Chef Bites earns $10,000 to help displaced victims in restaurant industry
Originally filed at roneade.com
A new Ottawa Restaurant Fund to help displaced wait staff, cooks and others in financial distress raises its first ten thousand dollars in a single night.
Archive note. This page preserves work first published on roneade.com between 2014 and 2016. Ron Eade died in August 2015; nothing on this site is new writing in his voice, and the reporting below is presented as a dated record rather than as current coverage. Restaurants, prices and staffing described here reflect the moment the piece was filed.
The evening
Sixty tickets at $125 each, sold out, at a Rideau Street restaurant on a Tuesday night in December. The event was called Chef Bites, and it raised roughly $10,000 for a new fund aimed at people in the hospitality industry who had fallen on hard times. A charitable receipt of $90 was issued against each ticket.
The idea came from Caroline Ishii, formerly of the vegan restaurant ZenKitchen, and Donna Holton, who owned the host restaurant. Ishii's own restaurant had closed under a revenue-agency seizure earlier that year, which gave the project an obvious provenance.
"It was truly amazing all around," Ishii said afterwards. "I am thrilled by the incredible community spirit around Chef Bites, the new Ottawa Restaurant Fund, and I'm in awe of the talent and generosity of the chefs. In one night we raised over $10,000 and guests were asking to be put on the mailing list for the next event. I also have chefs lining up for the next one."
The single biggest lot
The largest fundraising item of the night was an auction lot: $3,000 paid for five named chefs — Marc Lepine, Matthew Carmichael, Marc Doiron, Caroline Ishii and Steve Mitton — to cook dinner for ten at the donor's home.
Why the fund existed
Eade set the context bluntly. Anyone even casually interested in the local food scene knew that restaurants had been suffering, with some substantial names closing that year. He expected more failures in 2015 — some the victims of a weak local economy, others because they had priced themselves out of an overstocked market that would not sustain, in any numbers, main courses above $40. He noted that Montreal was seeing a comparable run of high-profile closings, so Ottawa was by no means unique.
His point about who pays was the reason the fund was needed. It is the ordinary men and women working for wages who bear the cost, he wrote, especially when they are stiffed for a paycheque or several because an employer has been running on fumes. Ishii and Holton set the fund up with a community foundation so that it could offer more than handouts — small emergency loans and support for educational upgrading among them.
Community foundations of this kind administer donor-advised and named funds on behalf of local causes; the Ottawa Community Foundation is the body that holds them in this city.
Who cooked
Nine chefs contributed courses: Marc Lepine of Atelier; Scott Adams of Benny's Bistro; Matthew Carmichael of El Camino; Jason Laurin of Essence Catering; Ross Fraser of Fraser Café; Steve Mitton of Murray Street; Marc Doiron of Town; Chris Deraiche of Wellington Gastropub; and Caroline Ishii, co-founder and formerly of ZenKitchen. Sponsors included two Niagara wineries, two local breweries, the host restaurant, and a cheesecake maker who supplied the closing bite.
What they served
The plates, which Eade documented one by one in the original post, give a fair snapshot of what Ottawa's better kitchens were doing at the end of 2014. A tofu pocket stuffed with bamboo, mushroom and rice, tied with a squash ribbon and served with daikon pickle and green bean in sesame miso dressing. Gorgonzola arancini with braised beef short rib, fennel candy and roast tomato sauce. Side stripe shrimp with fenugreek, chickpeas, chillies, poppadum and coriander. A crispy carrot tuile with lemongrass crumble, coconut gel and curry pearls, and chicken liver mousse on a puffed cranberry cracker with pistachio and hidden rose apple. A profiterole stuffed with chicken liver mousse, quince preserve and almonds. A crispy tuna taco tartare with iceberg, sesame dressing, queso and pickled ginger. A Vietnamese sandwich with smoked goose liver, soy-cider braised pork belly, pickled vegetables, coriander and radish. Charcuterie on a homemade cracker with rabbit terrine, smoked duck breast, semi-soft cheese, cumberland sauce and pickled daikon. And, for dessert, banana bread with passion fruit mousse, lightly smoked candied pecan and pomegranate.
Where it sits in the archive
Chef Bites is the constructive bookend to the year the rest of the archive documents. Six months earlier the same trade had watched one celebrated restaurant seized over tax arrears and another close after eighteen years. This was the industry's own answer to the question of what happens to the people those closures leave behind.