LOCALLY SOURCED
The hot new restaurant job: staff farmer.
When Bev Hotchkiss reveals that her new restaurant, Backhouse, in Niagara-on-the-Lake, won’t be serving strictly Niagara wines, it sounds almost radical.
“In part I feel it’s because I want to have the conversation with people about what we do really, really well,” Hotchkiss says, “and there are things we don’t, because of our climate. I’m trying to get adamant about not putting Niagara Cabernet Sauvignons on the list, for instance. There’s things that we just don’t do.”
Backhouse — which opened its doors to the public on July 3 — is both a restaurant and a functional testament to what Ontario, can do, foodwise. Its chef, Ryan Crawford, is well known in the region, having helmed popular NOTL eatery The Stone Grill. The restaurant is dedicated to what Hotchkiss and Crawford have termed “integrated sustainable cooking.”
“We sort of got tired of the bastardization of ‘ farm to table,’ “Hotchkiss says. “Sure, everything comes from a farm, but how ethical is it?”
Reading a sample menu from the restaurant helps explain what the pair are going for: meats, cheeses and eggs are all sourced from nearby farms and purveyors (chickens aren’t just free range but free foraging) and produce on hand as of this week includes scapes, chard and radishes. In other words: Backhouse is only going to let you eat what the weather is going to let them grow. “It’s sort of like a Stadtländer idea,” Hotchkiss says, citing local food pioneer Michael Stadtländer and his farmhouse restau- rant Eigensinn Farm, “but a step up.”
That ethos is not particularly inventive or new — Stadtländer was an innovator when he introduced sustainable eating in the 1980s — but Hotchkiss and Crawford, who are married, are setting themselves apart with terminology: the menu is not local, it’s “cold climate cuisine,” and the restaurant has its own farmer on staff (that’s the “integrated” part).
The latter is a practice Hotchkiss says is common in the U.S. and Europe but lacking here at home. “We’re farmers, our staff farms, and we have someone who we’ve hired to farm specifically for us,” she says. “But we’re really behind on this type of thing in Canada. I think that the Ministry of Agriculture and the Ministry of Tourism aren’t in communication with one another. It’s hard to get tourism licensing on agricultural property.”
Hotchkiss and Crawford didn’t get to Backhouse overnight. For his part, Crawford cut his teeth at the Stratford Chef ’s School, and has worked in such venerable kitchens as Thomas Keller’s The French Laundry and several high-end restaurants in San Francisco and California. The couple met at Stone Road Grille, where Crawford worked as the executive chef for eight years and where Hotchkiss had gotten a job after finishing her master’s degree in international relations. They got married at the restaurant, and left Stone Road about two years ago to look for a space of their own.
They started in Prince Edward County, an area that has in the past five years risen as a top tourist destination for many of the same reasons the Niagara region has long been one: good wine and local food production. Backhouse would have been a good fit for the region, “but the seasonality there is a bit too severe,” Hotchkiss says. In September, the couple sold their house and found themselves shopping not just for a restaurant but for a place to live; after coming close to signing deeds on numerous locations in southern Ontario, Hotchkiss and Crawford found out that the old Stone Road Grille space was available. They bought it.
“I felt it was like the mothership calling us back home,” Hotchkiss says.
The buzz surrounding the opening of Backhouse has been palpable, in part because Crawford is well-known, but also because the pair are bringing an approach and attention to detail that, Hotchkiss says, is somewhat lacking in the tourist-friendly Niagara region.
“We’re probably stepping it up a notch,” she says, though she jokes that, despite her confidence in the restaurant’s concept — and Crawford and his team’s abilities — she’d rather local customers visit a bit later in the season. “I keep trying to tell them: Don’t come till September or October,” she laughs. “There will be some kinks.”
We got tired of the bastardization ... everything comes from a farm, but how ethical is it?