Greenwashing...

I’ve always been a bit of a rebel—I question authority, I don’t take things at face value, I like to think that I live on the edge, battling the status quo. I don’t know where I picked up this attitude, maybe it has something to do with being a middle child—neither the firstborn nor the baby, struggling to earn my due—maybe it has something to do with genetics (my folks could be described as having the occasional quirk...), maybe it was just my group of childhood friends who set me on this path. One thing is for sure, though, at least over the last year or so, that sense of NOT being in the mainstream is almost certainly incorrect. Or is it?



From things like the election, in the U.S., of an (on paper) progressive president, to my own casual forays into the halls of local politics and even to the broad, casual acceptance of things that used to be my niche, my fringe philosophies; especially things like the local and organic foods movement, green energy, like solar panels and hybrid cars, railing against pollution and oil companies... Well, often, the fact is, I just don’t feel so alone out here anymore.



I seem to be surrounded by friends, big and small, friends I never expected to meet; let me elaborate: today, I saw a Coca-Cola truck with a ten foot high banner bragging that it was a hybrid-electric vehicle that was responsible for cleaning city air; last week I saw an article in which our new Wal-Mart claimed to be building its new local box store using ‘sustainable building’ practices; a new Canadian Tire, (across the street from the old one) will be LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) certified. Grocery stores claim to carry local and organic products; new restaurants advertise local foods. I’m surrounded by friends, everywhere I look, trying to help make the world a better place by going green, buying local, even cleaning the air with Coca-Cola.



Why do I smell a rat?



Last week I saw Food Inc., finally. If you haven’t seen it yet, please, really, go watch it. Now. Seriously, I’ll still be here when you get back....



OK, you’ve seen it? Good! Now, welcome back; where was I? Food, Inc. is a movie that seems to be a summary of a lot of the information I try to share with people on pretty much a daily basis (monthly, if you just read the newsletter...) It encompasses everything from the dangers and pitfalls of centralized agribusiness in the meat and commodity food industries to the intimate connection between what we eat and our (and our planet’s) health. One of the experts interviewed in the film was Gary Hirschberg, a C.E.-Yo (...his joke, not mine...), president, and one of the people instrumental in bringing Stonyfield Yogurt into millions of homes all over North America every year. Gary, it would seem, was kind of a late term hippie; the Stonyfield website describes him as ‘an environmental activist, a windmill maker, an author, and a noted entrepreneur’; a little more homework reveals that he was a member of The New Alchemy Institute, a think-tank and not-for-profit research group of sorts that experimented with green technologies and that sounds like a page out of any edition of the Whole Earth Catalogue. He evolved into one of socially responsible business’s most exhilarating (on the surface) success stories. He is a man who has taken his values to the street, and by ‘the street’ I mean Main Street, the place where you and I actually live. His brand is no longer merely the best-selling organic yogurt brand; it is the 3rd largest selling yogurt brand, period. He is no longer David, he is Goliath.



I have often repeated language of Gary Hirschberg, both consciously and unconsciously, when describing my vision for our restaurant... How it is important to reach a wider audience, how our business is our activism, how my dream includes the ability not only to help support organic farmers, but to simply, actually, support them. Stonyfield does these things; it supports hundreds of organic farmers and is responsible for tens of thousands of acres of pesticide and herbicide free farmland, an outstanding accomplishment for any company and, in my opinion, probably an excellent step towards saving the world. Hirschberg’s latest venture is encroaching even closer towards my own with a line of natural and organic fast food restaurants under the moniker ‘O’Naturals’, a franchise which he claims that he wants to ‘become McDonald’s’. He speaks of these things with the passion of an evangelist; he firmly believes in taking the socially responsible business model right into heat of the battle, the thick of the fight. He is fearless, smart, and probably, I hope, does more good than harm.



Stonyfield is a grand idea, but here’s the thing: it is an idea built (again, in my opinion,) on the same shaky ground that has created the calamitous state of food everywhere. Everything about Stonyfield, everything about big agribusiness in general, is that instead of, or, perhaps, in Stonyfield’s case, along with, being about good, better and best, it is about being big, bigger and biggest. It is the same bloated mentality that has led us to the edge of the cliff and the same mentality that will push us over.



I don’t doubt that Hirschberg means well and has done a world of good. But by this logic, Wal-Mart has also done a world of good and probably supported thousands of organic farms with a single purchase order. Hirschberg is at much less moral fault than Wal-Mart, who is in the business of organics and ‘sustainable building’ to look good and to sell more products rather than for any deep-seated activist rationale, but he, whether he likes it or not, is at the mercy of the same flawed system nonetheless.



In 2004, Stonyfield came under majority ownership of Danone Group, the folks who make Dannon yogurt, one of Stonyfield’s biggest conventional competitors. Like Ben and Jerry’s going to Unilever and Odwalla going to Coca Cola before it (to help clean city air, no doubt...), this was a big mash-up in the ‘socially responsible business’ marketplace. Under the terms of the sale, as long as Stonyfield is increasing profits, Hirschberg will remain in control; he has also obligated the company to continue a policy of donating 10% of profits to environmental causes for up 10 years after his departure. In return, he pays back all his investors, and also, incidentally, doesn’t really have to worry about cash flow around the Hirschberg home, anymore. Ever. It seems like a sweetheart deal, and the Danone group looks good with an organic jewel in its crown. And, like I said, there is no question that a big conglomerate can do more with a single purchase than a million of me will do in a lifetime of small potatoes organic purchasing. So, despite the sale, takeover, or whatever, it would seem that Hirschberg’s vision of an ecologically responsible giant agribusiness operation is still under his guidance. For now. Until it is no longer profitable, or even just no longer profitable enough. And yet, it is still flawed. Stonyfield, Danone, O’Naturals, Wal-Mart... these business are built on the same premise that got us into the mess we’re in, the philosophy of go big or go home.



Another guy in the film is Joel Salatin—now here’s a character I’d like to meet. He is a farmer who describes himself in Michael Pollan’s ‘The Omnivore’s Dilemma’ (you know the drill, go read it...



OK, welcome back...) as a ‘grass farmer’. By virtue of his success at this activity, he also manages to raise beef, vegetables, chicken and pigs on a farm in Virginia that can only be described as ‘beyond organic.’ His take, in the film, on the large scale farms of the world is clear, it won’t work. “The model,” he says, “is flawed.” What he means is that conventional and large scale agriculture ignores too many hidden costs to the environment—be it planetary or human health or even just the massive cost of inputs required to run a farm of scale. Most large chicken farmers make an average of $18,000 a year, and the cost of a single chicken house which is required for a contract with a large scale processor is about $500,000; now, think about that... This is only one example, a little homework reveals dozens more examples. The fact is that cheap food is not really cheap; it is a market, like subprime mortgages, which is designed to fail. Even Stonyfield, with all of its market share and brand loyalty will collapse when the rest of the system collapses. Cheap oil, as we’ve all seen recently, is also not so cheap when you have to start digging for it a mile below the surface of the ocean, and it is the very foundation of our so-called ‘cheap food’ economy. Corn, a commodity which the film shows to be in (if not the primary ingredient of) a vast percentage of the cheap foods we have come to take for granted, is only cheap because of massive subsidies put in place by the U.S. government. Monsanto, the world’s largest purveyor of genetically modified seeds, has managed, through bully tactics and effective lobbying, to all but shut down the time honored practice of seed saving—the only way small, localized farms will be able to survive in a world without cheap oil. “The system,” as Salatin says, “is flawed...” Understatement.



The film is amazingly informative and I highly recommend it, especially its central message about consumer responsibility. I wish a film could change the way we all behave, but that’s not really up to a film, it’s kind of up to us, isn’t it?



On the local front, we are hearing more and more about local and organic, about ‘Green and Growing’, about how these big, new, and likely unnecessary businesses (do we really need four grocery stores in a town of 8,000?) that are moving into our small town are now the ones who are going to help us save the world...



There’s a new word out there, ‘greenwashing,’ that’s used to describe this tactic—it’s the same type of advertising ploy used in recent history that made sugary breakfast cereals a ‘part of a healthy breakfast’ or like claiming that french fries and ketchup count as a serving of veggies and are somehow healthful foods. They can be healthy, in moderation, as can toxic waste (OK, in extreme moderation...) Nowadays, ‘health’, the buzz word of the last decade or so, has been replaced by ‘green’. And, with the careful application of a little green paint, suddenly everyone is green, like those healthy junk foods of yesteryear, whether they are actually green or not. Pesticide-heavy farms are good for us and good for the planet because they are ‘local’. Grocery store chains can sponsor organic events because .5 percent of their sales are of ‘organic’ products from China or South America, so they are suddenly ‘on our side’...



I thought I’d joined the mainstream, and it does make me smile to know that WalMart, apparently, wants to be like me. Gary Hirshberg had a similar epiphany which he described in an interview a few years back. He said that he had started his quest to change the world by comparing the good turnout he had received at a tradeshow to an outlandishly larger turnout received by Kraft; he had decided then and there to figure out how they had done what they had and to imitate it, but with organic foods. Large organic farms do something similar: they use ‘organically approved’ inputs like Bt in place of conventional pesticides, sewage sludge in place of chemical fertilizers, then they proceed to pile into giant combines and set out to remake the face of the earth in their own flat, unimaginative image. A few years later, Hirschberg, after following this path, found out that Kraft was seeking advice on green(wash)ing their company and realized that, in this battle he had ‘won.’ Somehow he missed the irony.



I hate to be cynical (I mean, obviously); slowly but surely, people are coming around—attitudes are changing, the fringe is becoming the mainstream. We’re still fighting the good fight, just on different fronts in a big, weird and complicated war. Hirschberg is a warrior, with good intentions leading his own crusade, and appears to be winning. He is also, thanks in no small part to his timely flying of the green flag, a multimillion- if not billionaire. And Joel Salatin, smart, humble and by no means burdened with such material wealth is on the other front, a clear and honest voice who is also winning his own share of hearts and minds. So am I just a rebel? I don’t crave poverty, but I would, as I think Salatin does, settle for moderate material success coupled with the satisfaction of a life well lived. But why am I unhappy and skeptical when I see the corporations, often the same corporations that got us into this polluted, illogical system we’re in, changing their stripes? Going down dirty and coming up green? Is it because I know, you know, we all know, that when it comes down to it, the only real ‘green’ out there for a big company, a really big company, is on the back of the U.S. dollar bill? Well, yeah. That probably is it.

