HAIL TO THE CHEF
B. C. serves up another Top Chef Canada winner.
It must be something in our water. For the second year in a row, a chef from B. C. has won the Top Chef Canada competition. And this year, second place also went to a chef who’s now in Vancouver.
“This is the biggest secret I’ve ever had to keep,” said winner Carl Heinrich, who has known of his victory since filming on Season 2 of the competition ended last summer. The Sooke native, who is now based in Toronto, said it will be a relief not to have to watch every word any more.
Heinrich is looking forward to being in Sooke this weekend so he can celebrate his victory with family and friends in his hometown.
Meanwhile second- place finisher Trevor Bird, who recently opened Fable restaurant in Vancouver, said parts of the whole Top Chef Canada experience still seem surreal.
“I’m super- stoked,” said Bird, 29, a Montreal transplant who last worked as a chef de partie at the Shangri- La hotel in Vancouver. “At the end of the day, I got a restaurant out of it. It’s a dream come true.”
In the show’s 90- minute finale that aired Monday evening, Heinrich won the Top Chef Canada
Carl deserved to win. He’s a very technically good cook. Myself, I can’t say the same thing.
TREVOR BIRD
TOP CHEF CANADA RUNNER- UP
title with a four- course meal that included a smoked trout salad, a roasted elk loin, an orange and fennel sorbet and a peach cobbler.
Bird’s meal consisted of a goat cheese, pickled raspberry and hazelnut amuse bouche; olive oil- poached salmon; “veal doppelgänger” ( two preparations of veal); and a blueberry mascarpone tart. The guest judge was Vancouver restaurateur Vikram Vij.
“Carl deserved to win,” Bird said Monday. “He’s a very technically good cook. Myself, I can’t say the same thing.”
Any episodes where it appeared that Heinrich might have displeased the judges was due to editing done to heighten the drama, Bird said. “Carl was never at the bottom.”
“Mark [ McEwan, the head judge] was by far the toughest judge because he had the best palate,” recalled Heinrich, 27. “It was always hard to cook for him because you couldn’t slough anything off.”
Both Bird and Heinrich, who until recently was executive chef at Toronto’s Marben restaurant, worked with Top Chef Canada Season 1 winner Dale MacKay as he was opening Lumiere in Vancouver.
“He’s very organized, very intense,” said Heinrich. “I saw how he put a menu together, how he put his kitchen together. His technique and palate are among the best I’ve ever seen.”
With the $ 100,000 prize and $ 30,000 kitchen that he won, Heinrich plans to open a new restaurant in Toronto, where he will serve farm- to- table dishes that are “approachable yet refined.”
He’s happily ensconced in Toronto and plans to stay there for the foreseeable future.
“I really miss being out west, but I’ve just signed a 10- year lease,” he laughed. “Toronto is the best culinary city in Canada right now. It’s really somewhere I think I can build a strong, successful restaurant.”
En route to Vancouver Island this weekend, Heinrich will reconnect with Bird and have a meal at Fable. Then it’s on to Sooke, where Heinrich ( Grad ’ 03) will give the keynote address to the graduating class of 2012.