Producer-driven ingredients How one Niagara restaurant is topping all the best-of lists PD Days
If you’re hoping for a table at The Restaurant at Pearl Morissette this weekend, there will be a bit of a wait. Until about the middle of January. This is what happens when enRoute, the highly respected Air Canada inflight magazine, puts you atop its annual list of Canada’s best new restaurants. The Restaurant at Pearl Morissette in Jordan was crowned Oct. 25 — the first in Niagara to receive the honour.
The day after co-chefs Daniel Hadida and Eric Robertson gave their acceptance speech in Toronto, “I think we got 400 reservations,” Hadida said. “That’s definitely the best part of it.”
The accolades, determined by one writer after eating her way across Canada, came just shy of a year since Hadida and Robertson opened their renovated barn-turned-coveted dinner reservation on the bucolic Pearl Morissette winery property.
Five weeks after their first service in November 2017, they were hosting a dinner for Michelin, the world’s most respected restaurant ranking body, with chefs from the Michelinstarred Elske restaurant in Chicago.
Michelin tapped Hadida and Robertson again last spring for a collaboration with Kadeau, a two-star operation from Denmark known for making ants palatable.
All the while, the restaurant was drumming up national media attention that read like poetry about a prize find in one of Niagara’s smallest burgs.
This week, Hadida and Robertson added to their honours when Toronto Life ranked it first among out-oftown restaurants. (Backhouse in Niagara-on-the-Lake was No. 8, and was enRoute’s People’s Choice
Award winner in 2016.)
Still, the day after the enRoute win last month, the crew was back in the kitchen as though it was just another Tuesday.
“It’s good from a business standpoint,” Robertson said. “It doesn’t affect our attitudes toward running a restaurant and doesn’t change what happens within these walls. If people have different expectations coming in — I hope they don’t.”
“It’s nice,” Hadida added about the award. “But it doesn’t define us.”
Here’s what does:
Two chefs are better than one
Much about Pearl Morissette makes it stand out, starting with its unconventional kitchen structure. Hadida and Robertson are co-chefs with neither playing sous chef to the other’s chef de cuisine.
In other kitchens, egos might prevent such an egalitarian organizational chart. But Hadida and Robertson, both tack sharp and articulate, complement each other in the kitchen to execute their multi-course menus that can change mid-service.
It helps that each chef harnessed their talents in Michelin-starred restaurants in Europe and bring the same rigorous standards that reared them to their Jordan galley.
Say farm-to-table and watch Robertson and Hadida tense up just a little. It’s a term they eschew even though their ingredients come from Niagara farmers, their resident forager and gardener Deirdre Fraser, and a Newfoundland fisherman named Gerry.
All restaurants at a certain level should be farm to table, they say.
But their approach is different than other high-end dining rooms who label themselves as such. Hadida and Robertson take their cues from producers, using what they have available week to week rather than telling growers what they want to cook.
That kind of of sustainable approach is their “guiding light,” Hadida said.
“It’s being unique and concise with the purpose of the restaurant, which for us is hosting people, nourishing people and giving people a great experience,” he said. “(It’s about) capturing deliciousness in a way that surprises people and excites people and gives people a really good time.”
Gratuity included
There’s no tipping at The Restaurant at Pearl Morissette. The gratuity is folded into the final tally on the bill, which means everyone gets their fair share at the end of the night.
Chefs serve guests alongside frontof-house staff, giving diners direct access to the kitchen. The result is stellar service but it also makes for a cohesive team invested in the restaurant’s success.
They plant restaurant gardens together in the spring and eat together on their days off. It’s also not unusual for restaurant staff to cook dinner for the winery’s Mexican seasonal agricultural workers, joining them at the table and playing impromptu soccer together on a lumpy patch of lawn just outside the kitchen.
“That is unquestionably the most important element of this,” Robertson said. “That’s what goes into any great business or restaurant. It’s having good people around you.”
Hadida and Robertson constantly refine how they operate at Pearl Morissette.
The Michelin dinner with Kadeau, in particular, exposed them to new techniques and inspired them to rejig how they operated those first few months after opening. They started using the kitchen differently and altered the format of their menus, skipping the “staid” snack portion after that event.
“Any time you have the opportunity to shake up a system … it’s something Eric and I are eager to do,” Hadida said. “Although we’re a different restaurant than we were then, we’re a much better restaurant.”
Staff here are always learning, though, whether it’s touring the Canadian Culinary Collection at University of Guelph, getting schooled in oolong from a tea sommelier or foraging with Fraser.
They share that knowledge with guests during dinner service and with curiosity seekers who show up outside of dinner service to see for themselves the greatness that Niagara has in its midst.
“Definitely a lot more local people are poking their heads in on a Wednesday afternoon,” Robertson said, “which is great because it always gives us the chance to chat and let them know what we’re up to.”
Tiffany Mayer is the author of Niagara Food: A Flavourful History of the Peninsula’s Bounty. She blogs about food and farming at timeforgrub.com. twitter.com/eatingniagara