Month: September 2013

Enjoying a great meal in Charlottetown at Lot 30

Posted on by David
You would not have thought I'd still be hungry, but between rounds of judging I found time to have dinner at Lot 30 (151 Kent St., Charlottetown, PEI, 902-629-3030, lot30restaurant.ca). Charlottetown is not a big place (fewer than 35,000 people), but Lot 30 and chef Gordon Bailey could hold their own in Montreal, Boston, or Toronto. The restaurant is a spacious room with hardwood floors, wooden tables and chairs, and several pieces of Op Art on the walls. Since I was dining alone, co-owner Traci Bailey (Gordon's wife) placed me at the bar in front of a video screen showing the kitchen's plating station. Watching disembodied hands assembling each plate before it came out was as hypnotic as staring into an aquarium. The décor is...Read More

Trying to judge the best shellfish chefs in Canada

Posted on by David
I was honored to be asked to judge the Garland Canada International Chef Challenge, one of the highlights of the PEI International Shellfish Festival. Ten world-class chefs compete for a grand prize of $10,000, sponsored by Canada's lead producer of professional kitchen equipment. I joined chefs Alain Bossé from Nova Scotia (aka the Kilted Chef) and Dominic Serio, the vice president of the Atlantic division of the Canadian Culinary Federation. The challenge for the chefs was to cook a plate incorporating at least three of the following PEI shellfish: lobster, jonah crab meat, mussels, and soft-shell clams. The challenge for the judges was to choose the best dishes from a field of highly talented competitors. I don't know what what goes on back stage on...Read More

Making PEI mussels like the mussel master

Posted on by David
As a native Belgian and as the man who launched mussel aquaculture on Prince Edward Island (see post), Joel Van Den Bremt has eaten his share of mussels over the years. When I asked him how he preferred to cook them, he thought a bit and told me, “steamed, but with the vegetables soft enough to eat. I like the vegetables, too.” I agree with him. Some diners will pass the mussels to someone else at the table and just concentrate on the mussel-flavored broth. I prefer the three-bowl plan: one for the mussels, one of the spent shells, and a third for broth and vegetables. Although you can steam mussels in a dry pan, relying on their own juices, many people add raw vegetables...Read More

PEI folks give new meaning to foodies

Posted on by David
I can't say I've ever see an island where so many people make or gather or process wonderful food. Between judging duties at the International Shellfish Festival I had the chance yesterday to drive around the island a bit, heading up to the north shore to see a mussel processing operation (more on that later on), pay a visit to a potato farm, catch a picnic in the fields, and visit Raspberry Point oysters. That's Scott Linkletter at the top of this post, hauling a cage of oysters to show how they're grown using an Australian system of posts driven into the soft bottom of shallow waters. The cages are suspended on lines that hang on the posts. Every few days he and his staff...Read More

Fishermen feed the world (especially on PEI)

Posted on by David
I met one of my heroes yesterday at the PEI International Shellfish Festival. I say “hero” even though I had never known his name until I met him, but Jozef Van Den Bremt changed the way a lot of us eat. A Belgian immigrant who wanted to find a way to contribute to his adopted country and his new home province of Prince Edward Island, he set out in the 1970s to figure out how to grow blue mussels. It's not that mussels were uncommon. They cling to every rock and pier in the North Atlantic–and every one of those wild mussels is full of grit in its flesh. To get sweet, juicy and grit-free mussels, you need to cultivate them on a substrate where...Read More

Tasty start to PEI International Shellfish Festival

Posted on by David
Mussels, oysters, or lobster? It's hard to choose among them on Prince Edward Island, the small Canadian province with the massive shellfish harvest. This year I'm getting my fill of all of them as a judge of Garland Canada International Chef Challenge. But before the competitions got started on Friday the 13th, I joined 500 other diners for the Feast and Frolic kickoff dinner at the Charlottetown Festival Grounds. Food Network Canada star (and Islander) chef Michael Smith played emcee, and the students of the Culinary Institute of Canada did the cooking. It was an auspicious beginning. The moderately deconstructed lobster chowder (above) consisted of a celeriac broth with foraged sea asparagus and green swoops of pureed lovage. A butter-poached claw and half-tail of PEI...Read More