'A Perfect Expression of What We're Doing'
Erin Clatney has come full circle. In 1996, closer to the beginning of her career in the culinary arts, the now-caterer was managing the Blue Parrot restaurant on Elgin Street when the Piazzas, owners of the Ottawa Bagelshop & Deli, approached her to come to Wellington Street and run their new coffee bar. They were expanding into the neighbouring space, formerly owned by the Church of God.
“I came here at a time when they were really expanding,” Clatney says of the space that had previously been a family home, a funeral parlour and a community centre before it was a church. “It was a big leap for them to take this over and do that build.”
These days, Parlour, Clatney’s event space and latest project, occupies that same spot and has since late 2019 when the Bagelshop decided to shrink back to its original size. Her Parlour, whose name references the 45 years when it operated as a funeral home, has an occupancy of up to 250 and serves as a restaurant and bar on days when it’s not being used for private events.
Asked to produce a dish that represents her on a plate, Clatney, who has been in the food business for 35 years and has run Dish Catering since 2002, came up with tuna lightly seared on the edges and plated as crudo with blood orange slices, thinly sliced jalapeno, green apple, yellow zucchini, cucumber, basil, some artful squirts of homemade nori mayo, yuzu vinaigrette and basil-infused olive oil.
“This tuna crudo is a perfect expression of what we’re doing,” Clatney says, adding that it can change according to the seasons. “The yuzu is good umami with the fish.”
She also prepared a signature dish — a chicken liver parfait, topped with roasted grapes, a recipe inspired by a Jacques Pepin classic to which Clatney added more butter and more cognac, she admits with a laugh.
“I love anything simple and French.”
Back to the beginning
A child of the 70s, Clatney grew up in Toronto in a restaurant-owning family. “That restaurant was very much of that era, of that time, which I still kind of love,” Clatney says. “You know, prime rib, Yorkshire pudding.”
Food has played a central role in her life since the beginning at that Avenue Road restaurant, and when she was old enough to get a job, she worked on tourist boats in Toronto Harbour.
“Those were large buffets and parties,” she says, adding that that’s where she learned about the volumes of food needed and where she developed her strong work ethic. It’s also where she fell in love with the industry.
“It’s a lifestyle, because you’re with the same people 12 to 18 hours a day,” she says. “We would jump off the boat into the harbour. I can’t believe that — I mean, you could develop film in that water, right? — and then we’d go sleep on the island, go back the next day, and do it all over again. That’s where the love of this industry came from. It’s that team, that bond, that grind. We knew we were very different from the guests and had to stick together.”
She then moved on to restaurants, always near Adelaide and John Streets. When she was 19, she rented a pricey loft she couldn’t afford, but fell for the freight elevator that brought her home to the space from the street. At $1 per square foot in 1990, rent was $1,200 a month, so she knew she had to get a job. She walked into a fine dining restaurant called Orso across the street and asked for a job. Her pluck and ambition outweighed her skills at the time, but someone must have seen something in her even then because they hired her.
“And then I started an essentially after-hours club in my loft,” she says. “All sorts of people would come there to play [music] at that time, and we would charge money at the door and hire security. People still remember it.”
Now, the mother of four admits it was sketchy business, but it was also “very entrepreneurial” and likely shaped her love of working for herself. The likes of Barney Bentall, Jim Cuddy and Bass is Base all made appearances.
She would be up late hosting her parties and then would get up in the morning to go execute plates of fine dining at Orso. She kept up that pace for 18 months before she left Toronto to travel before coming to study at the University of Ottawa.
“I love, love, love Ottawa,” she says.
She had later stints at the New Edinburgh Pub and then the Empire Grill, which had just opened and was a hotspot. From the supportive environment at the Empire Grill, she finally caved and agreed to do some catering at the suggestion of friends. The business grew quickly by word of mouth.
All about entertaining
“I’ve been in the business a long time and it’s always about cooking, entertaining, dinner parties — all of that,” she says. “Friends had been asking me to do a shower or Christmas party, so I did.”