A complicated crisis.

Recently a flurry of comments responded to the Ottawa Citizen’s Food Section editor Ron Eade’s blog about the sudden closure of Benitz’s Bistro, a chef-driven Ottawa restaurant manned by Chef Derek Benitz and his wife. I met Derek only once, at a Savour Ottawa food event—and I recognized him immediately: he had the same wild, harried look I see sometimes in my own eyes, usually right as the latest bus is barreling down the ramp towards me. I do not profess to know him and I do not write this as any sort of defense; this is just my emotional reaction to the piece as presented in the Ottawa Citizen’s ‘Omnivore’s Ottawa’ blog…But, like I mentioned, it was a Savour Ottawa event where I met him, and that means that he was on my team, a local foods guy, a guy with values, someone else who is out there trying to change the system. Turns out, we are alike in more ways than one…the fact is that I gasped as I read the article, airing out the Benitz family’s dirty laundry—knowing that my own story would read, depending on how it was written, with just as much seemingly salacious detail...the unpaid bills, the personal failures, trials and errors that seemed to err more than try...Whatever catastrophe finally pushed Derek and his business past the point of no return, I haven’t got a clue, but I do know this; ‘There, but for the grace of God, go I....’

I don’t know if my business will still be here next week. At the time of this writing there are any of a dozen different serious crises that could destroy the last four years of blood, sweat, and tears that have made the branch restaurant what it has become. Another slow week and we’ll miss one of two payments, either to HST, who will freeze our account, seize whatever they can get and prevent us from paying any other bills, or to our mortgage company...who, probably, wouldn’t do anything right away, but they could, and that would set a very bad domino at the front of a long line of other bad dominos into a forward falling motion--you know, like that HST I mentioned, or PST, source deductions...payroll, our liquor license renewal, or any of a number of other creditors including our families, our friends...purveyors, artists; all of whom expect and often need for us to pay them.... Or the walk-in refrigerator could stop working, or the stove.... The health unit could decide our grace period for putting in a new kitchen floor was over. Or I could get run over by a bus. We don’t see too many buses in Kemptville these days, but, you know, it could happen. Everyone always throws that ‘run over by a bus’ line into the string of worst case scenarios; I wonder how that started? I know why it’s there; it’s a placeholder, a reminder—‘it could be worse!’, ‘You’ve got your health!’, or more to the point...’quit complaining! Life is short, get on with it!’

My dad was an entrepreneur; that’s where I got the bug. Even before he opened ‘Samuel’s’, his namesake restaurant, the place where I fell in love with this, with my industry, (and, perhaps more importantly, his last business...) he had a string of other ventures, including, you guessed it, a bus station. That idea, getting run over by a bus, resonates in a strange way to me—Some folks, when they hear that, probably picture a bus from the outside, from a distance—I was so young and at such an exploratory age when we had the bus station that sometimes it feels like I was born on one. Like a bus is in my DNA. I don’t just picture it...I hear it rumble, belch, and hiss, I smell diesel, the sooty smoke, I remember standing next to the wheels when they were so tall that I couldn’t touch the tops. I remember crawling through the luggage compartments, unlatching the whole back end to reveal the gigantic motor; I remember the antiseptic smell of the on-board washroom, the fabric and vinyl seats, the ashtrays in the armrests at the back, the bus driver with his giant movie-screen-sized windshield. But mostly, I remember my Dad, the boss of the bus; conducting a symphony of bus; choreographing a ballet of bus. Yeah, I could get run over by a bus; in some ways, I already did.

In 2006, it occurred to me for the first time that I might actually be able to open my own business. I got run over by a bus when the first dozen attempts at financing fell through, then in October of that year I got hit by another bus when we actually opened our doors. I got run over by another one on our first busy night, during the blackout, again when the Hydro company threatened to shut us off because of a stack of mis-mailed bills, when I had to fire someone for the first time, when a cook unplugged the meat fridge overnight, when the health inspector showed up during a busy lunch, when we over-prepared for an Ottawa festival by a factor of ten and got stuck holding the bag.... When I got my first complaint, when I got my first review which implied (mistakenly) that I served grapefruit! (...it was grape chutney, Anne; the grapes were from our own vine out back!) Honestly? I’ve been hit by, knocked down with, run over by, and sent to the back of the bus in some way or another every week since we opened.

But every time, I have gotten back up. We did find financing, we survived opening, busy nights and blackouts, we passed health inspections (with flying colours, in case you’re worried...) and have paid our bills, paid our bills, and paid our bills; sometimes late, sometimes on installments, and sometimes with little more than promises and hopes. But when push has come to shove, for four and a half years, we have rolled up our sleeves, gotten back up and we have done what had to be done.

And more. We started a thriving Farmers’ Market; we host three or four charity events every year. We provide an income and stability to our employees and their families. We manage the upkeep of a piece of local history, our 160 year old stone and timber building in the heart of downtown. There is nothing farther away from staring at the grill of that oncoming Greyhound than reading our customer comment cards that say: ‘excellent, excellent, excellent, amazing, 10 out of 10, best meal ever!’ Or, ‘we love it here!’
And we have managed this entire project in line with our values. I set out to open an organic and local foods restaurant, a business that did minimal impact to an environment that is even more stressed out than me—And, four and a half years later, we still buy local and organic as much as or more than the day we opened—more than almost anyone you know—Our meats do not come from factories, our vegetables taste fresh from the field because they are, and our pantry is stocked, floor to ceiling with certified organic foods. We still use natural, biodegradable cleaners, recycled and compostable paper goods, and we don’t even have a dumpster because most of our waste is either recycled or composted...In addition to those local, small farmed and natural meats, we include lots of healthy, vegetarian and vegan options, we use mostly whole grains and we even control portions of salt and fats, easy to do when you prepare almost everything from scratch—and you don’t even have to ask us about MSG or trans-fat because there is none here. We don’t have to add veggies to our kid’s meals, they already have them.

For now. Today, we are here; tomorrow, I may get run over by a bus.

Which brings me back to Ron Eade’s blog and Benitz’s bistro. The comments on the blog were what really got to me. They ranged in scope from impassioned defense to cruel accusation, and, in all truth, having nothing more than a passing recollection of the chef in question, I cannot say where the blame should lie. But here is what I imagine: Derek had another slow week. Fewer customers came in than the week before, fewer regulars returned, fewer new people saw the sign or the ads. A bill was put off, because there wasn’t quite as much money as he thought there would be. He worked harder, he made the food better, he tried a new approach, but, whatever it was, it didn’t take. He had another slow week, he put off another bill. A piece of equipment broke, it slowed service, it made his work harder, but there was no money to fix it, so he plugged on, worked around it. The slower service turned a few people who were on the line about his restaurant around—they told a friend or two, and Derek had another slow week. Each of these things became a domino in a row, the bills, the broken equipment, the slower service, and as each one of those dominos lined up, he tried new things, he crossed his fingers and he hoped. He stuck to his guns, he worked on the delivery, on cutting costs, on keeping people happy...But one day, he put off one bill too many, or maybe something else broke that he couldn’t repair. One day the bus ran him down and he couldn’t get back up.

Was this a personal failure? Should he have fought on against all odds? Sure. I have this conversation with myself every week, and if I didn’t keep saying ‘Yes! Fight on! Find a way!’ then this adventure would have ended in defeat long before this day...But does that make him a villain? No. Fraudulent? Again, no. Our culture is littered with stories of winning against all odds, of pulling ourselves up by our own bootstraps, of turning lemons into lemonade....To have quit any sooner than was absolutely necessary would have been his, and would also be my end. As long as there is a chance that this company can turn itself around, I will keep trying. As long as people keep turning up, keep encouraging us to succeed, keep thanking us for doing what we do, I will keep on fighting, I will keep on trying.
My Dad showed me how to put those buses in line. He taught me how to be not just a business owner, but a good one, a fair one—but in the end, a restaurant took him down. Restaurants are bigger than buses, and meaner; just ask Derek Benitz, or, I’m sure 99 out of 100 restaurant owners you could meet. Margins are slim, diners are fickle, trends and tastes change with the wind and season. And how many newspapers have a ‘Haircut Reviews’ section waiting to pounce on the first barber who tapers unevenly or fails to provide a perfect bob? Restaurants are hard work; they are demanding, intense and unforgiving.

My restaurant may not be here next week. It probably will, and every instinct has told me not to tell this story, this truth, to let you see behind the veil.... But I get tired when I see good guys like Derek lose the fight, like my brother, like my dad. I don’t want to be one of those guys or gals. I made it past the first hurdle; I didn’t fail, like 23% do, in my first year, and I’d like to not be one of the 60% that fail in the first five....The fact is that I love this place. I love the work, I love the response, I love the people, I love being able to effect change by the simple fact of existing and I love that I don’t have to be like McDonald’s, The Keg, or the Olive Garden to do it. I love that I can depend on local farmers and not buy from big, industrial suppliers like the others. But if I’ve learned anything, if stories like Derek’s have taught me anything, it’s that I’m not going to succeed by laying down in the ditch, waiting for the trouble to pass, I’ve got to get out in front of that bus and make the driver stop and let me on.
So here goes. Tomorrow, I really could get run over by a bus, so it’s time for me to quit complaining and to get on with it. So what, pray tell, am I trying to say? How about this: if you value your local and local foods restaurants, visit them. Frequent them. This is not an easy business; fun, yes, but not easy. Come to the branch; buy something this week or next. If you can’t come, send a friend; if you can come, bring a friend. We want to succeed. We want nothing more than to offer you a little home away from home; a friendly, smiling face, and a great meal grown and raised by the good people all around you. If you value that in us, if you value that in any restaurant, then support us. Support all of us; give us a chance to get on the bus. Honestly? Give us a chance to drive the bus.
And that is what I really want to say.

