OCT 23 12 – 9:25 AM — My serendipitous moment at dinner Monday unfolded as I dug into chef Pat Garland’s delightful charcuterie platter, a display of home-cured porcine in myriad variation, the second of eight courses served at the first Knives Out Ottawa meal held at Murray Street Kitchen in the ByWard Market. There, tucked in his shimmering aspic of gelatinized head cheese, were four green edamame beans and three cubed nuggets of carrot — little unexpected treasures buried deep in a dish normally restricted to assertively seasoned meaty bits, no doubt the chef’s nod to vegetables in a five-hour orgy of pork from snout to tail.
It made me smile, those morsels of veggies. Nice to include a selection of food groups, I say …
And so went the inaugural Knives Out Ottawa dinner, smile after smile, discovery after discovery, where customers at $75 a head ($125 with wine pairings) snapped up 54 tickets within days, if not hours of its announcement in Omnivore’s Ottawa and online on Oct. 5. A second planned for Nov. 12 with just 20 seats at Atelier on Rochester Street, to mark the restaurant’s fourth anniversary, is already sold out.
Top, flavour-packed pork liver hotdog on steamed bun with spicy mustard created by Murray Street Kitchen sous chef Paul Dubeau; centre, creative charcuterie platter with head cheese, flawless home-cured porchetta, jowl pogo and fried crackling, bacon, pickled cauliflower and carrot by chef Pat Garland of Absinthe; bottom, rich pork consommé, smoked carrot, caramelized onions, marrow and horseradish butter by chefs Jamie Stunt and Simon Bell of Oz Kafé.
Each dinner is threaded with a common theme — on Monday, almost a dozen chefs used every bit of the pig you might imagine, and then some, from head to bones to blood, with a selection of porcine tunes on the sound system played throughout the meal. The next challenge at Atelier is to incorporate hallowe’en treats through an entire multi-course dinner.
“We’ll use leftover hallowe’en candy in all the dishes,” says Atelier’s Marc Lepine, recently crowned Canada’s Grand Champion chef at a national contest in Kelowna, B.C., and an original member of the Knives Out brigade.
“Not all of them will be sweet,” he adds. “There are also things like potato chips, pretzels, things like that. It being Atelier, we have to have a little fun.”
And fun, it most certainly is.
Patterned after Toronto’s successful Group of Seven chefs, the idea born a month ago among friends in an after-hours resto/bar on Preston Street was to corral a core of chefs to prepare a series of monthly theme meals, rotating among their restaurants, for adventurous diners who aren’t timid about letting talented young men do what they will with their creativity. The benefit for chefs is they get to think beyond their usual menus and have fun working together in a spirit of camaraderie; diners, on the other hand, get to try new things and sample the cuisine of a generous handful of restaurants in one sitting, without having to actually make the rounds through the streets of Ottawa.
(The concept is not lost on some of Ottawa’s women chefs, incidentally, who are reportedly planning a similar female version in late November called Clam Jam.)
Grilled peameal bacon, sunchoke, mustard hollandaise, pickled quail’s egg by chef Chris Deraiche of Wellington Gastropub.
The core group of Knives Out Ottawa includes Garland of Absinthe, Lepine of Atelier, Jamie Stunt of Oz Kafé, Marc Doiron at Town, Arup Jana of Allium, Chris Deraiche at Wellington Gastropub, and Steve Mitton of Murray Street Kitchen who brought the whole thing together. Joining them Monday was Paul Dubeau, sous chef at Murray Street; Simon Bell of Oz Kafé; and Luis Calero, chef de partie at Atelier, among others.
Deraiche says he’s not surprised by popularity of the event. “It’s a pretty cool idea and I think your chances of having a great meal are pretty high,” he says. “And it’s exciting for us — we get to hang out and figure out what our next theme will be.”
And what will he do with leftover hallowe’en candy? “I have no idea yet,” Deraiche says.
But you can bet it will be fun.
Pig’s blood spaetzle, confit pig’s tongue, smoked heart meatballs in broth enriched by pig trotters, with pork rind by chef Steve Mitton of Murray Street Kitchen.
From chef Arup Jana at Allium: “Sacrilegious Goat Curry” with crispy pork shoulder curry, potato-peanut croquette, curried garlic purée, green chilies and refreshing mint yogurt.
Characteristically playful sous vide pork leg, truffle, ramps, charred corn, chimichurri with fresh mustard, pork crisp, gouda and tomato jam by chef Marc Lepine of Atelier.
Among the standouts was an unusual (and ridiculously rich) tarte Tatin to close the meal by pastry chef Doiron. “My challenge was to incorporate pork in a dessert,” Doiron says, “so I decided to do a pork belly tarte Tatin.
“You make a caramel, pour it into moulds, layer on apples, then confit pork belly on top, finished with puff pastry on top that I made this morning.
“I’ve served tarte Tatin before, so I thought apples and pork go well together. This dessert straddles the sweet and savoury.”
Town chef Marc Doiron’s apple belly tarte Tatin with bourbon-washed bacon ice cream, smoked crème fraîche. (He melded the taste of bacon with whisky by mixing bacon fat with the bourbon, chilling, then removing the fat after it naturally separated. He then used the infused liquor in the ice cream.)
After November, Knives Out Ottawa is expected to take a brief hiatus in December and return in the new year.
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