Stratford chefs’ Call to Farms
Restaurants work together to boost town’s culinary scene
For most people outside of Stratford, the town is known primarily for its theatre scene (and being ground zero of Biebermania). It’s not a bad reputation — well, one out of two ain’t bad — but when the stages close for the season, the town of 30,000 that depends heavily on tourism dries up despite its emerging food scene. Restaurants close, hours get cut and tensions build up within the local industry.
“It’s an incredibly competitive, small city and we’re all trying to capitalize on the tourists in the short theatre season,” says chef Tim Larsen of the justopened Red Rabbit restaurant. “Because of that it led to an unhealthy, competitive culture among chefs.”
So one night over beers, a small group of chefs decided that enough was enough, and created a collective called the Stratford Chefs League. The goal would be getting chefs who have never worked together to hold collaborative dinners on farmland, work on nearby farms to get closer to their suppliers and raise the town’s culinary profile, from the restaurants to the chefs’ school to the farms.
“We were all craving something creative and interesting,” says chef Yva Santini of Pazzo Taverna.
While having pints with Larsen and Mercer Hall chef Ryan O’Donnell in February last year, Santini mentioned how her grandfather would talk about villagers in Italy coming together for a pig slaughter and roast in the fall.
“We were all craving something creative and interesting.” YVA SANTINI CHEF AT PAZZO TAVERNA
One thing led to another, and Santini called up one of the nearby farms she works with and, last May, brought along a group of chefs to learn how to slaughter a pig, like an extreme version of a staff retreat trust exercise.
They sold tickets to a pig roast on the farm to the public (they served a pre-slaughtered pig from the farm for legal reasons) and made it into a semiregular event dubbed, Call to Farms. Currently, the collective (think Toronto’s Group of Seven Chefs) has grown to 10 chefs from fine-dining places such as the Bruce hotel, the church-turned-event space the Revival, and café and bakery Revel Caffe.
At another dinner, the chefs went to organic produce farm Soiled Reputations, where they picked sugar snap peas before the diners arrived.
“We were on our knees, using tiny scissors to pick tiny flowers and tendrils,” says O’Donnell. “It gives you a lot of respect to the farmers and now you don’t just see a bag of greens that automatically show up at the kitchen. You see the physical labour and suffering that went into not just the greens, but also the soil . . . It’s made me more focused on vegetables and less on protein, showcasing varieties of vegetables people aren’t used to seeing, and letting the ingredients have that clean and clear taste.”
Larsen later went back to the farm on his own to work a few more days, picking weeds and killing bugs with his hands. “I used to grumble a bit about paying $20 for the farms’ mixed greens, but now I understand all the work that went into it.”
Santini considers the League as a way for local chefs (and diners) to learn more about the food that grows in the region, as well as learn skills from other chefs.
“I work all year-round so I don’t have the opportunity to travel to Europe and stage for three months,” she says. “So why don’t I learn from my community, since we’re all using the same products? I could make pasta in Italy but we don’t have the same eggs and flour here. That’s the benefit of the League. We can work together and keep raising the bar for Stratford.”
So while diners get a delicious dinner on bucolic farmland and chefs get to hash out old rivalries and get creative outside of their kitchens, the farmers get to have a slew of chefs and diners come to them and eat their products.
“Since the dinner, I had a ton more restaurants buying large quantities of meat from me,” says Erin McIntosh, whose family opened their farm up to the most recent Call to Farms dinner in June.
At that dinner, chefs splayed open lambs and roasted them over an open flame on the farm’s muddy grounds in the middle of a morning rainstorm (it cleared up by the time dinner started). McIntosh says it was a way for her to network with chefs and let customers see how their pigs, ducks, turkeys, sheep and chicken roam openly on the premises.
The League is still in its infancy as the chefs-turned-event planners are still learning things such as renting equipment and budgeting (a quarter of the profits from each Call to Farms dinner goes to the hosting farm).
But the chefs involved say they already reaped the benefits and have high hopes for the next year.
“It was almost like an overhaul effect,” says Larsen. “I’ve known people who work 100 metres from me in the last five years and I wouldn’t have spoken to them had it not been for the Chefs League.
“It was all b-------. If you worked at this restaurant, you had to hate this restaurant, it was all silly stuff.”
Stratford’s food scene continues to grow as its chefs band together to make it worthwhile for not just visitors, but local residents, to keep going out to eat.
“In the last couple of years, more and more good restaurants opened year-round, giving locals something great to eat in the winter,” says O’Donnell. “In the past, a lot of them were only open in the tourist season, sending the message that they were only for tourists.”
“The festival has allowed the food scene here to flourish, but now we’re at a fever pitch with great producers and chefs,” continues O’Donnell. “When people are planning a trip in Ontario and are interested in food, look at Stratford. Book your restaurants and then make your theatre reservations around it. That’s our goal.”
“I’ve known people who work 100 metres from me in the last five years and I wouldn’t have spoken to them had it not been for the Chefs League.” TIM LARSEN CHEF AT RED RABBIT