Chilihead

It’s hard to explain. If you love chilies the way I do, there is nothing to explain, if you don’t, well, like I said, it’s hard to explain...I guess that, for me, there is familiarity, after all, my mother pulled no punches with her chili con carne (it was made with cayenne pepper-40,000 Scoville Heat Units; the measurement for how hot a pepper is, determined by how many times a pepper is diluted in water before losing its heat..., her chili also included jalapeno-6,000 SHU, and ancho chili powder-1,000 SHU...); every Mexican restaurant we ate at in my childhood (and there were many) served chips and salsa in bottomless baskets and bowls before the meal and the salsa (jalapeno) was never made any more mild for the children, nor were the enchiladas, the chilies rellenos, the huevos rancheros, or the burritos (Tex-Mex restaurants use a lot of jalapeno, poblano-1,000 SHU, serrano-20,000 SHU, pasilla-1,000 SHU...) My brother and I discovered a Thai place in our late teens that would deliver a powerful blow if you requested it (Thai finger peppers-90,000 SHU, in sufficient quantities to humble the toughest jalapeno nibbler)—The local Chinese restaurant had a hot pepper in the Kung Pao chicken that we were advised to remove before eating (Cumari-40,000 SHU) but hey, what fun is that? The Chicken Oil Company served the ‘Death Burger” (jalapenos, again, and Tabasco sauce-6,000 SHU), Loretta, our Cajun friend, made a powerful gumbo that would burn like a tire pile (she used cayenne, black and white pepper, fresh serranos and jalapenos and yes, more cayenne)...Breakfast, lunch and dinner, where I grew up, there was always a place for chilies.

But why? When my wife sees me sweating and tearing up, nose running, unable to speak, she is dumbfounded; in fact, most people who don’t share my love of the glorious pain of pepper eating seem to share this curious amazement. But the ones who do...well, lets just say that we understand. But how can I explain it? A scientist would calmly point out that when the capsaicin interacts with the taste buds, the nerves send a signal to the brain that the mouth is being burned, the brain reacts by turning on some defense mechanisms; it increases the heart rate, speeds up the blood flow, increase perspiration, and releases endorphins. Endorphins, you may know, are the gooood stuff...Endorphins are the drugs your body keeps around to make you feel good enough to keep functioning after an injury, which was probably a pretty important survival tool for our jungle dwelling predator-prone ancestors...for the modern version of us, for chili-heads, (...and skydivers, and roller coaster riders...) endorphins are also an awesome cheap (legal, easy, non-toxic...) buzz. That’s right, we’re sitting at the table with you, munching on our peppers and getting high.

My first encounter with real extreme heat was that Thai place I mentioned earlier. I grew up in Bryan/College Station, Texas, a college town and home of Texas A&M University, a large and well regarded institution that drew (and draws) a diverse international student body with its excellent engineering, agricultural, as well as many other programs. This diversity was, although not always exactly overt in our community, a small and interesting presence that brought with it some unusual perks. One of the greatest of these was Thai Taste, a hole in the wall storefront restaurant peopled by a family of Thais who had come to help support the education of a family member (or maybe members? I can’t recall...). It was hardly a conventional restaurant: décor was somewhere between sparse and non-exsistent, the 3 or 4 tables seemed to be inherited from a real estate office boardroom or a garage sale down the street, the menu was short and often patchy, depending on who was working, or the time of day, the time of year—They often even closed for a couple of months at a time to visit Thailand and, apparently, to bring back piles of dried and specialty ingredients not otherwise available in Texas. It was not a cookie cutter Thai restaurant like so many I have visited in the years since with the same tired versions of Pad Thai, Coconut Curry and Tom Yum soup, although it offered some of these things, it offered them in a vacuum, without the influence of the standard ‘Thai Restaurant Model’ that seems to define the mildly flavoured, ‘Westernized’ and homogenized Thai restaurants that I have encountered so frequently in the cities of my travels in the years since. Thai Taste, for lack of a better description, seemed more like home cooking. There was a grandmother in the kitchen, a father, a mother, possibly a sister, perhaps an aunt or an uncle or something, teenagers who wanted to be somewhere else, young children who delighted in running the food, clearing the plates and refilling the water glasses. The food was fresh and rough, large chunks of ginger and lemongrass were left in the soup for the diner to remove, bones and gristle were unapologetically not cleaned from fish or chicken, and most importantly, spice was not held back in some vague attempt at appealing to some mythical, as yet undefined to me concept of ‘the Western Palate’. Almost everything was spicy at Thai Taste, some things more than others, but the reason two teenagers would return again and again to this haven of hot, was the fact that the food could be prepared as hot as you liked, all the way up to the apex of impossibility, that’s right, five stars. My brother and I returned a number of times ordered our food at this magical heat level, asked for a pitcher of ice-water, smiled at each other and plunged in. The pain was instant and furious, but the pleasure...well, here I am 20-plus years later still basking in its glow, so you can be the judge.

When I moved to Austin, I discovered my next marker on the road to chile nirvana, it was in the form of a bottled sauce at a barbecue joint called Ruby’s. Just a bottle on the table next to the Tabasco, by that point in my chile-chomping career, I could drink Tabasco out of the bottle, and I often would, publicly, usually to prove a point, or, honestly, just to show off...This new sauce looked good, a Mexican label, a bright green colour, I was having the Jambalaya, and poured about a half cup of this new treat all over it, against the advice of my dining companion who had met this fabled pepper on the field of battle before and knew exactly what I was up against. That formidable foe was my first encounter with a family of peppers known to scientists as capsicum chinense, the family that includes all of the hottest peppers in the world. The sauce was bottled habanero hot sauce (about 100,000 SHU), and that meal was the first of many with a new and lifelong friend--I almost finished it too! Of course, over time, my tolerance has grown, and now, if I wanted to, I could probably drink that sauce out of the bottle, I wouldn’t bother, of course, but, just sayin...

So yes, chilies are hot. At some point in the 1990’s Dave’s Insanity Sauce (118,000 SHU) came along and introduced ‘capsaicin extract’ as an ingredient that pushed the boundaries of heat into the realm of weaponry; enjoying habanero sauce eventually lead to sampling raw habaneros (up to 350,000 SHU). Dave’s Insanity, upped the intensity in subsequent sauces and opened the floodgates to a host of new competitors using even more and more extract, a process that changed the whole game, but, of course, I tried each new sauce as it came around, and even though through all that heat my tolerance steadily grew, I was also humbled again and again, once, in California, by a bottle of some poison called ‘Da Bomb’, the only bottle of hot sauce which I could not finish, and once, even, by a plate of a half-dozen chicken wings at a roadside stop in Erie, New York, which required a signed release before it could be served. I ate four before tapping out. There was, until recently, always still one more challenge, the true, according to many, Holy Grail of Heat, India’s mythical Bhut (or Naga) Jolokia, the fabled ‘Ghost Pepper’ (1 million-plus(!) SHU) which I actually finally sampled here in Canada last month. It was, though astoundingly hot, surprisingly easy for me, easier than I expected, (too much extract over the years, I suppose) but I also wonder if my sample was anywhere close to as hot as they come (or if, as one observer noted, perhaps I am just the Hulk Hogan of Hot, thanks Kathy...) But either way, it leads one to wonder, is that really all there is? Will I keep trying, keep eating more and more, hotter and hotter? Will I eventually have to spray police grade pepper spray (5 million SHU) down my throat, or score some straight capsaicin extract (16 million SHU) for a weekend with the boys? Well, the short answer is...no.

My favourite pepper in the world is a chile grown and dried by Tierra Vegetables in Healdsburg, California, the variety, ‘Chilhuacle Negro.’ It is native to the Mexican regions of Oaxaca and Chiapas, and the variety is astoundingly tasty with an aroma that can only be compared to the complexity of a fine wine or a perfect cigar, and although the variety of chile is amazing, I’ve had it from other farmers, and the fact is, there is something about the soil, the care, the drying method or something else that Lee and Wayne James (the brother and sister farming team who are responsible for the chili-head Mecca that is Tierra Vegetables) do that turns this mildly spiced, aromatically overachieving chile into a piece of culinary art that, in my mind, rivals the white truffle, the saffron thread, a glass of Chateau D’Yqem, or even a perfect Malpeque oyster for its ability to produce transcendent aroma and flavour. Chihuacle Negro clocks in nowhere near 16 million Scovilles, in fact it only creeps across the Scoville finish line with a relative heat somewhere between 500-1,000 SHU. A close second, for me, in the world of favourite chilies, or even just foods in general, is the texture and warmth of a heavy walled, roasted and peeled Poblano pepper, which, stuffed with good cheese or with a sweet and tangy pork picadillo, I enjoy more than almost any other meal. That’s also only about 1,000 SHU. A freshly fire roasted Hatch chile from New Mexico at peak season is a treat that everyone should enjoy at least once in their lives and several times if possible, easy enough, again, at a measly 1000-2,500 SHU. Give me a few rings of a Hungarian wax pepper fried in olive oil with a pinch of sea salt, or a plate of flash seared pimientos di Padron, both of which are often quite mild (but which may surprise!) with Scoville Heat Units ranging from near zero to the low 1,000s. One of my favourite all time vegetarian meals includes the flesh of sweet big, meaty red bell peppers (0, that’s right, 0 SHU) roasted, peeled and layered with cream cheese, caramelized red onions and big slices of grilled portabello mushroom. Heat or no heat, I am content to dine on this equal parts notorious and nonthreatening nightshade forever. Dried, smoked, ground to any of a dozen different powders, flakes or coarse meals, reconstituted in warm water, pickled, preserved, jellied, served on popcorn, in chutney, in dessert, on breakfast or on steak, the fact is that the capsicum family, when it comes to cooking, is my family; it is as comfortable as my favourite slippers and as entertaining as an evening with an old friend.

India has spices, coffee, mangoes, tea...Thailand has fish sauce, lime leaves and galangal; Italy has white truffles and saffron; France has black truffles, stinky cheese and botrytis wines, Japan has the Ume plum and is surrounded by literal oceans of briny treasures. And in today’s world, all of us can have all of these things, all of the time. Asparagus in winter, chestnuts in the spring...Cheap oil and a fleet of planes have brought the treasures of the world into each and every one of our gourmet food stores and, for a price, we can enjoy anything that we like. For Now. But what if, or perhaps even, ‘when if’ the world shifts, when, for whatever reason, these treats from other lands are no longer around to fill our shelves or when, and even now, the price is so high that we need something else, something that is our own, easy to find and easy to grow and easy to use and store and share to delight our senses and to spur our imagination? What then? Fortunately for us, this New World, the Americas, our world, has its own trunk full of culinary treasure; our chilies, our peppers, these many capsicums which were being consumed wild in the jungles of Bolivia as long ago as 7500 BC before being cultivated in Ecuador some 6,000 years ago. Over time, these puny pods of painful pleasure travelled throughout South, Central and North America, before, finally over the recent and relatively short span of just the last 500 years or so, they fanned out in the galleys, holds, and pockets of European and other adventurers to conquer the palates and racing hearts of humans on every corner of the globe. Over time they have evolved a variety of styles, flavours, textures and aromas that span the palate as surely as they have spanned the globe. For me, chilies have followed me from Texas to California to Ontario, a magic ingredient, a family of ingredients that, in their versatility, array of flavours, ability to tease, tantalize, attack and yes, even occasionally, to get me a little bit high, has always distinguished my cuisine, opened up my taste buds to new possibilities and filled my belly with everything from astounding sweetness to astounding heat; these secret ingredients, these talismans, these tricks of the trade have become the paints whose broad rainbow of flavours, aromas, and textures are the colours that have helped me to fill out, with whatever artistry I can muster, the canvasses of plate on which I daily paint.

