By Marion Warnica
The Chelsea Club is packed tonight. Laughter and the clink of forks on porcelain fill the air, but nothing can distract from the guest of honour: a good meal.
There are 40 people in the dining room of The Chelsea Club, a beautifully restored Victorian mansion. The crowd is here to savour the monthly vegan dinner created by ZenKitchen, a burgeoning Ottawa catering business.
The menu – smokey adjuki bean soup, salad with ginger-sesame-ponzu dressing, a Japanese tasting plate and Meyer lemon cake with Limoncello glaze – was created by chef and owner Caroline Ishii, a former communications and marketing consultant.
Her vision of a food business that focuses on the important connection between food and health is now a reality.
“How come we spend $100 on a pair of sneakers to put on our feet, but we hesitate over 50 cents extra for an organic carrot that is going into our bodies?” Ishii asks.
People aren’t aware of the great effect food has on their bodies and she wants to change this, says Ishii.
Ishii uses seasonal, locally grown, mainly organic ingredients and likes to surprise people by showing them vegan food can be “just as tasty and satisfying as any other meal.”
Her friend Kurt Baumgartner – a self-described carnivore – is one such ZenKitchen convert.
“On our way to the first dinner, we were joking that we would have to stop by McDonald’s on the way home. But I was blown away by the variety and the quality,” says Baumgartner, a financial planner and Centretown resident. “We have been to every dinner she’s held since then.”
Ishii’s new life as a chef and business owner began more than 12 years ago when her car careened headlong into a tractor-trailer while she was a Red Cross relief worker in Ukraine. Miraculously, she and her party survived, but it spurred Ishii to make some big life changes.
“There is no guarantee that we’ll be alive tomorrow,” she says.
Ishii took up yoga and meditation and cut back on her work schedule to seek her “true passion.”
This search led her to the Natural Gourmet Institute for Health and Culinary Arts in New York where she studied the connection between food, health, healing and the environment and went on to train with chefs in New York and San Francisco.
Ishii returned to Ottawa to share her cooking philosophy and in April 2007 she planned a simple dinner party for friends that became a huge event for 40 people.
Since then, ZenKitchen has gathered speed, with Ishii now planning monthly gourmet vegan dinners. ZenKitchen also provides small-scale catering for events, personal chef sessions and cooking classes.
The company has operated for just a few short months but already dinners are booked weeks in advance and Ishii’s cooking classes fill up quickly.
After another stint of chef training at a friend’s restaurant in Japan next year, Ishii is playing with the idea of moving ZenKitchen out of The Chelsea Club to a storefront location. One day she wants to add a wellness centre with a café and other services devoted to health. But for now, Ishii says she’s happy to stick with what’s working.
“I’ve realized that happiness comes with small things you do everyday in your life,” she says. “And that’s what I feel at the dinners. I come out and everyone’s happy, like I’ve transmitted through my food and my passion – that kind of energy.”