FARM-FRESH FOOD ON THE MENU AT WORK AND HOME
Sometimes being in the right place at the right time can change your life.
Such is the case with Chef Scott Dicks, who runs the kitchen at Odla — one of Saskatoon’s newest restaurants. Dicks worked with local chefs Christie Peters and Kyle Michael in Vancouver years ago, then moved to Saskatoon to cook at The Hollows while they were getting their second restaurant, Primal, off the ground.
While working at The Hollows, Scott struck up a friendship with Arlie Laroche — owner of Farm One Forty, a holistically managed farm just north of Saskatoon — as she delivered cuts of meat for use in the kitchen at the restaurant. After Dicks left The Hollows and started up his own catering company, Laroche approached him about cooking at one of the farm to table dinners held at Farm
One Forty every summer.
Laroche and her husband, Brett, were so impressed by Scott’s culinary expertise, they invited him to be a co-owner in a restaurant that was a bit of a passion project they were hoping to turn into reality. Plans were hatched over beers, and from then on the hard work began of turning the space formerly held by Nino’s on Broadway into Odla, a farm-to-table concept restaurant.
Six months after opening,
Dicks says the restaurant is doing well, and he loves the team that has assembled to bring plates of comforting and delicious prairie-inspired cuisine to Saskatoon diners.
Chef Scott graciously welcomed us into the cosy home he shares with his girlfriend and three cats. We’re lucky that we got a window of his time, as he had only a few hours free before he had to go back to the restaurant later that day. Dicks says he’s still working 12-hour days, but is hoping to scale that back soon.
I spied a basket on the counter filled with the prettiest brown eggs and was happy to hear that for his snack Scott was making eggs on toast — the classic dish for busy folks on the go.
You may have guessed these weren’t regular eggs on toast.
The base was a fermented tomato focaccia, made in house at Odla. The kitchen had a surplus of tomatoes, which were fermented for about four days, then turned into focaccia dough.
Freshly baked, the bread was slathered with rosemary mayo while freshly grated Parmesan and a smattering of pickled jalapenos completed the sandwich. The farm-fresh eggs were fried in butter, which had browned up beautifully, and the yolks in all their golden glory were perfectly runny when pierced with a knife. The salt sprinkled on top of the eggs was from Newfoundland Sea
Salt Company. It’s a connection the chef welcomes, as his family is originally from Newfoundland.
While Scott prepared his sandwich, we chatted a little about this and that.
Q What is your guilty pleasure grocery store item?
A Sour candies. Every time I’m at the grocery store I pick up a bag of sour candies.
Q What is your favourite Saskatchewan ingredient to cook with?
A The tomatoes in Saskatchewan are amazing. We get some really nice du puy lentils in, and they are a treasure. They’ve been on the menu since Day 1 and they’ll probably stay on the menu. We burn through a lot of those. Honey from Farm One Forty. I’ve used more honey in the last six months than I have in my whole entire life. We’ve been leaning more on honey and removing refined sugar out of our recipes, so we are playing with that as we go along. The honey is super abundant and it’s great for the farm and great for us. YXE Urban Bee Farm does all of their stuff on Farm One Forty for us.
Q What do you cook for yourself when you have just 15 minutes to eat?
A Eggs on toast. For sure, every time. The eggs are from Lee, my egg man. That’s one of the funnest parts of the restaurant, is the personalities that we meet with all of our suppliers. We have a very generous roster of different people who specialize with different things. We know who we want certain ingredients from. We deal with 30 to 35 different people whom I talk to on a weekly basis.
Q If you could cook for anyone famous, who would it be?
A It would be nice to have Rob Feenie in the restaurant. When I moved to Vancouver I worked at Feenies, and that was around the time that I realized I was getting pretty good at cooking. I worked for Feenie for a couple of years, and it would be cool to have him in the dining room just so he could see the transition of where he first met me and where I am now.
Q Did anyone inspire you to become a professional chef ? If so, who?
A Nobody really in particular inspired me to become a professional chef, but there have been a few people along the way that inspired the way I cook. Ned Bell in Calgary, for one. Travis, a guy I worked with at Boneta in Vancouver, he now has a butcher shop called Thistle Meats in California. He was a big inspiration. Jeremie Bastien, who was the chef at Boneta now has Monarque in Montreal, and he was a big inspiration as well.