ETHICAL GOURMET / Remind me to Tell You About the Time I Looked in the Heart of an Artichoke

Little Red Riding Hood, You Sure are looking good. You're Everything a Big Bad Wolf Could Want. Woolfy's Restaurant and Little Red Café Woolfy’s at Wildwood is situated on Highway 7, and Perth Road 118, just outside St. Mary’s in an inconspicuous bungalow surrounded by a farmer’s field. Chris and Mary Woolf, make a sojourn to Woolfy’s well worth the drive. They know how to provide a warm and welcoming ambience. Over many years of dining at Woolfy’s I have never had a disappointing experience. Chef Chris Woolf is the back of the house and Mary Fuller Woolf a consummate host is the front. The Woolf’s are Perth County restaurant royalty. Their commitment to the hospitality industry is nothing short of formidable. I first encountered the Woolf’s while working in Stratford in the mid-eighties. Chris worked with Chef Jean Marie Lacroix at the Church and Chef Neil Baxter at Rundle’s and went on to teach at the Stratford Chefs School, in those early years when it was the onl...

Let’s Send Visitors Home Praising London, Ontario Figure skating fans from around the world will be coming to London in March for the 2013 ISU World Figure Skating Championships. The best figure skaters in the world, from over 50 different countries, will participate in the event from March 10 to 17, 2013, at the Budweiser Gardens (formerly John Labatt Centre), as they compete for the title of World Champion. And the event’s festivities don’t end on the ice. Through the “Light up London” initiative and on-site Fan Fair, the entire London community will be engaged in a full week of celebrations. The Fan Fair will take place at the Covent Garden Market and Budweiser Gardens, and will feature family-oriented activities, including games, activity stations and an outdoor vendor marketplace. “Light up London” will cover the downtown core in purple, white and silver – the color themes of this year’s ISU World Figure Skating Championships – with participating restaurants featuring special...

Che Resto Bar – Infused with Latin Flavour Marvin Rivas’s Che Resto Bar on Dundas is a big-ticket entry into downtown London’s dining scene. This is Latin-American cooking that personifies its origins but also highlights its potential. The menu has a distinct Peruvian flavour, influenced by Chef German Nunez’s heritage. Nuevo Latino cuisine is the rage right now, and Che is the ideal place to experience it. More than a restaurant, the bar/lounge area is a dominant feature and a prime focal point. The resto bar concept is about social interaction and Che has a great vibe. Rivas delivers the resto bar experience with panache: luxe surroundings, welcoming ambience, great cuisine, interesting wines and exotic cocktails. Try a signature capirinha (Brazil s national drink) or Cuba’s ubiquitous highball, a thirst-quenching mojito, or a pisco sour with lime juice, sugar, egg white and sparkling wine. A well-designed resto bar demands an in-depth understanding of how restaurants flow. ...

The Springs The Springs is London’s newest and highly anticipated gourmet refuge on Springbank Drive, under the creative genius and culinary guidance of Chef Andrew Wolwowicz. The smartly appointed restaurant, housed in a beautifully refurbished church, has been operating since mid-October. We are already hearing rave reviews about Wolwowicz’s interesting menus, listing dishes crafted from local, regional and seasonal ingredients. Wolwowicz’s collaborators local entrepreneurs, Tim and Laura Owen, tell eatdrink that although they were initially hoping for a soft opening, the restaurant has been busy every single night since opening. The Owens wanted to integrate as much of the original church as they could into the new restaurant, but they realized that the church’s foundation was disintegrating. Instead they levelled the church except for the original front vestibule, and rebuilt the structure from the ground up using 6,000 of the existing yellow bricks. Identical bricks from two house...

Windsor Eats and Eat Your City On a recent trip to Windsor with the new Ontario’s Southwest Culinary Tourism Guide ( http://www.ontariossouthwestculinary.com/ ) in hand, I was not surprised by the vibrancy of the culinary culture in Windsor. Here is a bit of an update. It’s time to celebrate Windsor’s and Essex’s culinary community. From August 1 to August 7, 2011, you can visit any Eat Your City participating restaurant and indulge in a prix-fixe 3-course meal at lunch or dinner. Each participating restaurant will offer a unique Eat Your City menu. http://windsoreats.com/eatyourcity/ The menus will showcase the diversity of dining choices in Windsor and around Essex County. The prix-fixe menus are priced per person and do not include beverages, taxes or gratuities. Here are three participating restaurants that offer local, seasonal fare and are committed supporting local farmers and culinary tourism : Rino’s Kitchen Located within The House (formerly the Nesbitt Inn), Chef Rino Bort...

Janine Bratt’s Taste Bud Bistro at the Art Gallery of Windsor Located inside the Art Gallery of Windsor, entry to this delightful riverfront bistro is accessible from the front without entering the gallery. There is an outdoor patio with comfortable wrought iron chairs for al fresco dining, and 14 foot windows inside the restaurant that also highlight a stellar view of the Detroit skyline. The dining room is minimalist with comfortable black chairs with white-clad tables that create an attractive domino effect against a dramatic raspberry coloured wall. The wall is enhanced by a blackboard featuring the menu. On the tables are small pitchers of perfect pink hydrangea blooms. Chef/owner Janine Bratt, a 2006 graduate of the Stratford Chef School and a former chef at Caldwell's Grant in her hometown of Amherstburg. Bratt spent three seasons refining her skills at Rundles in Stratford. Bratt also spent time at Oliveto in Oakland, California; The Sooke Harbour House in Sooke; Fresco Res...

