Chef Blackie, colleagues team up for ‘performance’ dinners
Ottawa chef Michael Blackie is again indulging his flair for showmanship and love of collaboration.
At his Stittsville restaurant, NeXT, he’ll stage eight events this year that will each feature two out-of-town chefs joining him in the kitchen to prepare elaborate dinners, and each dinner will be preceded by cooking demonstrations from each chef.
The first “three chefs/one dinner” event of this year is to be held Wednesday. Seven more dinners will be held in 2017, monthly on a Wednesday, except in December.
“We’ve got chefs of all different styles coming,” Blackie says. “The basic premise is get them together and expose Ottawa to chefs that most people might never get to meet or see or taste.”
Last year, Blackie held four such dinners at NeXT, which he helped open four years ago following his stint as the National Arts Centre’s executive chef. While at the NAC, Blackie staged several Celebrity Chefs of Canada events that brought in leading Canadian chefs to team up with their Ottawa peers.
Blackie, who starred in a 2010 Food Network Canada series called Chef Off, said he was able to tap into a large network to quickly pull together a roster of visiting chefs from Canada and the U.S.
Wednesday’s event will feature Blackie in the kitchen with Craig Youdale, dean of the Canadian Food and Wine Institute at Niagara College, and Rudi Fischbacher, associate dean of Humber College’s school of hospitality, recreation and tourism in Toronto.
“I thought it’d be cool to bring two deans ... they develop the cooks that I need in my kitchen,” Blackie says.
As with each dinner, the event kicks off with drinks and canapés at 6 p.m., during which time guests can meet and mingle with the chefs. Then, Blackie, Youdale and Fischbacher will give presentations about dishes to come during the night.
Dinner will be from 7:15 to 10, with each chef responsible for what Blackie calls a “wave” of two courses. Even as they’re cooking, the chefs will be wearing microphones, and their banter and comments from NeXT’s open kitchen will be sent to speakers in the room.
“It’s totally a performance,” Blackie says. “Who doesn’t want to know what’s going on in the kitchen?”
For his part, Blackie is starting dinner with two dishes that were inspired by a recent visit to Mexico’s Pacific coast. One dish pairs sea scallops and hominy, and another quesadilla-like dish is made with chorizo, using a large rectangular press that Blackie brought back from Mexico.
Youdale is to follow with a dish of blackened pork tenderloin and then grilled game hen. Fischbacher will serve baked Thai salmon and espresso-marinated flank steak before a final wave of three desserts.
The cost of the night is $115 a person, with a pairing of three glasses of wine and a digestif for $38.
Other chefs visiting this year include Deb Paquette of the Nashville, Tenn., restaurant Etch, and Toronto pop-up and food truck chef Matthew Basile (May 10); Karin Desveaux of Loyalist College in Belleville and Chicago chef Rick Gresh (June 21); celebrity chef Chris Pritchard and barbecuing authority Ted Reader (July 19); Hockley Valley Resorts chef Michael Potters and Toronto chef Paul Boehmer (Aug. 16); chefs John Morris and Steven Gugelmeier, who worked with Blackie at Brookstreet Hotel in Kanata during the mid-2000s (Sept. 20); Toronto restaurateur and champion oyster shucker Patrick McMurray and Newfoundland and Labrado chef and Top Chef Canada contestant Todd Perrin (Oct. 18); and Montreal chef and Top Chef Canada contestant François Gagnon and Vancouver chef Robert Clark (Nov. 15).
For Blackie, the appeal seems to be as much the camaraderie as it is the potential of filling his restaurant on a Wednesday night.
Visiting chefs, he says, will stay at his home, which has two en suite bedrooms in its basement. “It’s like family. They’re with us for 72 hours .... It’s set up so that we can hang out.”