off to the CCC 2018 was Thursday night. Each chef was introduced to the team of culinary students from Okanagan College, assigned to help them. They were given an envelope of cash and an unlabelled bottle of bottle. All they know is that it’s Canadian — that’s a given — and this year, it’s white.
Wine in hand, slurped and sniffed and studied, the Kim team were off crack of dawn this morning to scour the food shops of Kelowna to create a dish that accomplishes three things: feed a crowd of 400 within a strict $500 budget; impress the judges with its creativity and flavours and economy; and work brilliantly with the wine. (At this competition, the first of three this weekend, 30% of the marks allocated are for the match.)
Here’s Kim’s competition:
From British Columbia, Alex Chen–Boulevard Kitchen & Oyster Bar
From Calgary, Blake Flann – BLAKE, Canmore
From Edmonton, Shane Chartrand – SAGE
From Regina, David Vinova – Wild Sage Kitchen & Bar
From Saskatoon, James McFarland – University of Saskatchewan
From Winnipeg, Mike Robins – Sous Sol
From Toronto, Lorenzo Loseto – George Restaurant
From Montreal, Éric Gonzalez – L’Atelier Joël Robuchon
From Halifax, Barry Mooney – Gio
From St. John’s, Nick Jewczyk – The Fifth Ticket
Leave a Reply