The Art of Hospitality
That’s Jamie,” says Amber Thom, co-owner of The Everly, a casual fine dining Kingston restaurant that is quickly becoming a classic.
Thom is talking about the dish Jamie Hodges — her partner in business and life — has produced for The Dish. “It’s everything he does. And that horseradish cream,” she says with a smile.
Hodges, chef and co-owner of The Everly, chose a dish from the menu and served it up in The Everly’s stunning art deco dining room, complete with giant chandelier, plush banquettes, comfortable 20s-era chairs and a touch of black walnut crafted by a local artisan in the form of tables, trim and stylish back bar.
“It’s a throwback to a great winter dish,” Hodges says.
The star is a cotecino sausage made of pork skin, meat and fat, spiked with fennel, nutmeg and cinnamon.
“It’s a rustic Italian sausage,” he says. And they put it on the menu because it’s the “end of the pig — all ground meat.” The meat is marinated, ground in house, formed and then poached before being sliced and fried to serve. On the plate, it sits atop of a mound of French Puy lentils from Saskatchewan that he slow- cooked risotto style with chicken and red wine that were added to a sofrito of onions, garlic, carrots, parsley and celery. It’s all served with a house mustard made from Saskatchewan mustard seed and a horseradish crème fraiche. The mustard is three parts yellow mustard seeds, one part black, bloomed and then blitzed.
Shortly after Hodges put this dish on the menu, a customer tasted it and said he’d had the same dish at the pub down the street.
“That’s because I put it on the menu at the Red House a decade ago,” Hodges told him with a laugh. Hodges was the opening chef at the Red House food & drink when he and Thom first moved to Kingston.
A transplanted kiwi
Hodges is originally from New Zealand, which his accent will betray within minutes. He studied in Wellington at Weltech and received a City and Guilds diploma in culinary arts. His culinary studies began at 18, immediately after high school. He rightly reasoned that if he was able to cook, he could work and travel anywhere.
“That was in 2001,” he says. “I’ve often been the youngest in the kitchens, but now I’m the oldest.”
Eighteen years ago, at the age of 21, he brought his cooking skills to Canada.
“Snowboarding brought me to the interior of B.C.,” Hodges says. He intended to go to Whistler for a month.
“I came on a one-year tourist visa, which I’ve now sat on for quite a while,” he says with a laugh, admitting he actually now has permanent residency and his citizenship papers have been filed.
He stayed at Whistler for more than a month — 4.5 years to be exact — working a stint at Araxi Restaurant and Oyster Bar.
“I was able to get my foot in the door as a ‘fetch boy,’ then I moved up to prep cook, then to the raw bar,” he says. “That was interesting. It was a big white marble bar in the middle of the restaurant and you’d do sashimi, sushi, oysters. I’d often shuck 60 dozen in an evening. It’s all performance art.”
From Whistler, he moved on to Vancouver to work at Cibo Trattoria, which specializes in rustic Italian food.
“That’s where I learned butchery, cheese-making, pasta-making,” Hodges says.
It was in Vancouver that he met Thom, who was doing front-of- house work, having studied hotel and hospitality management in Guelph, and once their daughter Rosie was born, they decided it was time to head to Kingston, where Thom grew up.
“We were paying $1,400 a month rent there and when we moved here it was $1,300 a month to buy a house,” he says.
The Kingston years
In Kingston, he worked at Red House for six months as he renovated the kitchen in their home to make it commercial grade. Then, they started Epicurious Catering as well as the Red Brick Supper Club. Guests were invited to bring their own records and alcohol and the room became theirs for the night.
Hodges and Thom would serve a four-course meal in their private at-home dining room.
Soon after, they opened Juniper Café, which was housed in the Tett Centre for Creativity and Learning and served as the anchor for their growing catering business. “About half my cheques for catering came from Queen’s University,” Hodges says.
They sold Juniper three years ago and then went to work on their ultimate dream — opening The Everly in the historic district of Kingston.
“This was always the end product,” he says, looking at the dining room he and Thom designed. “We were self-sponsored, so it took some time.”
The restaurant
The Everly — named for a dreamed-up character, a sophisticated gay man from the ’20s with discerning taste in décor and food — opened three months before the complete COVID lockdown in March 2020. But it survived because it’s in Kingston, where, with the exception of one big Omicron surge, COVID numbers were reasonably controlled for much of the pandemic’s two-plus years.