It’s hard to explain. If you don’t understand by now, it’s entirely possible that you never will. But let’s put it this way, sometimes it gets pretty cold up here in Canada, too cold to grow allspice, or nutmeg or mangoes or tea. And to me, it seems pretty obvious, there’s only one thing to do when it gets too cold, yeah, you know...Turn up the heat!

-Chef Bruce

Our Daily Bread...

In three years, I’ve made every batch of brown bread at the restaurant except for one. That day, I had help from my good friend Rob Mathewson, who those of us locally know as the gentle giant genius of loaf behind Grateful Bread, the bread consortium that has anchored our local farmers’ market these past three years. He and his equally storied and infinitely interesting wife Shelley just moved on last month to the West Coast, for work, but also for family, which is also how I found myself here, so who am I to judge? Just a bit sad, that’s all...But anyway, this story is about bread, so we’ll talk about all that stuff some other time. This story is about bread, about baking, and about my favourite baker.



I guess my first experiences making bread were my grandmother’s Parker House Rolls, a recipe in which each yeasty, white ball of dough was dipped in melted butter before it was packed together in Corning ware, then risen and baked. The effect, though guilty in hindsight, was mind expanding in practice. My mom complained that her mother in law had never mentioned the second package of yeast on the recipe she wrote out, and that had she not spied that sneaky addition over her shoulder one day, no-one would have ever known. That might be why no-one else’s rolls ever came out quite as good, but I think we all suspect it was more than just that. The most critical ingredient in bread, I have come to discover, is the baker. When she baked those rolls, it was her way of showing her love.



I moved back to my home town from West Texas in ’93 or so and was lucky enough to find a job at a little scratch bakery, Brazos Blue Ribbon, that was operated by a couple of ex-hippie types who probably just wanted a place to buy whole grain fresh bread and muffins themselves and couldn’t find anyone else doing it. They had a wide selection of loaves, pastries, kolaches, and cookies and they served sandwiches and soups for lunch. I was hired as an assistant baker, which meant I never got to see lunch; lunch time, for me, was now in the middle of my night. I arrived at work every day at 2 am and left work at about ten, at least for the six short months that I managed to survive that schedule. Maybe it was as a result of these long, late hours, but the head baker there was insane, good insane, I mean; he was a hilarious, huge, jolly, loud, heavy metal singing madman, and at 2 o’clock in the morning, I was his only audience and his biggest fan. He taught me like Obi Wan taught Luke, with a pile of clichés, aphorisms, cleverly mixed metaphors and the occasional near backhand (which I probably deserved...) I was told to use my hands to mix the dough; ‘spatulas are liars!’ I was trained to taste the dough, to ‘think with my hands’, to ‘bake with my nose...’ I was no baker when I came in, I had mistakenly believed that 5 years of line cooking would qualify me for some kind of high speed ascension to that goal; but, by the time I left, I was, although not quite a baker, at least not quite as foolish as when I arrived. He was a great teacher, he loved what he did, and it showed. So why did I leave? Honestly? I wasn’t ready to give up sunlight; I don’t think I ever will be. Baking, as a profession, asks a high price from those who it calls.



Rob is not a baker by profession (...yet?). He worked here in Kemptville in some capacity for the government; he told me about it once, it was something to do with measuring water levels, analyzing drainage from wetlands, that kind of thing...I’m not really sure, the fact is, when I talk to Rob, it’s usually about bread. He loves bread, he loves baking...when he’s not at work (or practicing his clarinet), it’s likely that he’s baking. He always reminds me of that jolly baker from Brazos Blue Ribbon, he has that same big presence, the same quick smile and twinkling eye—and I don’t care what he gets paid for, the man is, and will always be, a baker. He understands, naturally, instinctually, what it took me so long to learn about bread, about why bread is not pure science or pure art, about how good bread is craft, plain and simple, about how your hands know more about baking than your head, and that your heart and nose are just as critical to the process as your mixer, your oven or your timer. Baking bread is about patience and care. It is about good humour and generosity. It is about love and, if you do it right (and he does...), it is about changing the way people think about every other bite of food they take.



Rob has given more to this community than just some tasty loaves; he is one of those good, generous people who come along and just can’t seem to help but share. He started, a couple of years ago, giving classes on baking to anyone who was interested, he dreamed up the whole idea as a charitable act...the classes, or workshops, were, I believe, actually a ruse to get a dozen or so extra hands out to roll dough for bread for a Salvation Army Food Bank fundraiser (I may have my facts wrong, but I believe it was for one of our Mother’s Day brunches here at the Municipal Center). The idea caught on, and soon, these workshops (again, not to be confused with free labour...) were given several times a year, baking bread for Christmas food baskets, again for our Mother’s Day brunch, for a free community Thanksgiving dinner, or, really for any event or even person that needed an extra bit of sustenance to be broken and shared. I noticed once that at the workshops, and with the free loaves of bread, he gave out a recipe on a little piece of onion skin paper along with an idea, a prayer really, a request that the holder of the recipe would bake it with others, and that in exchange for this loaf, in lieu of payment, that they would do this same giving again, for other food banks, for other friends, for anyone who might need a warm loaf of love. Luckily, at the very first workshop, the friendly friar of the leavened loaf won a convert, my sister-in-law, and really, one of the world’s all time greatest people, Denise Busby.



Now with all due respect to Rob, who was the reason I set out to write this story, within the first two or three lines I, and really, anyone who has bought bread at our exciting little market over the last few years, probably knew very quickly where this was going to end up. Denise is the kind of person who just seems to do well at most anything she tries; over the years that I have been lucky enough to know her, not only has she been a record breaking manager for a noted office supply company in the heart of Ottawa, she has evolved into a master hobby gardener, a photographer of immense talent, the most patient wife her incredibly lucky husband could hope for, and, on an incredibly personal note, the greatest aunt I could ever imagine for my, for all of our, little girl. She also, thanks to Rob’s workshops, and a great deal of that natural instinct like both my Grandmother’s and his, has become a phenomenal baker. The first year of the market, Rob alone was the baker, but starting in the second and continuing with the third, Rob was joined by Denise as a fellow ‘Grateful Bread’ baker. As often as Rob has been at the market of a Sunday, Denise has been there as well, at first with breads she learned to bake with Rob, but later and lately with scones, cookies, and even breads made with her own recipes. I am, I admit, a very picky person when it comes to the quality of food (hey, it’s my job!) and I can honestly say that during the market season, her Chipotle-Cheddar Bread is one of the greatest pleasures of my daily life.



Bread was one of the first things that we humans learned to make. Almost every culture has a bread of some kind, flour and water, maybe some other stuff, a leavening agent, some time of work, some time of rest. Bread is what we share, when we share. It is the most basic of sustenance, and, as a symbol, it speaks to the core of who and what we all are. It is the first thing we serve at most restaurants, because throughout our cultural memory, it has become an act of welcome so common that to not offer it would be out of place. Early on we learned that all of the bounteous harvest our farmers’ market’s amazing vegetables would bring people out once, but that it was the bread for which they returned.



I’ve learned a lot about baking over the years; I learned about tortillas, the bread of Mexico, from fellow cooks and older Mexican ladies at a taqueria in my home town, my first job outside of the stifling world of fast food. I learned about thin crust pizza dough from a skilled chef at Romeo’s in Austin where I baked in a wood fired oven, and I trained intensively through those dark nights at the Brazos Blue Ribbon, teaching my hands how to feel for when the dough was just right. I have learned that sometimes it’s about a second package of yeast that someone forgot to mention, and that sometimes it is about no yeast at all, just patience and courage. And I have learned, after all that, that all the knowledge in the world will only produce a pretty good loaf of bread.



Thanks Rob, it was always a pleasure to bake and to break bread with you, and I hope to do it again soon. You’ve given a lot to this community, more than we ever could have asked, Vancouver Island is lucky to have your big, generous heart in its midst. I understand why you moved to be close to family; that is, after all, also what brought us here.



I hope that my bread, the one I’ve made every batch of save one, is half as good as Rob’s, half as good as my grandmother’s Parker House Rolls. I’ve tried to shape it, learn it, understand it, infuse it with all the meaning, heart and soul that I can, and every time I make it I think maybe, maybe this time, maybe I’m getting close. Bread is more than just flour and water and yeast and salt. It is family, it is being together, it is sharing and it is love. And for me that means that on the last weekend in May, when the time is finally here at that first market of the season, I’ll be right there in line again, waiting anxiously for that first loaf, for that first taste of Chipotle-Cheddar from Denise, Abigail’s Aunt Denise, my favourite baker.

dollars and senselessness...

My granddaddy was a dentist; he worked in the Astin building in downtown Bryan, Texas, my home town. We used to watch the Christmas and July 4th parades from the windows of his upstairs office—I remember back in the 70s, when I was just a little kid, downtown Bryan was still ‘where you went’ when you needed something. You parked and walked, and within a few blocks you had the Woolworths, the Parker-Astin hardware store, a pizza parlour, shoe shops, men’s clothing shops, women’s clothing shops, hat shops, a barber shop, a library, restaurants...There was a community there, and tagging along with Dr. Enloe was a good way to meet and see every member of it. By the mid 80’s, it was a ghost town. Two out of three shops were empty, folks had moved out to bigger stores on bigger streets with bigger parking lots. Dr. Enloe had retired, the parades moved uptown and the barber looked bored. You see, that was right around the time that Wal-Mart came to town. I’m thinking about it because Wal-Mart has just announced that it is planning to begin construction, starting this spring, on its long rumoured Kemptville location.



