A Seven-Course, 11-Day Odyssey

Thursday, Jan. 13, 5 p.m.

It’s T-minus 11 days. Chef Adam Vettorel’s notepad is part list, part masterpiece. His small, precise all-caps printing fills every available space on two pages of a book the size of a watercolourist’s sketchpad. It’s a flurry of words and ideas for dishes to be served at a sevencourse dinner for 60 people two Sundays from now.

Vettorel is co-owner and executive chef at North & Navy, one of Ottawa’s hottest new restaurants — it opened a year ago in the space formerly occupied by Beckta Dining & Wine — and he’s collaborating on this dinner with Oliver Truesdale-Jutras and Phoebe Oviedo. The latter are business and romantic partners who run Stovetrotter, an Ottawa-based company that does global guest spot dinners. They’ve already hit Morocco and Japan; Paris, Brussels, Munich, Berlin and Amsterdam are next. And, to Ottawa’s delight, they’re doing a few while wintering here. This is the second after an engagement at Fraser Café’s Table 40 in late December.

Stovetrotter’s mission is to showcase local ingredients and artisans. For this dinner, root vegetables will star and, in a nod to the restaurant’s Italian roots, there will be five “ethically imported” Italian items. Other than the imports, every ingredient will come from Canada — the closer, the better.

“Just because it’s winter, doesn’t mean it’s time to stop eating vegetables,” Vettorel says.

The chefs have already had a planning session that resulted in the notepad ideas. This weekend, the work and experimenting begin. There are elements that are old hat to them — the ravioli dough in one dish, the homemade ricotta in another — but components that will include such delicacies such as dried hops, spruce tips, lobster mushrooms, chanterelles and slippery jacks, all foraged in Papineau- Labelle, must be tested. Those ingredients will be joined by locally farmed ingredients — Brussels sprouts from Acorn Creek Garden Farm, beets, celeriac, spinach, leaf lard and chickweed from Juniper Farm, and local mushrooms from Le Coprin.

Sunday, Jan. 17, 11 a.m.

Oliver Truesdale-Jutras is chopping carrots, celery, onions, turnips and king eryngii mushrooms for a stock to eventually be infused with the dried mushrooms.

Opening the jars of mushrooms, he ruminates on their aromas. “This smells like fruit… or something,” he says of the chanterelles. “The slippery jacks smell like soy sauce and the lobster mushrooms just smell like a Chinese grocery.”

The mushrooms came from his father, chef Robert Jutras, formerly of Culinary Conspiracy, who is an “extreme” forager. Truesdale- Jutras then runs to the walk-in, returning with two jars. “This is hawthorn jelly. They’re pretty much inedible until you make a tea. It’s strange. It tastes familiar, but not quite like anything you know. And this is wild-grape jelly. It’s totally sweet — and tart.”

Truesdale-Jutras is part chef, part mad scientist, always analyzing the properties and chemistry of food. Oviedo is more perfectionist and part Zen practitioner in the kitchen. She moves about the stations calmly and meticulously — one of her many talents is as a pastry chef, the kitchen position that requires the most precision — while her partner is more excitable and emotive. Vettorel, who shares the duo’s immense creativity, is somewhere in between. All three are yoga devotees.

“We have a similar mindset generally,” Truesdale-Jutras says of the three chefs involved in this venture. “Phoebe and I probably go a little bit further into local or foraged foods. At Table 40, we were Nazis with ourselves about this. If it wasn’t available in Canada, we couldn’t use it.”

Oviedo interjects: “Stuff like pepper or lemon — they’re hard to substitute.”

All three chefs met at on the line at Domus, a now-closed pioneering ByWard Market institution that stressed local ingredients. “But even at Domus, it wasn’t full psychopathic dedication,” Truesdale-Jutras said. “We did use soy sauce.”

The mushroom dish Truesdale-Jutras is working on includes the rich broth, and raw, pickled and roasted mushrooms from Le Coprin, spinach and chickweed, to be plucked from the frozen ground at Juniper Farm's greenhouse — they’ve already picked some and it bounces back well — and a custard in the bottom of the bowl. The broth will be served table-side.

Back to work they go. There’s much to do today, one week before the meal takes place. Vettorel is juggling work and family on what is normally his day off and Truesdale-Jutras and Oviedo are taking advantage of the quiet basement kitchen at North & Navy to get some things done. They’ve made a pastry of Juniper Farms leaf lard, but have decided it’s too lard-intense to use for their sumac meringue tart. “We’ll add some water and butter and scale back the lard a bit,” Oviedo says.

Sumac is a sour, almost lemony, Canadian berry that’s widely used in the Middle East, strangely. “You see sumac everywhere and we don’t use it in Canada,” Truesdale-Jutras says.

Today, Oviedo is also working on a bread made of red fife and oats from Castor River Farm. The recipe has three parts, two fermented overnight. In a couple of days, she’ll know if it worked. As she kneads the dough, it reminds Truesdale-Jutras about another ingredient — hops.

He pulls out a bag of dried buds — a paler marijuana look-alike. “It’s hops!” he says. “There’s a mild ganja smell, but it also smells like beer. We’re testing hops butter for a bread course.”

That’s a project for tomorrow. For now, he’ll finish his stock and Oviedo will move on to chesnut butter. Made by cooking then puréeing roasted chestnuts in butter, it’s part of a pasta dish. It’s hard to imagine that “experiment” going wrong.

Team Stovetrotter is also moonlighting at Truesdale-Jutras’ parents’ Manor Park home, where they’re staying. They’ve dried rye, for garnish on a pasta dish, and cured egg yolks, which will be shaved over a Brussels sprouts dish.