Within six months, she was hiring serving staff and taking over a space in Hintonburg where she basically put in the commercial kitchen herself.
“I gutted the 1,500 square-foot-space and had people do the things I [couldn’t] and did the rest myself.”
She worked in the kitchen for three years and then the business needed her on logistics and sales, so she hired her first chef though she’s always worked closely with them. Others who’ve worked in Dish’s kitchen over the years include Ottawa’s 2014 Top Chef Canada winner René Rodriguez, 2013 Gold Metal Plates silver award winner Jamie Stunt and NeXT restaurant’s Michael Blackie.
Clatney has seen clients’ children grow up and now she’s catering for them — and sometimes even hiring them. She has spacial-sequence synesthesia, which gives her the quirky superpower of remembering what she served at a party 20 years ago, where the wine glasses are located in clients’ kitchens and what flowers they had on the table.
“I usually know what the weather was like, what they ate, what was on the menu,” she says.
Today, Clatney, who sees herself as a cook, not a chef, does all the food costing and still oversees and creates the menus. “I’ve probably written 100,000 menus in my life,” she says, adding that she and chef de cuisine Mike Beck, who’s been working with her for 13 years, work closely together.”
Beck is a seasoned chef who ran his own food truck called Dash for a time. The graduate of the Culinary Institute of Canada in Charlottetown, P.E.I., also worked at the now-closed Soupçon restaurant in Chelsea, Juniper and the Manx Pub.
He previously worked as Clatney’s head catering chef and now he’s the head chef of all food operations at Dish and Parlour.
“I really do love it all,” he says about his job. “I guess my favourite thing is receiving fresh produce from local farms. I also love to barbecue brisket and break up whole animals when I get the chance.”
He called the pandemic, at which time he returned to Dish and Parlour full time “a ridiculous adventure” of ups and downs, but mostly smiles.
Inspiration and thought process
When she’s coming up with a menu, Clatney says she always starts with the style of service.
“Where is this happening? Are we in the middle of a field with 200 people?”
Then she thinks about the season, the event’s spirit and the hosts’ or guests’ likes and dislikes. She also considers how the items on the menu work together and how they look. For example, if she’s serving canapés, she doesn’t want everything coming out on a piece of bread.
“If I’m talking to you at a cocktail party, I will take three seconds to decide whether I can manage a canapé with a drink,” she says. “I see big ones all the time. What am I supposed to do with that [as a guest]?”
Full circle
Clatney finds herself back in the space at 1319 Wellington after she spent some time looking for an event venue. At one point, she had another space that she started renovating and quickly got out of the lease when she found structural damage. Then, she went quite far in bidding for 50 Sussex Dr., now occupied by the Royal Geographical Society, before deciding to walk when the National Capital Commission wouldn’t accept her terms. Finally, she discovered the now-Parlour space was available in September 2019 and jumped at the chance. She planned to open in April 2020, weeks after the COVID-19 pandemic shut down small businesses around the world. She sees the extra time she got as a result as a gift rather than a hindrance.
“I couldn’t control any of the lockdowns, but it gave me a chance to try a million things and see what worked,” she says.
Overnight, she lost all her catering gigs for the second quarter of 2020. Because she’d financed the entire renovation of her space, she was left with $24 to her name at the beginning of the lockdown, so she was motivated to try whatever would start bringing in revenue.
She furnished the place with second-hand furniture and opened it on July 1. She tried a food truck, takeout, the patio and, ultimately, a restaurant.
“I felt really creative at that time and that’s how I started the restaurant,” she says. “Mike [Beck] and I laughed every day at the absurdity of it, but we found some joy in being able to cook for people and provide something that gave people choice.”
Today, the catering business is back and the restaurant operates when there aren’t bespoke events. Clatney has 38 employees and turns away catering work regularly, allowing her to be choosey about what jobs she takes.
“The core of what I love to do — feed people — came back to me in all of that.”
Parlour
1319 Wellington St. W., Ottawa
parlourplace.ca | 613.761.1302 | @parlourplace
