Pat Garland of Absinthe Cafe wins 10th Gold Medal Plates chef competition in Ottawa
Originally filed at roneade.com
Victory against nine competitors entitles the winner to compete in the grand finale in Kelowna in February.
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 result
Chef Patrick Garland, owner of Absinthe Café on Wellington Street, took gold at the tenth annual Ottawa regional Gold Medal Plates competition on the Monday night, beating nine local challengers. It was his second attempt at the invitational contest. His dish was quail stuffed with foie gras, served with a braised thigh croquette.
Silver went to chef-owner Steve Wall of Supply & Demand Food and Raw Bar, also on Wellington Street, who had competed twice before. Bronze went to a newcomer, John Morris, executive chef at the National Arts Centre.
The plates
Garland's winning plate, recorded in full: quail breast stuffed with foie gras, braised thigh croquette, cinnamon cap mushrooms, frittered shallot, confit grapes and a gewürztraminer reduction, paired with a 2013 Niagara gewürztraminer from a single vineyard on the Vinemount Ridge.
Wall's silver dish was aged raw beef with oyster mayonnaise, eldercapers, onion and soft herbs, paired with a 2013 Niagara sauvignon blanc from a limestone vineyard on the Twenty Mile bench.
Morris's bronze dish was a sweetbread-crusted Alberta veal fillet with a smoked vine tomato filled with Prince Edward Island mussels and tarragon pesto, mussel broth and a veal marrow butter sauce, finished with a dehydrated black olive tuile, paired with a 2013 Niagara pinot grigio.
What the chefs said
"It's a really exciting day for me and my team," Garland said moments after the win. "I'm looking forward to the championship in Kelowna. I'm a French cook and tonight's dish is classic and updated. We poured tons of wine into that dish — like, eight bottles — and we just marinated it. But it's really my team that made me proud today, it's all their awesome support."
Wall said the silver was great, adding that the carpaccio dish had been on his restaurant's menu about six months: "We just wanted to do something we knew we did well and we love."
Morris was the most emphatic on the collective point: "My team performed really well. As everyone knows cooking is not an individual sport, it's a team sport. I couldn't have asked for more."
The competition, and the city's record
Ottawa was the tenth of the regional heats held across Canada that year, with the final regional contest following in Regina on 21 November and a two-day national championship scheduled for Kelowna, British Columbia, on 6 and 7 February.
Eade set out the city's previous record in the national final. Chef Jamie Stunt took national silver in 2013 after winning Ottawa gold in November 2012. Before that, chef-owner Marc Lepine of Atelier took the top national prize in 2012 after winning gold in Ottawa in late 2011. Earlier Ottawa gold medallists who went on to place among the top three nationally included Matthew Carmichael in 2009, with bronze, and Michael Blackie in 2006, with silver.
The previous year's Ottawa winner, chef-owner Marysol Foucault of a small Gatineau restaurant, joined the judging panel rather than competing, which is the convention for a defending regional champion.
Context
The 2014 Ottawa field had been unusually unsettled. As the archive recorded in May, one invited chef withdrew after taking a job in Toronto and was replaced at short notice; and as the ZenKitchen closure made clear, another invitee's participation was in doubt from the moment his restaurant was seized.
Competitions of this kind are a significant part of how Canadian professional cooking organises and promotes itself, alongside the trade bodies; the Canadian Culinary Federation is the national professional association for chefs and cooks in the country. The Gold Medal Plates series itself was founded in 2003 and had, by 2014, raised a reported $8.2 million for Canada's Olympic and Paralympic athletes since 2004.