Dave Scharf, Centretown News
Chef Marc Lepine preps for evening service at his restaurant.Chef Marc Lepine returned to Ottawa from the West Coast with a gold medal and a reputation to match.
Lepine, head chef and owner of Atelier in Little Italy, won first place at the Canadian Culinary Championships in Kelowna, B.C., in early February. This is his second gold medal from the competition. He previously won in 2012.
His big-finish dish was trout, with miso, molasses, a hoop made of tuile batter (an almond paste used for cookies) and a warm broth poured over the finished product. The judges raved about Lepine’s dish.
“I didn’t expect to win this time around,” says Lepine. “When we were in the competition, we did not feel confident about the first two parts, which is funny because we ended up winning all of them.”
The competition has three sections. In the first, competitors taste an unnamed wine and then make a dish to match it on a budget of $400. Next is the Black Box challenge, where competitors are given a box with unknown ingredients inside. With only those ingredients, they must whip up 13 plates of the same dish for the judges.
Lepine says this was the most challenging part.
“You can practice beforehand,” Lepine says, “but only a bit. There were some things in there I had no idea how I would use.”
The win comes at the perfect time for Atelier, Lepine’s restaurant located on Rochester Street. The restaurant recently expanded, now able to seat 45 patrons, nearly double their previous size. That expansion may come in handy with the fanfare following Lepine home from Kelowna.
“February is always a busy time in Ottawa, with Winterlude and everything. We’ll be able to tell how much busier it is better in March and April,” says Lepine.
Atelier already has an upstanding reputation in the Ottawa food scene.
It is a tasting-based restaurant, with a 12 course menu of small portions changing daily. Peter Hum, food critic for the Ottawa Citizen, says Atelier is a unique restaurant in the local culinary scene.
“There are other tasting menu based restaurants in Ottawa, but Marc’s is the most ambitious, expensive and even challenging,” says Hum. “I’ve eaten just one dinner at Atelier, and it was fantastic; not just delicious but novel and thoughtful too.”
Michael Radford, head chef at the Whalesbone Oyster House on Bank Street, says Ottawa’s restaurants are appreciated by travellers, even with neighbours like Montreal and Toronto.
“I think Ottawa has a good scene,” says Radford. “I hear positive comments on it from out-of-town customers all the time.”
Radford says those involved in the restaurant scene in Ottawa become family.
“We share ideas, bounce concepts between each other, and really just strive to make Ottawa the best it can be,” says Radford. “In fact, I was actually involved in helping out with a couple of dinners that went on at his restaurant whilst he was in Kelowna.”
Whalesbone specializes in sustainable seafood, and Atelier uses creative methods to create small taster portions.
Even though their restaurants are different, Radford says it’s just a matter of local chefs helping other local chefs.
Many news outlets in Ottawa refer to Lepine’s cooking as molecular gastronomy, which looks into physically and chemically transforming the ingredients in dishes.
Lepine says he and his team base their techniques on trial and error.
“We try them out, we taste them, then we go back and make it again,” says Lepine. “We make it as close to perfection as we can.”