Category: ZZZ
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Great Kitchen Party of 2020: the pandemic edition
Things were done differently in this quite-different year. Glittery galas cancelled, gatherings reduced to tiny numbers, the good people who have staged Canada’s Great Kitchen Party (formerly, Gold Medal Plates) have had to come up with a new plan. Conceived 15 years ago as a series of coast-to-coast culinary competitions in support of Canadian athletes […]
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Coconut Lagoon’s sorrow
I was writing a short piece to celebrate Joe Thottungal’s cookbook making the ‘long list’ for the Taste Canada Awards when the awful news hit that his restaurant was on fire. After sixteen years of operations Coconut Lagoon has now closed for the foreseeable future. I’m acquainted with a great number of restaurants in this […]
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Cooking for a cause
Team STOFAThe Ottawa restaurant industry has always given big-heartedly its precious time and gastronomic treats to a worthy cause. And here’s yet another example of this generosity: STOFA (chef-owner Jason Sawision) was the first of three restaurants to host a pop-up dinner in support of the invaluable work of Citizen Advocacy Ottawa. Four courses for 35 […]
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Drinking in Healdsburg, California
Greener Grape Growing
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Alice: vivid, inventive plant-based food
Briana Kim has been watching mushrooms break down. This, in the fermenting chamber at her restaurant, Alice, newly opened in the little house on Adeline Street that used to host The Rex, and then, briefly, Marc Kitchen. Kim’s been fascinated, she tells us as she delivers course 5 of 8 (‘Mushroom & Potato’), to taste what happens […]
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THRU by Marc Lepine
THRU is found inside Atelier Restaurant, at 540 Rochester Street. Reservations are made at thru.tickit.ca. June and July dates are now sold out. August dates to come. Cost: $400 for two, taxes, gratuity and booze included. Of all the various chats I have had with chef Marc Lepine over the years, the one I remember […]
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tasty lessons in Québec City
I’m at Café-Bar Artéfact in Auberge Saint-Antoine seated comfortably beside a cannonball. It’s of French manufacture, shot some 260 years ago from a small French cannon aimed, I would imagine, at the British. Still embedded in the hunk of wood in which it was found, it relaxes next to a section of stonework that was […]
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Canadian Culinary Championships 2018
In the dozen years I’ve been helping adjudicate the Canadian Culinary Championships, there has never been a more impressive parade of dishes at the Mystery Wine Pairing. Yes, the wine is stripped of a label, known only for its Canadian content and colour, and yes, 30% of the marks are for the food-wine match…. But […]
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Food life in the Fez Medina
“There are, give or take, ten thousand lanes in there,” our Fez taxi driver tells us as we wait outside the Batha Gate for our hotel porter. “The narrow streets were built to be complicated. It made it more difficult for the invaders.” It’s no picnic for modern invaders either. Every map of the Fez […]