WATCHING HIS WASTE
Chef shares food philosophy
I confess to throwing out a significant part of nearly every bunch of carrots that ever came my way: the feathery greens. The peelings. The bits at the top and bottom. Ditto for the leaves at the top of celery stalks. And tired lettuce: So much of what came into the house left via the trash.
Then I read Daniel Vézina’s inspiring new book, La cuisine réfléchie: bien manger sans gaspiller (Les Éditions La Presse, 2015, 277 pp, $39.95). Could be that I was ready for its message, but it got me thinking. Among the many things I learned was that carrot greens or limp lettuce can be ingredients in soups. That carrot peelings can go into a vegetable bouillon. That celery leaves have the makings of a lovely celery salt.
“We are near a showdown,” he said in an interview. “By 2050 there will be nine billion people on the planet — and there will not be enough food. We throw out 30 to 40 per cent of what we produce. We have to find a solution.”
Vèzina, 54, is a high-profile and charismatic Quebec chef who has spent most of his life in restaurant kitchens. With his wife, Suzanne
I don’t like to work. I do this to have fun. For me, it is fun when I’m cooking and writing.
Gagnon, he owns Laurie Raphaël, a high-end restaurant named for their children; it has tables in Quebec City and Montreal. The Quebec City establishment, open since 1991, closed recently for renovations and is set to reopen in April; the Montreal restaurant has operated since 2007 on the second floor of the downtown Hôtel Le Germain. Vézina usually divides his time between the two places. Home for the Verdun native is Quebec City, where he grew up, but he keeps a pied à terre in a downtown Montreal apartment building — easy walking distance to Mount Royal for a jog.
To many Quebecers, his is a familiar presence.
He co-hosted the program Attention, c’est chaud! on Radio-Canada and the reality show Les chefs! for a five-year run that ended in 2015, as well as L’Effet Vézina: de père en chef, with his son. Raphaël is a partner and chef de cuisine in the Quebec City restaurant; his daughter is in the business, too, in marketing and customer service.
On Fridays, Vézina does a radio program from his Montreal restaurant on Rouge FM — Bonheurs de table, with Marie-Élaine Proulx. He is an ambassador to Zeste on platforms including the web and television, and he blogs at zeste.tv/ vezina. “I like the media: It is a way to reach people,” he said. “When I show a technique, people see it.” Les Chefs!, for instance, had a million viewers.
His recipe segments are nothing short of inspiring: In one I watched the other day, with Quebec actress Jacynthe René as guest, Vézina prepared an enticing carrot tartare with a bunch of carrots he put through a traditional meat grinder before mixing in carrot and orange juice, raw quail eggs, mustard, vinegar and oil, horseradish and sesame seeds and a bit of quinoa. When René remarked on his inventiveness, he replied that he is occasionally inspired by dishes he has in restaurants and that, other times, ideas come to him in his dreams.
In L’atelier de Daniel Vézina in 2012, the first of three books he published with Les Éditions La Presse, he wrote about basic techniques: In observing aspiring young chefs on Les Chefs!, he said, he realized that too many knew too little about them. His 2013 book, Mes classiques préférés, features such classics as beef bourguignon and Dover sole.
In La cuisine réfléchie, the third book, Vézina chose to tackle the topic of creativity by considering the subject of waste.
Wasting less, he contends, means many things: It means thinking before buying, as we draw up our menus and before tossing food into the trash; it means buying less, buying better and cooking more. It means learning to create meals from ingredients we have on hand.
He encourages readers to have confidence in themselves and “to be inspired by what pleases you, by what you liked as a kid, by what tastes good and makes you happy.”
Vézina remembers the little garden his father kept in their country place, remembers delicious corn and flavourful strawberries. He remembers also that by October, “everything was wrapping up” and that, after that, the only lettuce available was iceberg and that tomatoes had pale interiors. “I criticized everything,” he recalled, “and my mother said, ‘If you don’t go on to become a chef, I don’t know what you will do.’”
As it happened, he went to cooking school — and loved it. He graduated in 1979 from the cooking program at the Polyvalente de Charlesbourg in Quebec City — the same school attended by Normand Laprise, who went on to open Toqué! in Montreal. The two have known each other since adolescence and Vézina calls Laprise “my great friend.”
Among the many charitable and social causes with which he is involved, including the Fondation de la greffe de moelle osseuse de l’Est du Québec and the Regroupement des cuisines collectives du Québec, is the Fondation Serge Bruyère. Bruyère, who died in 1994, was a chef and restaurateur who, in 14 years at the helm of À la Table de Serge Bruyère in Quebec City, worked with local producers and trained dozens of cooks, including Vézina: He calls him “my mentor.”
Today Vézina works happily with small producers in the Charlevoix region who grow produce including thin green beans, zucchini flowers and tomatoes for his restaurant kitchens, but he remembers a time, not that long ago, when virtually all restaurants used frozen vegetables; they were considered superior to fresh.
He says the goal of his recipes, which are relatively simple to follow, is to encourage people to go to market, cook for the weekend and sit around a table together: To him, that’s what it’s all about. For his part, Vézina loves gathering with friends, loves sport and loves travel — he spent a month over Christmas with his family in the Far East and last June climbed Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, training first on the stairs of Mount Royal — and also being free to make the choices he wants to.
“To be motivated in the kitchen, you have to have a passion for life. If you have time for life, you have passion for the kitchen,” he said.
“I don’t like to work. I do this to have fun. For me, it is fun when I’m cooking and writing. It’s a game. When I am no longer having fun, I’ll quit.”