Back in the 80s, Wal-Mart was still saturating the various media with prevarications about it’s ‘commitment’ to ‘Buy American’ a commitment which I notice it has not committed to anytime recently, especially as by about 2005, somewhere around 60% of the stuff they sold was imported, mostly from China...according to one study, in 2004 alone, Wal-Mart spent over 18 billion dollars on Chinese products. That means that if it were an individual economy; they would be China's eighth largest trading partner, bigger than Russia, Australia, and, you guessed it, Canada. According to the AFL-CIO (American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations), "Wal-Mart is the single largest importer of foreign-produced goods in the United States", their biggest trading partner is China, and their trade with China alone constitutes approximately 10% of the total US trade deficit with China as of 2004.



Apparently, Wal-Mart has sent as many as 1.5 million jobs to China; you know, decent jobs, factory jobs, middle class jobs. Not the kind of ‘greeter’ or ‘cashier’ jobs they offer in their stores, jobs that pay minimum wage and lock a person into the lowest possible economic bracket for life (or at least for as long as the often brief term of employment...), especially given this company’s famous and well documented anti-union stance and what seems to be a complete and utter disdain for anything resembling a job benefit...Wal-Mart sells its stores to communities by promising jobs. Hmmm. Here are some interesting statistics: a 1994 study done by the Congressional Research Service concluded that "for every two jobs created by a Wal-Mart store, the community loses three. Jobs that are retained by a community are often merely shifted from local businesses to the giant retailer." In another study, a fella named Kenneth Stone, who is a Professor of Economics at Iowa State University, found that some small towns can lose as much as half of their retail trade within ten years of a Wal-Mart store opening. They don’t bring jobs, they just shift them around.



I used to live with a Wal-Mart employee, and her stories used to make me cringe...she said that every morning they would do cheers, even sing ‘Wal-Mart’ songs, like a cult, you know, morale building stuff...What a great place to work, right? At least until she was sent home mid shift every time she approached 28 hours in a week, the magic hour at which she would have become a full time employee, and thus been eligible (after a year!) for the modest health insurance package that such employment status required. She knew of no-one, outside of management, who was receiving any such benefit, and it’s probably just as well, with a $1000 deductible, the presence of the insurance would have been all but invisible to a person of her age, health and financial means. Wal-Mart is not a good steward of its people.



These days, I live in Kemptville, and we are not immune to the fallout of the carbon economy, the desire for bigger parking lots for our bigger trucks have already moved much of the major business from downtown to the highway, as seems to be the way of the world these days. But one of the things that attracted me to this town, one of the reasons I wanted to be a part of this community was that we still had (have...) a vibrant, beautiful, and even functional downtown area. It’s not at 100% occupancy, by any stretch, but it is still a vital, functioning core to our town. I can still shop, eat, go to the post office, the bank, I can buy books, clothes, gifts and hardware all within an easy walk from my home. The parades still loop down Clothier Street to Prescott, and we watch them from upstairs window of our Heritage building that hearkens back to a time when horses would have pulled the floats.



I realize that so far this article makes me sound like a xenophobe, like someone who doesn’t believe in the market or in competition. This is simply not the case. The fact is, I have always accepted that this concept, this thing, that we have collectively agreed to call ‘the market’, whatever it actually is, is one of, if not the most compelling forces on human behaviour that exists. I even believe that it might be something even deeper, something more intrinsic, like some kind of manifestation of our base needs in the world. People need to eat, to have shelter and clothing, and since prehistory we have hunted, we have gathered, and farmed, we have done what it has taken to survive, we have protected our own by providing for them, and even when we had enough, and when those we care for had enough, we hoarded, because eventually (we instinctively knew) that someday, we might no longer have enough. These base activities when practiced in the modern world become dollars traded for goods and services, the collection of dollars has replaced the collection of foods and firewood, the need to protect became the act of collecting and exchanging dollars through corporate and market based prophylactics that have absolved us of the direct responsibility for what we have done to collect more and to hoard. We are compelled by these base instincts and desires, and we act.



The question then becomes, is the market all that we are? Are we nothing more than slaves to our most basic motivations? I contend that we are not. There are, and have always been other factors that affect our behaviours, factors like love, compassion, empathy, free will and choice. A corporation is an excuse to behave badly, by its very definition it protects its participants from risk, and it absolves them of direct accountability, of blame. If these other instincts, these other factors exist and therefore do affect our behaviour, it stands to reason that other institutions must also exist (as the market exists to express our base desires) to embody them and that through them, we can act on those better angels in our hearts and minds. My feeling is that those institutions are exactly what we would expect them to be, things like the government and its mandate to regulate and pick up where the market leaves off, trade unions, churches, charities, service groups, even extended groups of family and friends. I don’t doubt the power of the market; I simply refuse to accept that it is the whole of who and what we are.



We don’t always do what is best for ourselves—given food we will sometimes indulge too much, given wine, we sometimes drink beyond our fill; we are humans and to be human is to accept that there is both base desire and a higher calling—when my pants get too tight, I know it is time to slow down. I hope that I will decide in time, but who knows? Wal-Mart is the grand expression of our most base desire, our need to collect, to conquer and to hoard, no matter the cost... it is the love handles of our culture, it is the desire to indulge taken to such bloated extremes that it no longer has a view of its own belt. I believe in the market, but I also believe in knowing when it is time to say no to a second serving, when it is time to temper our greed, and when to think about more than what is easiest and fastest and cheapest, and to start to think about what is best; best for me, best for my community and best for those who I love.



Kemptville has three grocery stores, a health food store, four hardware stores, and several other small retail stores and shops that will be dramatically, instantly and permanently affected by this new beast, this Godzilla that will not stop until Tokyo is burning. Many of these stores have been locally owned for generations; when you spend your dollar with these folks it stays here, in Kemptville, it doesn’t shoot off to Bentonville, Arkansas to make sure the Walton family will have even more billions of dollars to not give to charity (less than 1% in 2005!). Wal-Mart will come in with predatory pricing (a new Wal-Mart will charge as much as 17% less in a new area than in one where its act of economic devastation is complete,) it will bring unsecure and low paying jobs to replace the secure and better paying jobs that it will destroy and within a few years, our sweet little downtown will, sadly, probably look a lot like the one in my hometown did in the years after its arrival there, and it will probably look a lot like the downtowns in thousands of sweet little towns all across North America still do. That is, unless we decide not to let it.



The last time I visited Bryan, my old downtown was a sight to behold, new shops, new stores, new clubs and restaurants had sprung up to fill the empty storefronts from those years after the Wal-Mart came to town...folks in the government, folks in the neighborhood, the old businesses that didn’t want to move, lots of smart, forward thinking people had gotten together and decided to fix the place up. Incentives were used, not to bring in an instrument of destruction this time, but to rebuild and re-imagine what that downtown could be. Now it’s a beautiful, vibrant place, in many ways it reminds me of downtown I remember from tagging along with Dr. Enloe. It was a long road to recovery, but it worked, and I don’t think one person in Bryan would say it wasn’t worth it. The way it worked was through community—people getting together and deciding that it was something they wanted and then going out and doing it.



I don’t presume that I can stop Wal-Mart. No more than I can presume that I can stop myself from sometimes eating a second slice of pie. But I can, and we can, sometimes say that enough is enough. I don’t presume that I can stop Wal-Mart. Not alone. I can hope and help to curb its effects on my new home, I can warn and I can share what I have seen. We can take our energy, our ideals, our dollars and our votes and we can go downtown, pick up some trash, encourage a friend to open a shop, patronize it, send other folks there, patronize the other shops downtown even if it costs a buck or two more, we can join a community group, participate in the BIA, in a theatre group, in a church group, shop at the farmers’ market, we can build a strong community and together we can keep it alive. We can elect a mayor and a council who want to keep the heart of the community alive, who will fulfill the mandate that their institution has as a sacred duty, to think not just about the base and greedy desire to increase the tax and revenues, but rather to take the best care possible of the community that has elected them and which has given them the dollars which they already have. That means accepting that things like Wal-Mart will come, but not incentivizing it, not paying out of pocket to extend services, not giving any tax breaks or easy zoning changes...It means growing, but growing smart, not just growing for its own sake. And if you really want to be a part of real change, you can do what Nicole and I have done for the last several years, you can make the easy, quick and simple decision to shop somewhere else.

beer, a love story...

I don’t drink as much as I should...well, at least not as much as I should if I still want to be considered an ‘expert’ which, I guess, at one time I sort of was. But when I do, like most folks around here, it’s usually a beer. My first beer was a Heineken, of all things, shared between at least three of us boys, stolen out from one of our parents’ stash, and furtively gulped down in the woods out behind the house. Like most folks, I didn’t quite get it at first—but, there it was—a new experience. It wasn’t terrible, but I didn’t quite get the appeal either. When I got older, drinking beer with the guys was sort of ‘something that you did’ and I latched on to Budweiser—I appreciated the red label, (red was my favorite colour!) and, of course, the cool chef at my restaurant drank it. It was my ‘favourite’ beer, because, well, everyone needs a favourite, right? Then one night, at a party, a friend produced a Guinness.

I’ll never forget that first sip—bitter...rich, intense. At first taste, I was not a fan—I thought, fleetingly, that it might have been a joke drink—you know, like you’d find a fart scented perfume at a novelty shop or something. It was too much—it reminded me of when the soda machine at work broke and you got a cup of undiluted syrup...It reminded me of a coffee from a gas station that had been stewing since yesterday morning...It reminded me of hot tar. Then I had a second sip, and I began to recognize that all those big flavours were there on purpose, and that they even fit together in a sort of weird architectural balance—a structure—by the end of the bottle, I was hooked. I still love that beer—although, I have to admit, it’s no longer quite as devastating to me as it was that first time...it’s a context thing. That bout with Guinness lead me on a long quest—It opened up a world to me, flavours that I’d never before encountered—the world of the art of the glass...

We had a pizza joint in my home town, Double Dave’s, which offered an ‘alternative degree program’ (...it was a college town...) where one could earn diplomas and degrees in the beers of the world. My brother was an employee for just long enough for the two of us to earn our doctorates , that is to say, we tried them all—an invaluable experience for a couple of youngsters and one that has shaped my tastes in the years since. Most of the beers they had were, I know now, fairly mainstream, the ‘Budweiser’ of their respective countries; but luckily, a few were good introductions to the world that was just starting to open up to the average consumer back at that time, the world of ‘craft beer’.