“We do feel very fortunate to be here in Kingston,” Hodges says. “[The city has] secure incomes from the Kingston General Hospital, Queen’s University and government institutions. Only one [Kingston] restaurant has closed in the whole pandemic.”
At The Everly, service is a big part of the offering, but Hodges and Thom pivoted to takeout for the first three lockdowns. In all, they had to lay off staff for four different lockdowns, during which the latter were eligible for $300 a week, at least after the Canada Emergency Response Benefit wound down.
“In Kingston, that won’t allow you to meet rent,” Hodges says. “We helped out. This is my pipe dream, but they’re the ones who pull it off. We have 14 staff in total and they all came back.”
The restaurant is currently open four days a week and the kitchen team makes everything from scratch, including the memorable warm focaccia that greets diners with their first drinks.
“The cooks bust their asses — four days on, [long] days,” Hodges says. “We’re in a different world and we have to adapt. Dinosaurs will die. We focus on service and quality. My kitchen starts at 11 and finishes at 10:30 most nights.”
To survive during the pandemic, Hodges and Thom adapted by opening a retail shop in mid-December 2021. They took over a charming 250-square-foot space next door to the restaurant and made a shop featuring many of the wines on the menu as well as a few staples, including mustard, rabbit terrine and foie gras crisps. There is some wine and beer from Prince Edward County and even more wine from the Niagara region, with a few from more far-flung places. Most are not available at the LCBO.
“So if people were here and liked the wines, they could go next door and buy some retail,” Hodges says. Thom had sold two cases of a Georgian red the day before edible Ottawa visited.
Inspirations and influences
Hodges says he’s been fortunate to work alongside some “amazing” cooks over the years. At the raw bar in Whistler, he worked with Joël Watanabe, who now owns Kissa Tanto, a Japanese-Italian restaurant in Vancouver that was voted best new restaurant in Vancouver in 2017 and received a rave review from the New York Times in 2018.
“I worked with him for 3.5 years at the raw bar,” Hodges says. “I picked up all his nuances of perfectionism.”
He worked with Mark Perrier and Neil Taylor at Cibo Trattoria. Perrier worked at two-Michelin-star restaurant La Gavroche in London, and Vancouver gems including Osteria Savio Volpe and Pepino’s Spaghetti House. Taylor was the opening chef at Cibo and now heads up Cedar Creek Winery’s Home Block Restaurant while former Araxi colleague Andrew Richardson is executive chef of CinCin.
Finally, he staged at Vancouver’s CinCin periodically with Thierry Laborde, who is now a French Michelin-starred chef living in London. He would travel from Whistler, work, sleep there overnight and then return to Whistler. “It was an honour,” Hodges says. “He was very old school.”
How the magic happens
Asked what goes through his head when he’s conceiving a dish, Hodges says he starts with what is available. Even in the dead of winter, his plates are still 80 per cent local.
“We print our menus every day,” he says. “There are subtle changes on some dishes, bigger ones on others and we change three to four dishes a week. That keeps us sane. The same dish time and time again stifles the mind.”
The week edible visited, he had 14 rabbits on order. He confits the front and back legs, to then be breaded and deep fried for crispy rabbit. He also confits the saddles and wraps them in smoked procuitto and then roasts them.
“Every three to four weeks, we get rabbits from Rise Farm,” he says.
Hodges emphasizes zero waste so he preserves local delicacies year-round. His beef tartare at the moment is made with pickled chanterelles from last summer. When they run out, he’ll switch to pickled ramps, just in time for new spring ramps to surface. Fiddleheads will follow.
He recalls being asked by Tourism Kingston and Downtown Kingston officials to participate in a campaign called Kingstonlicious, which offers a three-course meal made of local ingredients. “Ours was local without even thinking about it,” he says.
Buying local can also be advantageous. As retail beef prices have skyrocketed, he estimates his have only jumped by 15 per cent in the last eight years. (Meanwhile, a kilogram of prime rib has jumped from $28 per kilogram to $43, according to Statistics Canada.)
“That’s because it’s the local abattoir,” he says of Wallace Beef at Joyceville Institution [jail], which he likes supporting because it’s giving inmates purpose.
Besides local food and a stylish room, visitors to the Everly will be struck by the service.
“Service is key,” Hodges says. “Someone tweeted the other day that we’re trying to keep the art of hospitality alive. It’s all about comfort and taking you away from your life.”
Indeed — taking you away from your life to the local of a sophisticated gentleman named Everly.
The Everly
103-171 Wellington St., Kingston
613.547.5864 | theeverly.ca | @theeverlykingston
