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Above, Canadian Culinary Champions L-R chef Jamie Stunt of Oz Kafé in Ottawa (silver), Marc St. Jacques of Auberg du Pommier in Toronto (gold), Milton Rebello of Hotel Saskatchewan Raddison Plaza in Regina.
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The exit interview, after a most impressive showing
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FEB 20 13 – 12:55 PM — Fresh from his impressive silver-place victory Feb. 9 at the Canadian Culinary Championships in Kelowna, British Columbia, Ottawa’s own chef Jamie Stunt agreed to a candid de-briefing interview in which he confides more than a little nervousness, more than passing anxiety, and more than occasional strategic planning that carried his team all the way to the winner’s circle. An absolutely stunning achievement for Stunt, a Hamilton native who has made Ottawa home for most of his 32 years, the last nine as executive chef at the modest 50-seat Oz Kafé on Elgin Street.
Recall there were three distinct components to the three-day contest — wine pairing, the obligatory black box of mystery Canadian ingredients, and the grand finale. Ultimately, the top prize among 10 contestants from across Canada went to Marc St. Jacques of Auberge du Pommier in Toronto, taking home the gold medal.
Jamie took home silver, in second place, while bronze went to chef Milton Rebello of Hotel Saskatchewan Raddison Plaza, Regina. A full account of the competition by head national judge James Chatto is available by clicking here.
Here’s my edited question-and-answer debriefing with Jamie. I confess it’s a bit long, but I think food lovers are interested.
My, it’s a good time for omnivores in Ottawa!
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Omnivore’s Ottawa: It’s little more than a week after your stellar silver-place showing at the Canadian Culinary Championships in Kelowna, British Columbia. Did you think you’d place among the top three?
Jamie Stunt: We were certainly hoping to. But I think it would be unreasonable for anybody to expect it. We were certainly trying, but we wouldn’t have been too crestfallen had we not because of the level of competition. We were very happy to have squeaked into the top three, but we didn’t necessarily think it was going to happen.
Omnivore’s: Has it sunk in?
Jamie: Not really, I don’t think so. We got back to Ottawa on Monday night and I was back to work at 10 a.m. Tuesday, back to the regular life things and trying to do some laundry. The competition ended Saturday night but we stayed an extra day to check out the city, visit a few wineries, that kind of thing.
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Omnivore’s: How difficult were the logistics for you, schlepping beer from Aston Brewing Co. and yak meat from Maberly clear across the country to serve 600 or so guests from a strange kitchen you hadn’t seen before?
Jamie: Ashton was great because they took care of the beer, so they got it out there and made sure everything was good to go and we didn’t have to worry. As far as the food, that was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do. I’m not the most organized person to begin with. I think we brought about 50 pounds of yak, all vacuum-sealed and packed in a way the airlines wanted with ice as checked luggage. We had 600 mussel shells that we scrubbed clean … There was a huge concern that our baggage could get lost, so we were very pleased to see those coolers coming down the baggage carousel at the other end of the trip.
We brought four very large coolers, then three or four more boxes of other stuff like dry goods. WestJet was very generous on baggage surcharges on the way there, so that was good. But the whole thing did end up being pretty pricey. The competition gives you $1,500 for ingredients – I don’t think anyone spends that little – and they paid for my flight, and my hotel for a couple of nights, but we arrived a day early and stayed an extra day which they didn’t pay for, and they didn’t pay for my sous chef Simon Bell or Michael Bednarz, or café owner Oz Balpinar, and their breakfasts and so on. They did feed us, however, but still I can tell you it was very expensive. But it would have been a lot more expensive had Christophe Marineau of Le Coprin mushrooms at home not bought mushrooms for us from Ponderosa Mushrooms, a business friend on the west coast. We were also sponsored by Northern Devine caviar, who gave us $1,500 worth of caviar free … But it was certainly not a cheap thing to do.
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L-R, Kafé owner Oz Balpinar, chef Jamie Stunt, sous chef Simon Bell.
Omnivore’s: What is the significance of your silver win, in your mind? Have you reflected on whether or not this is a life-changing milestone?
Jamie: It was nice to represent the city well, especially as Marc Lepine at Atelier took first place last year. So that gave me a really good feeling, and what I get as a general consensus in the restaurant community is that everyone is very happy. It makes me happy that I was able to show well. But long-term? I haven’t really thought about that. Obviously it’s one of the best things to have on your resumé, right? I’ve spent two-thirds of my life in Ottawa … and have no plans to leave. I have a seven-year-old son, who is a big part of my reason for being here. But Ottawa is home, if that’s what your asking.
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Omnivore’s: Is this life-changing?
Jamie: I don’t know yet. I’m sure it will help with whatever I end up doing. It’s made the restaurant here busier, it couldn’t be better as promotion for the restaurant.