A few years later, I was lucky enough to work in a brewpub in my hometown. I was on the opening crew and got to work with a selection of beers made for us alone—we were encouraged to be creative and to try to use the beers in our cuisine—it was awesome, I took every opportunity to quiz the brewmaster and spent my breaks spying on the brewery and hoping for a chance to play. It was invaluable for me to see, first hand, that beer was something that could be made—it sounds silly, I know, but it’s true—when you see something done, it makes it possible, not theoretical. It makes it real, it’s the same with cooking—you can read all you want, but until you see it done, it’s just a theory. We were busy at the start, but it didn’t work out, they had a bad chef and an owner with no experience and they failed within 2 years, I was gone in just a few months. The beer (and the experience), however, was wonderful and it’s really too bad it didn’t live on...

By the time I moved to San Francisco, I had begun to flirt, even start to get serious with ‘the other beverage’. Wine, to the average male Texan in those days was generally considered a necessary evil at an event, you know, so the girls would have something sweet to drink; but in the years between that first Guinness and through my gradual ascension into finer dining, I had come to understand that it was actually quite a bit more. So much so, in fact, that it is generally accepted that culturally, wine is the only important beverage in a fine restaurant setting. Imagine that bottle of Bud on a white tablecloth; you’ll see what I mean...And accept it I did, especially once I found the ‘college with a thousand classrooms’ that is the California wine country. I learned in earnest, especially at my work, where my professors brought the class to me, and for at least an hour or two a week I was treated to tastings of some of the world’s best organic wines, the wines that made up Millennium’s incredible (and the world’s largest) exclusively organic wine list. But through it all, I never lost interest in my first bottled love—beer—in fact, I learned even more, thanks to a fella named Captain Jack Fecchal, B.L.F.

Captain Jack was an oddball when he came to work with us at Millennium; it was by way of Italy, where he had attended a cooking school, and Colorado, where he apparently attended an Ultimate Frisbee school. Colorado was, and still is, ground zero for the US homebrewing movement. In fact, just weeks after President Carter signed the bill that legalized it, a couple of guys named Charlie Papazian and Charlie Matzen launched the American Homebrewers Association (AHA) in Boulder, Colorado on December 7, 1978 (happy birthday, AHA!) with the publication of the first issue of Zymurgy magazine. Captain Jack had apparently minored in this fairly recent but grand tradition at his Frisbee school, and by the time he got to California, he brought his knowledge and the tools of homebrewing with him. I was lucky enough to brew my first few batches with him on his elaborate 10 gallon system made up of converted kegs, propane burners, plumbing supplies and recycled angle iron, all welded together into a giant contraption that brought tears to the eyes of his roommates, especially when they realized that it wasn’t going to just ‘go away’, as they had earnestly hoped. We brewed several ‘all grain’ batches, the most difficult style, which means that we actually did the serious lab work of converting starch into sugar over low heat for long periods before applying yeast to ferment. I was glad to have learned this method, but was also a little happy to later discover that there were easier methods involving extracts and partial extracts that brewed some reliably tasty batches with quite a bit less time and work; I (and my wife) was also a bit pleased to discover that giant contraptions were not, necessarily, critical to the success of the batch. Beer was fun.

Wine, however, was where my brain continued to lead me, and my ‘expertise’ in that field continued to grow; I was even invited to be a judge at a prestigious wine event in Los Angeles—I was one of many judges, granted, but I was honoured, nonetheless. Beer was still a hobby, not a serious pursuit, and though it did occasionally appear in our restaurant as a feature, or in a serious trade magazine in some article or another, it was not ever something I allowed myself to believe was ever quite as important as wine. Beer was for fun, wine was for work.

I never really understood why wine culture was so much different than beer culture, but I did (and do) think about it a lot. Wine has a reputation, among ‘regular’ folks as being a snob’s drink—something that has bothered me since day one. It is, after all, just a beverage, just a way to lubricate social interaction, to relax, to consume the same drug that beer delivers, but by way of grapes instead of grains...so why all the fuss? Why does wine get ritual where beer gets games? Why does beer get neon lights when wine is lit by candles? Why does wine require a jacket when beer gets a t-shirt and blue jeans? It really does just come down culture.

When Nicole and I travelled to Europe, I went as a wine enthusiast. I was excited to experience wine close to the source, to see the old Chateaus and vineyards, to taste and to explore. I was also fairly poor—we were not going on a wine tour, per se, we were going to experience what we could, but also what we could afford. So we bought cheap, Budweiser cheap. We bought what was on the shelf at the corner stores, and I was pleased to discover, we bought quite well. At first I thought I was just lucky—after all, I had tasted literally hundreds of wines at this point, and how cool was it that with wines that were averaging in price around 3 to 5 dollars a bottle, how lucky was it that we kept scoring with completely drinkable bottles of regular wine? Everything else around us, hotels, restaurants, coffee, was more expensive than home, but bottle after bottle presented cheap but drinkable wine! I, at first, like I said, felt lucky, but as time went on, I had to admit, I started to get a little annoyed.

You probably know what kind of wine 3 or 5 bucks would get you here. You probably also know how much it would cost you to buy an equivalent amount of cheap, yes, but also entirely drinkable beer. It didn’t take long for me to figure out why wine is a North American snob drink and why our mainstream culture prefers beer.

In 2004 and 2005, I was lucky enough to attend the Book and the Cook Festival in Philadelphia, as an author (co-author of ‘The Artful Vegan’, 2001 Ten Speed Press) and as a cook alongside my old friend and mentor (and fellow beer enthusiast) Chef Eric Tucker. We reunited those two times to prepare a five course dinner paired with the beers of Philadelphia’s treasure, The Nodding Head brewpub. The Nodding Head is co-owned by a group that also includes Monk’s Cafe, easily one of the most important bars for the true beer enthusiast in North America—and it was there that we found the beer bible, a menu including over 200 beers—some available nowhere else in the world, and it was also there, under the excellent tutelage of the owner, Tom Peters, that we attempted to taste every one of them. Or something like that; it gets a little fuzzy. The important part of the story is this—we were in a hallowed hall of beer—surrounded by the best of the best—and the most expensive bottles were still well under 50 bucks. Try finding that with wine...Try finding that with anything; the best of the best just doesn’t have a good habit of staying that far under the dollar amount of the average person’s single days paycheck.

It’s a cultural thing; I guess, when I thought about it, I started to understand. In Europe, where drinkable wine is cheap, and I do mean cheap, the ‘average, regular’ person can afford to enjoy a glass or two, without making it a special occasion. But here, for those prices, the fact is that we often get undrinkable swill (sorry, North American wine industry, but you know it’s true.) Here, the ‘average, regular,’ person is going to choose a cheap, perfectly drinkable beverage that doesn’t break the bank. I appreciate wine, good wine, and I really appreciate great wine, but the fact is, that until all those ‘average, regular’ folks come on board, the culture of North America is going to continue to prefer their beer. And , well, maybe if I drank a little more, I’d have the time to find those rare and often rumoured ‘great, cheap wines’, but since I don’t (...and since we’ve got Beau’s right here!), for now, anyway, I’ll probably just have a beer.

a working class hero is something to be...

The sandwich shop is the only job I ever went back to. I first got the job in college, and it was the perfect college job; the owners were a couple of childless hippies who adopted the entire crew as a surrogate family and as a social circle; they took it upon themselves to teach us all how to work hard, and, well, how to party just as hard...OK, maybe it was the perfect college job if you had slightly less than lofty ambitions, but it seemed perfect to me at the time. The owners were, perhaps, a bit messed up personally, but as managers, they were outstanding. It was a small shop, but even after over twenty years in this industry, when I look back, it was the cleanest and most efficient place I have ever worked; it had the best morale, the highest rate of loyalty, and to be honest, it offered some of the most fun of any job I’ve had. I left it when I left college. I left college because of ‘personal reasons’ which is to say, I had learned how to party a little too well and it had fouled up both my first marriage and my college ambitions, much to my parent’s disappointment (if you can call a pissing away of a few thousand bucks ‘disappointment’ with a straight face). I, like many young folks in my privileged position, screwed up.



After college came a couple of years in Austin, where I tried to finish sowing my unsowed oats, and where I embarked upon an honest attempt at a music career. In retrospect, that, much like my college career, was more honestly described as skipping the hard parts (practice, touring, promotion, ‘homework’) and going straight to the parts I felt most suited for (parties, shows, and, well, did I mention parties?) I continued to cook through those years, graduating from sandwiches to fine-dining Italian and eventually vegetarian cuisine. I seemed able to get a little farther down that road even in spite of myself. But, finally, in an act of ironic, intentional rebellion, I ended up in another boozy, ill-advised marriage that was also destined for much of the same success as my life had rewarded me prior to that point. She was from West Texas, and when an opportunity came to live on a farm out there for next to nothing, we jumped at the chance to ‘play redneck.’



When we arrived at our dirt farm (I can’t imagine what else we would have harvested; stones? Mesquite? Cactus?), I did give the local restaurant a once over, if not a fair shake. It was owned by a former Dairy Queen franchisee who had expanded his ambitions into a family dining establishment that was both informed by his experience in fast food and a perhaps a little, but not too much, more. I applied, half-heartedly, but didn’t want it, and decided, for fun, to try something new for a change. Most of the men out there were oilmen, mainly because the land and climate yielded little else of value to be exploited as a trade. It was a small town, and if you didn’t work on the rigs, in the fields or on the derricks, chances are you made your money off of folks who did. And so it was that, I, in an act of hilarious ironic intent, a long-haired cook, an environmentalist, a musician type, a vegetarian even, ended up working (for a couple of weeks, I thought) as a welder’s helper.



I quickly found out that ‘welder’s helper’ is a bit of a euphemism like saying ‘washroom’ instead of ‘shit-hole.’ My status as a newbie and a city boy did not make my life any easier, and these flaws were only compounded by the fact that most of our days were spent crammed together in truck cabs driving from job to job listening to America’s latest (at the time) invention of dubious value, right wing talk radio. I still have scars from the holes I bit through my tongue. This is not to say that my life was completely miserable. Working among men has its moments, when the tensions start to ease and the humour comes out, and when the fear of the unknown or ‘the other’ is supplanted by the familiarity of shared experience. There were, working as we were in areas rarely visited by civilized folks, moments of startling beauty; we once saw a herd of wild deer numbering in the hundreds, and stopped to watch this rare sight in silence with a profound sense of privilege. In time, I (almost...) seemed to become accepted as one of the crew. Personal stories among these fellows were rare, but over time the welder’s story began to emerge.