The Modernist Gourmet Burger at Motor Burger This high-energy, gourmet hamburger hot-spot is a departure for Little Italy or “Via Italia”, (Erie Street East’s restaurant row), and perhaps even more poignant because it replaced the ultra-sleek, sophisticated and highly touted Noi, that closed in late 2009. “There was a time you had to fight for a table at Noi – but the recession sent a chill through Windsor’s Little Italy.” Never ones to rest on their culinary laurels, savvy restaurateurs and business partners Jay Souillere and Gino Geusale responded to the change in Windsor’s lingering economic climate. They re-imagined the Noi premises and conceptualized the chic and funky, cow and car décor- themed Motor Burger. The fresh and original take on a contemporary burger joint was fashioned as a survival plan to the recession, and an intentional way to pay homage to Windsor’s automobile industry. The result was a stream-lined operation with a recession-friendly, gourmet menu that appeals to...

The Local Food Connection — Yes, We Have No Bananas The Southwest Ontario Local Food Connection: Farmer / Food Buyer Networking Event and Taste it! Gala were an unprecedented success. The well-attended event, many months in the planning, exceeded expectations and identified many future opportunities for collaboration and cooperation in both the agricultural and culinary communities. This present era is, both sadly and ironically, characterized by an alarming ignorance about agriculture, environment and the standardization of our food products. The Local Food Connection was intended in part, to counteract this problem and shine a light on farmers and producers and the availability of local products. Representatives of restaurants, culinary retail, educational institutions and other institutions talked about what they like to buy and the challenges of sourcing local products. This networking event successfully showcased the region and helped further define the area as a whole, w...

A Taste of Honey at Garlic's Garlic's, From Scratch - Upscale Rustic Cuisine with Local, Sustainable Ingredients In the sense that the smart money today is on chef's and restaurants that wear their values on the menu, Garlic's leads by example and with plenty of style and a cutting edge culinary vision. The menu exemplifies a culinary philosophy that promotes the economic, environmental and social benefits of our local food community. This is some of the most superb farm-to-table cuisine in the city. The cooking has a contemporary edge, made from scratch with inspiration from local and signature ingredients and seasonal products. And, Chef Wade Fitzgerald's cooking repertoire just keeps getting better, the presentation more sophisticated and artful. Garlic's commitment to supporting local and sustainable food and agriculture has been instrumental in helping to raise the bar for intelligent dining in London. Five years ago, Garlic's owner, Edo Pehilj, recogni...

Promoting The Recognition of Cuisine as a Manifestation of Culture. The Raja Fine Indian Cuisine   Indian cuisine is a vast and sophisticated subject. India’s states and territories differ, cuisine-wise, as much if not more than the regional cuisines of other countries. Caste, culture. religious doctrine, geography, and climate have all played an immense role in preventing the emergence of a truly definitive national Indian cuisine. Despite the diversity, some coalescing threads surface on closer inspection. However, most of what we consider authentic Indian cuisine is a product of the British imperial influence, which resulted in a prolific Anglo-Indian restaurant cuisine that panders to the global masses. I initially became familiar with this style of restaurant cooking while living in England on two separate occasions. Going out for an “Indian” or a “Curry” or getting an Indian “takeaway” was a national pastime. The idea of a curry is, in fact, a definition that the British imposed ...

Stratford Tourism Alliance Stratford, Ontario, is not only a cultural haven for world-class theatre, but also for a world-class creative community, which includes actors, artists, playwrights, writers, musicians, and many uniquely talented professionals, all of whom contribute to the vitality of the community. Stratford has a long history of being a hotbed of culinary talent, including farmers, growers, chefs, culinary instructors and restaurateurs. Hospitality and the culinary arts are an important and integral part of Stratford’s creative and theatrical community. Stratford is internationally known for the Stratford Shakespeare Festival, which runs from April to November. The festival’s primary mandate is to present repertory productions of William Shakespeare’s plays, but it also produces a diverse variety of theatre, from classic Greek tragedies to more contemporary works. The festival has contributed to the formation of a distinctively idiosyncratic dining culture and restaurant ...

By Bryan Lavery I am an ardent reader of Sarah Elton, food columnist for CBC Radio’s Here & Now, who writes regularly for the Globe and Mail, Maclean’s and the Atlantic’s Food Channel, and is also an informative blogger and tweeter. Her new book, Locavore: From Farmers’ Fields to Rooftop Gardens, How Canadians are Changing the Way We Eat, was officially launched at the Green Barns Market in Toronto at the end of March. The New Oxford American Dictionary selected locavore, a person who seeks out locally produced food, as its word of the year in 2007. Since the term locavore entered the culinary lexicon, it seems to be on the tip of every culinary-minded person’s tongue. Originally, the term was coined in San Francisco by Jessica Prentice, for the 2005 World Environment Day, to describe consumers who choose locally produced foods over other high-carbon-footprint options. As the emphasis on local food, sustainability and terroir continues to gain momentum across Canada, Elton’s b...