Omnivore’s: How far in advance is Oz Kafé now booked for dinners, compared to before the competition?
Jamie: We were pretty busy already but I think this past week was close to record-breaking. We’ve been full every night since, and the phone has been ringing a lot more. We had to turn away probably a couple of hundred people last week.; we don’t have many seats to begin with, maybe 50, and because of the size of our kitchen we don’t load reservations up for the same time. So we have to limit how many reservations we take for the same time anyway.
Omnivore’s: In the regional competition and again in Kelowna, I know chief national judge James Chatto was impressed by, if not effusive about, your choice of yak as your main protein. In fact, he wrote that folks in Kelowna were buzzing at the prospect of trying yak meat, most probably for the first time. I wonder, do you think choosing yak from Tiraislin Farm in Eastern Ontario perhaps gave you an edge over other competitors? I mean, I doubt there would have been the same excitement had you selected, say, horsemeat.
Jamie: I think choosing yak absolutely helped because right away you’ve got the judges’ attention. They’re going to remember yak more than something else. I mean, there are only so many proteins out there and yak is certainly not a common or available one, so it was definitely a strategic move. Plus the fact it is excellent and very enjoyable, but you cannot overcook it. We were serving it almost raw. Ostrich would be a good comparison.
We were concerned about being able to get enough yak to serve 500 because of the small size of Tiraislin Farm. We had been dealing with Rosemary Kralik at the farm for a couple of years now and we more or less have a standing order with her, so the product was very familiar to us. It was exotic, and it’s a product we feel happy to serve. Rosemary is a member of Savour Ottawa, she uses no antibiotics, no hormones, no pesticides, the yak are raised in pastures and eat local hay …
Omnivore’s: As a competition, what about Gold Medal Plates regionally, and the Culinary Championship nationally, interest you? Why did you accept the invitation to begin with?
Jamie: It is an honour; we were just happy to be invited. It was the first year they asked us, so just to be part of that tradition was good. And, I can be pretty competitive. It was very much a team effort. As soon as we decided we were going to do it, I immediately starting thinking about how to win. Like I said, we serve yak at the restaurant, which gave us a bit of an edge, and our beverage pairing with custom-brewed beer from Ashton Brewing Co. was a little unconventional as well. So we approached it really seriously to compete on the level that it’s about. What we do here every day is excellent, but our price point and style at the restaurant is a little different from Gold Medal Plates, which is more fancy, more upscale, so we tried to operate within the structure of that event.
We counted 22 different elements on our final plate. They gave us, I think, seven culinary students to help us plate, so we had a long table and set them up to stand here and there, each one responsible for putting three things on a plate and they couldn’t move away for two hours. So it was an assembly line with Simon cooking the yak and slicing it, Mike running back and forth to the hotel kitchen with mushrooms, and the students were literally putting two or three things on each plate and trying to keep it moving as fast as we could.
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Omnivore’s: How did the fact some 25 chefs back home in Ottawa were running Oz Kafé four nights while your team was far, far away help you in the competition?
Jamie: It was unbelievably helpful. People in Kelowna kept asking us about that, it sort of became a story on its own where even the journalists in Kelowna were asking. The other chefs and organizers all thought it was just the greatest thing. So it was one of the coolest things ever to happen to me, having people I respect so much and who are so talented volunteering to help pitch in at home. It was a huge motivation, and I really think it gave us some extra strength in competition. It was a great feeling to have that amount of support, it’s amazing and it speaks to the amazing community and restaurants we have in Ottawa.
Whatever restaurant wins the regional competition next year, if it’s small and this kind of thing would help then I’d be glad to carry on the tradition and help organize it. I’d also volunteer to help whoever goes to the nationals next year, because Marc Lepine giving me his insight from the previous year was a huge help.
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Omnivore’s: The first event, creating a dish within 24 hours to match a mystery wine, provided you roughly $1.25 per plate to serve 400 people, plus judges. Were you already familiar with the chosen wine, Norman Hardie’s 2010 Prince Edward County pinot noir? Did you recognize it?
Jamie: Here’s the thing: I just totally, randomly tried a bottle of it maybe six days before the event. I never actually paid attention to wine in my life until after I won the regional, then I realized I should maybe go to sommelier school or pay attention to wine. So when I knew that mystery wine pairing would be part of the final competition then I crash-coursed myself for two months. I must have spent $1,200 tasting pretty much every Canadian wine I could get my hands on. So when I tasted the mystery wine it was obvious that it was a pinot noir, and also Allyson Bycraft [sommelier, who reported on Jamie's progress for Omnivore's Ottawa] tasted the wine with us.