His family had lived and worked on this dry, difficult land for generations. When the oil came along, his father had learned to weld (a trade he passed on to his son), but only to help cover expenses for the family ranch. Hard work was rooted deep in the bodies of these men like knots in a twisted log. In his family (unlike mine), education was not considered work, but a frivolity for the weak willed and the lazy, and ambition was all well and good as long as it didn’t interfere with the chores. The man I worked for had eased away from the family ranch and pursued a career of welding, even becoming a foreman and leader of his own crew, but in keeping with the family tradition, he had done this with little more than a seventh grade education. I recall that a portion of every day we worked together was spent with him agonizing over a calculator assembling the numbers required by his contract, his brow deeply furrowed as he used fierce determination to bridge the divide between what he needed to do and what he had been taught.



In all honesty, I didn’t really like him; my true (but mostly hidden) self was too far removed from his experience. He did not drink, he did not discuss politics, books, or even films, he did not seem interested in music, and his work was his life. His tough exterior was betrayed by his sensitive fascination with the natural world, and had he discussed this, I might have liked him more, but no verbal admission of this passion ever seemed to pass his lips. Outside of work, his wife and children were his only priority, a fact that, also unspoken, was understood. I was not in a place to appreciate these priorities, nor did I see myself heading in that direction and I didn’t get it. He was a gruff, knee-jerk xenophobe, and I was a rock and roll freak. I didn’t like him.



But even so, the ‘couple of weeks’ of work stretched into a couple of months, and as my comfort level among the roughnecks slowly grew, I left the occasional messages from the local restaurateur unreturned. I was not feeling creatively challenged by this new line of work, nor was there any glimpse of a future I could take pride in (oil work for a former environmental activist?) but the money was outrageous, much more than I’d ever made cooking, and though the work was hard on my body, it was easy on my brain. Maybe even a little too easy; which is probably why I was shocked the day we drove past the rocks.



Texas A&M was the university in my hometown where I had wasted my parents hard earned money. It is an internationally recognized math, engineering, science and agricultural school. So, naturally, I had majored in Theatre Arts; a department that existed here with the sole purpose of filling fine arts credits for students pursuing degrees in more practical areas of study. And, in case you didn’t get it, Theatre Arts was not a practical course of study.



I was required to complete a science credit for my degree, and in keeping with my flawed logic, I chose a course that seems to have sounded both easy and equally as impractical as the rest of my schooling; Geology. To this day, I have not got the slightest idea why I chose such an odd course; I did not collect rocks as a kid, I did not have an interest in mountains or volcanoes beyond that of casual appreciation, I love the natural world and rocks are, I suppose, just as nice as anything else in that genre, but why someone interested in food would choose the one science with probably the least to offer in that area is beyond the scope of my memory. It must have been my hope for an easy ‘A’, I can’t imagine what else, except perhaps ...fate... that would have motivated me.



You see, back in the oil field on the day in question, we drove past some rocks; well, actually, it was a row of bubble shaped hills. Hills, which I recalled from my Geology course, as being formed when lava shoots formed long tunnels that almost, but didn’t quite, push through the surface of the earth. It was an odd fact to remember, and one which I casually mentioned out loud. The welder, to my astonishment, immediately stopped the truck and began to quiz me intensively, and then, after a few minutes, astonished me yet again when he impulsively decided to end the work day, turned the truck around, and drive an hour out of our way to another interesting rock formation where we stopped again and the quizzing resumed. I was humbled. I had spent months alongside this fellow, watched him struggle with numbers, show casual disdain for things I considered to be of high importance (like music, film, books, politics or philosophy), I had seen him express little or no interest in any culture beyond the oilfield and ranchland that surrounded us. And I had, frankly, written him off in my head as a simple man. And then he had done what I, in my self-centered universe, had never expected a simple man to do. He had surprised me.



You see, I had lived these past few months, years even, in a sort of ironic fog. I had accepted, even rationalized my journey through the world of the ‘blue collar man’ with a laugh and a self-righteous sense of superiority; knowing that I was ‘among’ them, but not ‘of’ them. It had started when I dropped out of college, and been expanded when I moved to Austin. I drank cheap beer and wrote comedic country songs, I drove an old truck because it looked the part; I’d even rented a trailer home, because it was cheap, sure, but mainly because it was a campy cliché. But the western shirts I wore were from an upscale thrift store and my leather belts had somebody else’s name on them. I was a pretender, an interloper, and even the oil job and the farm were part of the play that the Theatre Arts major was performing in his head. But then, in a truck on highway in West Texas, the entire character was shattered. The whole play fell apart. I realized, in a moment, and with a startling clarity that I was a punk, a lousy little punk, who had hoped to walk in this world unnoticed only to be betrayed by his own lack of true worth.



The welder was no simple man. Had he been born in my family, where education was valued, he may very well have studied Geology, not for an easy ‘A’ but for interest and fascination. But my parents had given me an opportunity to have an education, and I had pissed it away. In my shoes, he would have graduated, he would have made my (I guess ‘his’ in this iteration) parents proud, in the same way he made his (actual) parents proud with the life he had actually lead. A life that wasn’t what he wanted to do, but what he needed to do. But me? I had failed at college and, these days, had even turned my back on the only career that had stood any chance of redeeming me...cooking. Cooking was the career that had paid for my lifestyle when my parents help had run out, the career that was my creative outlet; that meant something to me, the career that could actually not just pay my bills but that could probably save my soul. The only thing I’ve ever done of consequence besides fail at college (and vacuum cleaner sales, but that’s another story...) was cooking. And instead of keeping at it, focusing and getting better, I was slogging through crude oil and pretending to listen to Rush Limbaugh with a man who was still, for all his shortcomings, a better man than I. Me, I was just a lousy pretender; I had never done what I needed to do, just what I had wanted, and in a moment I realized that if I ever really wanted to be someone worthy of respect, the fact was, I had a lot of work to do.



I snapped out the fog that had followed me. I left the oilfields that week, went to the little restaurant in town, accepted the position he had offered, gave it my all, and helped bring a few special meals to some folks in a small town; and yes, in spite of myself, I managed to learn a few things as well. As the fog lifted, the marriage, with its ironic core, dissolved into mist. When we split up, I left, but I didn’t go back to Austin, not yet, that was where the irony had begun to take root—I went back to my home town, my college town and tried to start again. I went back to the sandwich shop and tried to do it right this time, and learn how those owners had become such good managers, paying attention to the work this time, not the parties, because this time, it counted. It was the only job I ever went back to, because this time, I needed to go back and do it right.

Earth Hour

Merely existing is not enough. Thank goodness—what a sad, impersonal world it would be if it were. Humans are social creatures—our need to build communities and work together for the greater good is what defines us as a species and is also the very definition of true joy. Earth Hour is a celebration of that spirit—it is a chance for people to make a statement that is at once personal, spiritual, communal and even, to some degree, political...But not a politics of left, right, green, red or blue; rather, it is a politics of politeness—It is a chance to say ‘I am willing to work for a better world.’ Even if the only act is turning off the light or the TV—turning down the heat or powering down the cell—walking instead of driving—it is a polite political act by being something small that we all do together. For one hour, we all say, ‘Yes, I want a better world, this is my contribution.’ Then, if we are lucky, at the end of that hour, as the lights come back on and the noise comes back up, we will all go forward with a new little spark—a smile, a little taste of truth. We will say, ‘You know what? That wasn’t so hard, in fact, it felt pretty good.’

the branch restaurant will celebrate Earth Hour with a candlelit, unplugged acoustic set featuring Ottawa’s Al Wood and Lindsay Pugh. You can also celebrate Earth Hour every day at the branch with our ongoing commitments to always choosing local foods, organic foods, compostable and recycled paper goods, biodegradable and non-toxic cleaning products and a general true belief in the importance of community. Thanks for being part of the change...

--Chef Bruce

the slip on the branch...

When we left San Francisco, we had finished writing, but were still waiting to publish, the second Millennium cookbook, The Artful Vegan, on which I had worked very hard and am proud to have received a co-authorship credit. It’s amounted to less than a thousand bucks in my pocket over the course of the several years since we published it, which is hardly a career maker, but I enjoyed the work, and it is cool to google my name and see that I am, technically, a published author. On the jacket cover of that book, I am quoted as saying that we... ‘left the Bay Area in 2003 to travel, with plans of opening an organic foods restaurant in Ontario, Canada.’ It was a dream on paper, sent floating down a stream.



That year we arrived in Canada in June, nearly broke, looking for rest and a bit of work to replenish the coffers for our European leg, for which we had already planned and bought tickets. I wasn’t legal to work in Canada at that time and wasn’t looking forward to sitting on the couch for the couple of months until we were ready to leave while Nicole picked up shifts at one of her old jobs in Ottawa. My birthday in early July was an excuse to get out of the house and visit a local restaurant which our hosts had recommended, Amanda’s Slip. ‘Just be patient,’ they said, ‘the food takes a while, but it’s worth it.’



