The Albion Rooms chef Stephen La Salle steps up to Gold Medal Plates in November
Originally filed at roneade.com
A late change is made after a chef from a ByWard Market restaurant steps down to accept a job in Toronto.
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 substitution
Chef Stephen La Salle of The Albion Rooms, the dining room opened in April 2013 at a downtown hotel in place of a previous restaurant, agreed to compete in Ottawa's regional Gold Medal Plates culinary competition on 17 November at the Ottawa Convention Centre.
The change was needed at short notice: a week earlier, chef Walid El-Tawel of Restaurant E18hteen in the ByWard Market withdrew from the annual competition after accepting a job at a new Toronto restaurant.
The chef
The restaurant's own description of La Salle, quoted directly in the original post, had him Ottawa born and raised and describing the city as "a city that's full of all my friends."
"I love cooking in Ottawa, it's so tight-knit, there is such a sense of community between chefs, suppliers, bartenders, proprietors and even diners," the quoted profile ran. "Doing farm to table is nothing new in Ottawa but it's something I think is so essential to having your food tell a story."
His style was given as "contemporary country Canadian" — contemporary elements of Canadian cuisine handled with a rustic country sensibility, with subtle British undertones as a nod to the restaurant's name.
The full invited roster
The Ottawa competition expanded to ten contestants in 2014, up from eight in 2013 when it was held at the smaller National Arts Centre. The invited chefs were:
- Steve Wall, Supply and Demand Foods & Raw Bar
- Michael Radford, The Whalesbone Oyster House
- Kyle Mortimer-Proulx, ZenKitchen
- Katie Brown Ardington, Beckta Dining & Wine
- Stephen La Salle, The Albion Rooms
- Pat Garland, Absinthe Café
- Ryan Edwards, Taylor's Genuine Food & Wine Bar
- Kyrn Stein, Social Restaurant & Lounge
- Pierre Lortie, Le Baccara
- John Morris, Le Café, National Arts Centre
Seven of the ten were newcomers: La Salle, Radford, Mortimer-Proulx, Edwards, Stein, Lortie and Morris. Wall and Garland had competed in previous years, and Brown Ardington had placed third the year before.
How the series worked
Gold Medal Plates ran in eleven Canadian cities in 2014, with invited chefs competing for gold, silver and bronze in each, and the regional winners going forward to a three-day national final in Kelowna, British Columbia, in February 2015. In nine of the cities the galas were public, with chefs cooking before a paying audience; in Montreal and Calgary the winners were chosen by judges at a private event. Founded in 2003, the competitions had raised $8.2 million for Canada's Olympic and Paralympic athletes since 2004.
The judges
The Ottawa judging panel was led again by a food writer and critic as head judge, alongside the owner of a local creative catering company, a Toronto-based national head judge, two cookbook authors and television personalities, and the chef of the Parliamentary Dining Room.
What happened next
Two of the ten names on this list did not make it to November in the circumstances anyone expected. Seventeen days after this piece was filed, ZenKitchen was closed by a revenue-agency seizure, putting Mortimer-Proulx's participation in doubt. And in the event, it was Pat Garland who took gold with a quail dish, with Wall second and Morris third.
Competitive cooking of this kind is closely tied to the culinary colleges that supply the field; several chefs in this roster trained at Algonquin College, whose programme recurs throughout the archive.