I said it reminded me of the Norman Hardie wine I had a few days earlier, and she agreed there were things she tasted that made her think about Prince Edward County – things like terroir, which I don’t know much about. But I noticed a sort of unique sediment in the bottle, which I noted five days earlier when I tried it at home, and I recall the wines tasted the same. So I actually called my roommate in Ottawa and had him email a picture of the braille on the bottom of the bottle, but it was not the same. Ultimately … we used the description of that wine from the Norman Hardie website to help us build our dish.
Omnivore’s: For the wine pairing you chose lamb tartare, with roasted beets, toasted pistachios, black radish, deep-fried threads of sweet potato for crunch, with rich smoked turkey mayonnaise. What led you to go with those components to pair with the wine?
Jamie: Simon gets credit for the smoked turkey mayonnaise, which started as a joke as he kept saying smoked-turkey this and smoked-turkey that as we were going around Kelowna scoping out the butchers and fishmongers before the competition, planning our route and the possible ingredients. Those items just seemed like the right thing to do with the wine, I guess. Using lamb I think raised some eyebrows because lamb is usually a gamier meat, but I tasted it the day before at the butcher shop and I tried a piece raw and was blown away by how mild and sweet it was. So I remembered that when it came to the mystery wine … With the lamb and smoked turkey mayonnaise, I think we were trying to set ourselves apart from the pack.
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Omnivore’s: The black box required you to work with six mystery items (photo, left) from across Canada: red fife wheat flour; sustainable farmed sturgeon caviar; firm goat gruyère; bittersweet black kale; Anjou pears, bone-in lamb shoulder and neck. That’s two separate dishes: 12 identical portions of both for the judges, with a one-hour time limit. What was the most intimidating or difficult black box ingredient?
Jamie: The lamb neck. We practiced black boxes here at the restaurant four or five times, but when I opened the box what really messed me up were the two different pieces of lamb. There was a rack, and a lamb neck that I was not able to identify. I think some people actually said it was pork, or ox tail, but the problem is if you mis-identify the meat you were committed and had to deliver what you said you would deliver. So I said, ‘I’m making a lamb and whatever-that-other-meat-is stew.’ That’s an actual quote, so I didn’t lose points because ultimately I did not call it something it was not … We’ve used lamb neck in the restaurant and you can make it very delicious, but it takes a couple of days. It’s very difficult to do in less than an hour.
Omnivore’s: Many chefs opted to make some variation of pancake with the red fife flour, but you chose to make bannock, a traditional Scottish cake usually made with barley and oatmeal baked on a griddle, garnished with shaved gruyere and citrus whipped cream topped with caviar. Let’s see, that’s three mystery ingredients accounted for. Then you stewed both cuts of lamb, using bones and wine to make a rich gravy. You marinated the kale in garlic and lemon, then seared it, then cooled and served it with a slice of tangy pickled pear. How did you feel about this dish?
Jamie: I’ve never felt so much pressure in my life, trying to come up with something and be creative and artistic and all that – in less than an hour. And I didn’t get to actually eat my dish. We tasted as we went along, and I overheard one judge saying something was delicious on my plate. I knew the stew was quite good and the meat was probably tender, some pieces more than others. I’m happy with what we did, given the restraints and the pressure. I think we performed quite well, and we got our dishes done on time. I think one guy went overtime by four minutes, and that may have taken him out of the competition.
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Omnivore’s: For the grand finale, according to reports from the scene, many folk were eagerly anticipating their first taste of yak. Your dish in Kelowna was essentially the same as it was in Ottawa last fall when you won the regional Gold Medal Plates – sliced lean strip loin, seared, served with custom Ashton Brewing Co. beer flavoured with lemongrass and lime, with elements strewn on the dish paying homage to the beer. For instance, malt in the smoked boar vinaigrette, barley miso mayonnaise as a sauce. Pioppino mushrooms to garnish, a mussel shell filled with sponsor Northern Divine caviar, egg and beer vinaigrette. Why did you stay close to the dish you served in Ottawa? What did you think about that final plate?
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Photo, left: Jamie’s grand finale plate.
Jamie: Again, it was a strategic choice to use the beer as pairing beverage as well as ingredient in the dish, including the components of beer like the malt … Acorn Creek Farms actually helped us make vinegar out of the beer, so the mussel shell with the egg and caviar had beer vinegar in it, and to season the beer I made a concentrate of tea, honey, and we had a herbal extract to flavour the beer.
At this level of competition you know everyone’s food will taste good, everyone’s plates will look good. I think categories are won and lost on the wow! factors, and originality. So to be original and to wow! are very subjective scoring categories.
Omnivore’s: How did you remain calm during such a mentally demanding series of events?
Jamie: I don’t know if anyone was that calm. Really, you have so much to focus on I think that helps direct your attention. I was definitely very nervous and stressed the whole time, but there is so much immediacy to it you can direct that nervous energy to achieving your goal.
Omnivore’s: Again, Jamie, thank you and congratulations from your friends in Ottawa.
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