As we sat down, we drank in the atmosphere. At first glance, the weird hybrid space was part coffee shop, part opium den, and part living room, circa 1975. Or 1935. Or some time in the renaissance. It’s tough to say. On the wainscoting above the well trodden, pale wooden floors, the decorators expressed their love for the waters of the Rideau’s branch with bold trowel effects and gobs of paint ranging from light spring trickle to deep ocean blue, and while other primary colors like bright red appeared in splashes on the door and occasional window frame, the bulk of the room was an ivory, or a smoky white, which had lost its gloss and now served as a polite backdrop for the mismatched pieces of art littered about the tall walls in various states of frame, fabric or papier mache. At the front of the room lurched an old piano with an exposed soundboard which had undergone the same broad strokes of blue and red paint; a shelf unit by the door was groaning under the weight of a community’s thousand wildly divergent flyers; while another by the bar was bursting with a year’s worth of the daily news. Scattered about the room and surrounded by creaky, but comfortable looking antique ladder back chairs, were a collection of round tables that were hand stamped with a textured effect before being painted, and were now beginning to wear in a way that gave them a timeless quality. The tables were topped with wine bottles decorated by a waterfall of wax, crested with tall candles, which were lit this evening in the dim room, to magnificent effect. After a few moments, we began to realize that the long, tall and narrow queenly manor of a room was crowned by a shy masterpiece. A hundred plus year old pressed tin ceiling was lovingly preserved, with only a bit of smoke outlining her delicious curves on the patch over the well used copper topped bar. Cardboard stars hung on string from various points in an effort to draw the eyes up to drink in her beauty. Small plates of an Asian pattern added to the air of mystique and the forks and knives were heavy and long. The bar was cluttered with a treasure trove of mismatched caffeination paraphernalia and the beer taps were of local brews without familiar names. Even the liquor bottles, though some were familiar, shared space with the arcane and unusual. The room echoed and rang with music that seeped out from behind the bar before creeping from Tom Waits to amateurish folk; it was unrecognizable and often weird. Overall the effect was of rebellion; refusal to conform, no concession to the mainstream taste, no attempt to pander. The menu, which arrived with the warm and instantly personable waitress, was a long sheet written in all capitals by a scrawling hand, unabashed in its misspellings and scratched out lines. ‘Amanda’s Slip’, read the oval graphic on the top left of the menu which was rubber stamped in its two tones of blood red and navy blue complete with its iconic riverboat from whose dock this bistro had borrowed its name.



I remember the words ‘house made’ being used more than once; I remember that there were several salads and that several items were described as being ‘Of the Day’ and ‘Market Priced.’ There was a ubiquitous garden salad, a pizza, and a steak of some sort, a mixed grill and a curry; a vegetarian item, an antipasto plate. I remember that the chicken was described as local and grain fed. After delivering the menu, our waitress had the unenviable job of reciting a paragraph of interesting descriptions in order to decode those ‘of the day’ items.



I was enchanted. This ‘little restaurant that could’ seemed instantly like home. I said to Nicole, ‘This is it, this is exactly the kind of place I want to open some day.’ My sister-in-law was right, the service was really slow. In fact, we waited over an hour between our salads and our entrees, and we were, to my memory, the only ones in the place... But even so, the food was, as promised, worth the wait. After dinner, we met A.J. for the first time while he was having a smoke in the alley as we walked back to our car. A.J. stands about six five and is proportional in breadth of shoulder and chest. He is known to wear a variety of interesting mustaches, berets, and occasional ponytails; in his customary chef coat and shorts and with his broad smile under searching eyes, he is at once flamboyant and memorable, yet easily approachable in a way that speaks to his obvious love of fun. Folks who dined or enjoyed an evening of music at ‘the Slip’ inevitably remember this lively character, his lurching, improbable, and joyful dancing, his bear-hugs and generous spirit, so much so that two years into our own venture here, we are still often asked about his whereabouts and activities.



On meeting him, I confessed to my trade and my status and offered him a free set of hands for the duration of my visit. Within the week, I was a happy addition to his kitchen and quite enjoying the freedom and fun and adventure that this exotic little bistro had to offer. Sometimes, I’ll admit, I enjoyed it even more than I should have, but that’s another story. The point is, Amanda’s Slip was a great fit for me. I was coming off 10 years of vegetarian cooking and A.J. was an expert at handling meat. I was a competent self starter who needed little training, and A.J. was tired and needed a break. I was versed in various ethnic and classic techniques, as was AJ, and able to communicate not only about the nuts and bolts of his cuisine, but about the philosophy behind it. A.J. was thoughtful, even spiritual in his reverence for local foods and businesses and building community, and I was in complete alignment (if a bit more geeky about the organic thing) for all of these things. For those reasons and more, I was and am deeply affected by my time with him in that tiny kitchen. When the time came for us to go off to Europe, he pulled out all the stops; he roasted a whole pork shoulder that Nicole and I still talk about, he closed the restaurant to the public, set a long table down the middle of the room for us, our family and our friends we had made in those few short months and gave us a night we will always remember. Or will always remember forgetting, or something like that. I am especially mindful that it was the last night I saw Wayne Grimm, a fixture at ‘the Slip’ and a character rivaling A.J. in his memorability. Before we came back to live in Canada, Wayne died, after a long, strange, and amazing life, and was found, not by his family or by his neighbor, but by his chef. That’s the kind of community that A.J. built; in Wayne’s memory, and to honor that community, his picture still hangs by his favorite seat at the bar.



Nicole and I left for Europe in the fall, then moved on to Texas, to work and to save and to decide where we would settle, and often, we would talk about that little restaurant in Kemptville, with the fun people and the best parties.



Amanda’s Slip had an anniversary in the summer, July, and threw a big blowout every year with bands beginning in the afternoon, piles of food, a truckload of oysters, and all the chairs and tables pushed out of the way for a giant dance floor. We attended our first, which was A.J.’s 4th, the summer that I worked with him. When we returned to Canada, it was just in time for his sixth year, and we timed our arrival in Ottawa to coincide with the unforgettable event. A.J. was characteristically thrilled by our return and greeted us each in turn with one of his signature back stretching bear-hugs. I was not surprised to find out that he was anxious to have Nicole and I come back to work as soon as possible...his mom even helped us find a house, a rental right on the Rideau, with a dock and access to a patch of forest teeming with wild mushrooms and fiddleheads. I felt like we had won the lottery.



Work at ‘the Slip’ had its rewards; the community of friends and artists and musicians which populated its cheery space was always a source of entertainment and stories. But it had its share of difficulties as well. A.J. was a charismatic character, but over time became increasingly harder to work with; I say this not to denigrate him, I love him dearly, but I prefer him as a friend than as a co-worker or boss. I think we both agree that I was also ready, in more ways than one, to have my own kitchen, and shake off the bonds of attempting, night after night, to put forth a version of someone else’s (no matter how philosophically compatible) vision. I left after New Year’s Eve. Nicole, at the time was supporting us both and moved on as well, to work in a busier restaurant in the next town. While I was still waiting for legal work status, I did stints in a couple of other local restaurants, helping friends I had made through Amanda’s Slip and Nicole’s new job when they needed an extra set of hands, but mostly, I stayed home and worked out some ideas, food-wise, music-wise, and in my heart, searching for what I hoped was my calling.



That year we learned that our landlord had decided to sell the idyllic cottage that had become our home. Sad that we would have to move, we were pushed, by friends and family, to see if we could purchase the cottage ourselves. I honestly thought the whole idea was a joke; I was an unemployed, semi-legal new immigrant supported by a waitress, and I was buying a house? Seriously? What bank would look twice at that? Well, (thank you ‘Sub-Prime’ lending...) guess what? We actually found a mortgage. I was stunned. We both were. For about a month, as the gears of the financial apparatus around us began to move, it looked very much like we were going to buy, even in our precarious financial status, a home. But then, at the last minute, our seller wavered. We were sad, as we had come to quite like our riverside home, but we still felt amazed and empowered in knowing that we were apparently more financially flexible than we had previously thought.



Soon after the house deal fell through, we heard that Amanda’s Slip was for sale. My first reaction was no...no way...the challenges were too great, it was too much work...it was too hard a legacy to shake off or to try to follow...it was too weird, scary, whatever. But then, over the course of a couple of weeks, a new idea began to take shape. I realized, slowly, how easy the work at ‘the Slip’ had been for me; I was confident that I could handle the kitchen myself, which had always been a criteria I had set in my hope for a restaurant I would own. I realized that as crazy as the idea of getting financing for our house had been, we had still managed to find a loan. I knew, deep down, that Nicole and I could not only run a small restaurant, but run it well, and that finally, finally, I could do things my way. And I remembered that first night in Amanda’s Slip, when I said ‘this is exactly the kind of restaurant I want to own someday.’ And then, there it was. No matter how I looked at it, it suddenly made perfect sense.



Nicole and I talked, argued, disagreed, and then finally agreed and rolled up our sleeves. I decided that I was going to make this happen, no matter the cost.



For some reason, the mortgage folks we had assembled for the home purchase were not nearly as excited about a 130 year old stone building with a restaurant on the ground floor, a leaky basement and an apartment above, but we were determined. When one person couldn’t help us, we moved on to the next.



Around this time, A.J. was planning Amanda’s Slip’s 7th anniversary party; Nicole and I wouldn’t have missed it, and A.J. welcomed us as though we had never left. We all knew that I was pooling resources to make this purchase, and that as of yet, had not met with success. What I didn’t know was that I was not alone.



After we left A.J.’s employ earlier that year, he had hired a waiter of outstanding caliber. A smart, personable, experienced, and even-keeled guy named Brent Kelaher, who had left behind a career in restaurant management for what he thought was the stability of a corporate job with Bell. By now, we all know how that story goes, even more so now than back then, but suffice it to say that he was lucky to have a trade to fall back on; a trade for which his aptitude was matched only by his passion. He was even more affected by A.J.’s decision to sell, as it would be hitting him closer to home, and had also begun to wonder if this situation was, in fact, an opportunity.



I was first introduced to Brent after a morning of harvesting wild garlic from a neighbor’s back 40; I knew A.J. would appreciate the gift, so I wandered in the kitchen door, wild treasures in hand, bearded, in my grubby boots, flannel and jeans. A.J. had told Brent about the chef who had worked with him the previous year, and there I was, emerging from the woods with nature’s bounty, like a character in a novel. When we were reintroduced at the anniversary party, it was an introduction of intent: ‘This guy also wants to buy the restaurant. You know what, you two should talk.’ Brent and I hit it off from the start. His obvious passion was a mirror of my own and after a brief but serious conversation, we came to realize that our shared vision could actually succeed. I think we also realized right away that our credit pooled together would be more formidable than his and Jenn’s or Nicole’s and mine alone. In July, it will have been three years since that meeting, and I have never had cause to doubt my instincts from that first conversation.



It took a couple of months from there, but with more than a little help from all of our family and friends, we have managed to do what I had hoped, dreamed, and set out to do when I wrote that fanciful bio for the book jacket back in 2003. Very few people get the chance to live their dream and we wake up every day, thankful that we are among the lucky ones. That dream on paper went floating down a stream in California, but found its way to a riverboat’s slip in Kemptville on a branch of the Rideau River, or, the branch, as we call it here.