Welcome to the ‘neo-bistro’
Hopgood restaurant in Wolfville creates unique dishes, keeping the local aspect in mind
Geoff and Lucy Hopgood call their new Wolfville restaurant a “neo-bistro,” and it ticks several boxes for them: a bit of a focus on natural wines, French- and Spanish-influenced food, varied clientele and a lifestyle that lets them devote time to raising their two young daughters.
“A new style bistro, where we focus on working with the producers we want to work with,” Geoff Hopgood summed up. “Because we’re so small we can establish a good relationship there. We don’t use multi-national companies; in fact, I drive to the farms myself to pick up the vegetables that get picked for me that day.”
BUSY OPENING
After three months of renovations, the look at Juniper Food and Wine (www.juniperfoodandwine.com) is neat and minimalist, perhaps a little Scandinavian, perhaps a little Japanese. All that remains of a pita shop, the previous tenant, is the vent hood and one window.
The first month since opening the 16-seat bistro has been busy, with an unexpected volume of business coming from Woodman Grove, a fairly new Wolfville neighbourhood of upscale apartment buildings that cater to retirees.
“They want to eat food that is good for them. The university students, they can put anything in their body and it doesn’t matter so much,” Hopgood said.
“But the older folks are loving us putting goose liver pate on the menu, that we make here from beautiful geese that were raised in Windsor. It’s not foie gras, this is unfattened goose liver. We’ve done dishes with beef tongue and stuff like that. I don’t want to scare people away, that’s not only what we do, we have a fantastic fried chicken dish, we do a lot of seafood, there’s a pork dish on the menu and salads and tuna and all these things. Our goal is to make things approachable, tasty, unique and very fresh.”
LOCAL, LOCAL, LOCAL
To that end, to complement dishes like Hopgood’s hot chicken and grilled pork collar, the chef continues to be enthused by the variety of local produce.
“Right now I’m loving this Murdoc cabbage that is torpedo-shaped. It’s leafy but crunchy and sweet all at the same time. If you do it grilled it’s fantastic. I get that from Tap Root Farms,” he said. “Salsify is another one. And the Musquee du Provence pumpkin is from Ted Hutten, it looks like it’s from Cinderella … we do a pasta with it, a stuffed pasta. It’s been really popular. That’s one of my favourite things at this time of year.”
CULINARY JOURNEY
Originally from Halifax, Hopgood burst onto the culinary scene when he opened Hopgood’s Foodliner in Toronto, which was both critically acclaimed and perpetually crowded.
But with a growing family living in a tiny house with a tinier backyard, the lure of home was strong. Also, Hopgood needs to be near saltwater. He’d been taking salt he made during visits to the family cottage in Smith’s Cove back to Toronto, where it would last a couple of months.
“I just really liked the idea of being a chef that makes his own finishing salt, that was a big thing to me.”
Now he and Lucy also run a sea salt-making company.
Lucy Hopgood’s background is in food photography and styling, and bookkeeping at the Foodliner, but for this venture she is the operations manager, taking care of myriad details, including reservations.
“It’s a real mixture,” she said of the clientele. “There’s a lot of local people checking us out, quite a few from Halifax are coming up as well. Our second week of being open was also Devour!, so there were a lot of international diners, people from Italy, people from all over the place coming then.”
RED AND WHITE
About a quarter of the wine at Juniper is local, with bottles from Benjamin Bridge, Grand
Pre, l’Acadie and Lightfoot & Wolfville, where Hopgood ran the food program for a time. The local wines were chosen mainly on the ethics and production style of the wineries.
“Most of those wines are classic methods, focused more on natural style wine making, Lightfoot & Wolfville is biodynamic,” he said. “That echoes the philosophy of what sorts of wines we want to serve with our food.”
Apart from its proximity to the Bay of Fundy and its location halfway between their cottage and Halifax, Hopgood saw a void in Wolfville’s dining scene, while acknowledging the excellence of the work done nearby by Jason Lynch at Domaine de Grand Pre and Dave Smart at Bessie North House.
“But in town here it was a lot of pubs, and the pubs are fantastic and bring a lot to this community, but … one of the things I heard was that people who would come here and stay in an inn would crave an experience like this. No one’s doing what we’re doing in Wolfville,” he said. “We’re here to help improve the culinary fabric of the community, which I think is already on the way up.”