"It's Just Great Having Those Local Connections"
The dish that sums up Kevin Paquette’s culinary approach in one plate takes several days to prepare. The chef de cuisine at Bocado, a Spanish-inspired restaurant, driven as well by the abundance of farmers and local fare in Prince Edward County where it’s located, takes some time to describe the dish.
“Occasionally we get a couple of suckling pigs in,” he says, a smile developing on his face. “And what we do is we'll cure it overnight. Then, the next day, we'll rinse it off, dry it off and confit it overnight in duck fat. The next day, we'll take all the bones and cartilage out, shred apart all the meat and then lay the skin down out on a baking sheet. We then season up the meat, add some delicious pork stock to it and then compress it down. We'll set it overnight and then we cut beautiful rectangles up that contain parts from the entire pig. And then, with the skin on top, we get it crispy in the pan.”
It turns out that the pork dish is indeed the signature dish at Bocado, located on the street that runs through Picton, the largest community in the county. The sauce is made with the leg of a biota ham, which ends up being the most expensive ham in the world. He makes a stock from the bone, then reduces it to a jus to garnish the pork. A typically Middle Eastern sauce known as boriani also accompanies the dish, which is made with housemade crème fraiche, dill beans and guindilla peppers. Local mustard greens serve as the dish’s final garnish.
This suckling pig stays on the menu year ’round, but sides change with the seasons. When edible interviewed Paquette last autumn, he was pairing it with local wheat kernels that he braised in chicken stock and vegetables and finished with sherry vinegar and butter. The effect was a rich, wholesome risotto-like side.
A little Spain in PEC
“Our philosophy here is [to give the food] Spanish authenticity, but also highlight all the local farmers in the area we love to work with,” he says. The featured dish ticks all the boxes.
Local producers of all kinds show up at the restaurant regularly and even ask the chefs what sorts of local food they’d like for the following year.
“We could just plan the menu a year in advance with them,” Paquette says. “It’s just great having those local connections on the go and we put their names on the menu if we use their products.”
Most of the producers they use sell only at farmers’ markets and to other restaurants and sometimes at the roadside stands that dot the county.
What the chefs can’t get in the county, they import from Spain. Most charcuterie and cheeses, for example, come from Spain and the menu changes with the seasons and what’s available.
Leaving the Big Smoke
Bocado's owner and executive chef Stuart Cameron has had an auspicious career, including being executive chef at Icon Legacy Hospitality, overseeing the kitchens at Mira, Patria and Byblos in Toronto. He was in the process of opening a restaurant called Azhar on Ossington Street in Toronto with restaurateur Janet Zuccarini in 2020 when COVID hit. He pivoted to catering and then bought a house in the county in September of that year and jumped at the chance to open a restaurant when a space with a fully equipped kitchen came up in Picton.
Cameron has worked with Paquette for 16 years. “He brought me out here because I've known him for a long time,” Paquette says. “My first [jobs in] restaurants were under him.”
Paquette studied at George Brown College and did an internship at Nyood under celebrity chef and TV host Roger Mooking. After the internship, he returned to school and then called Mooking when he graduated and joined the chef’s kitchen at Kultura Social Dining in Toronto. He spent the first four years of his career working there as Cameron’s sous-chef and then took over as chef de cuisine briefly when Cameron moved on. Paquette then did some travelling and working around the country, including three seasons at Moraine Lake Lodge, near Lake Louise, returning to either Toronto or Vancouver in the off seasons.
“After that, I moved to England for a year on a temporary travelling visa where you're allowed to work, so I just worked for a company that would place me into restaurants,” he says, adding that his goal was to fund his travel around Europe. “They would literally throw you into care homes, pubs — everything.” One of his jobs was to cook at a care home for Jewish people with developmental disabilities.
“At all these places, you’d get no training,” he says. “You would just get thrown into a kitchen by someone from the front. And there's no recipes or books or how to do anything. And they just want you to make lunch and dinner for everyone. You just have to look in the fridge and figure it out, which is crazy. And this one was kosher.”
After a year of that, he returned to Toronto and contacted Cameron, who, as the executive chef at Icon Legacy Hospitality, found him a job as head chef at Byblos, where he worked for the next three years. That’s where he met his wife, Alison Ferland, who was the sous-chef there. Then he and Ferland went to open Mira, a new Icon restaurant, after which he was the executive sous-chef for Icon as a whole, helping to manage the kitchens at Byblos, Patria, Mira and Byblos Miami. He did that for six months before he and Ferland had their first child. He had to give up his 90-hour weeks so he went to work at Coffee Oysters Champagne in Toronto for two years. The restaurant is a coffee shop by day and a high-end Champagne and seafood restaurant by night.
When Cameron decided to open Bocado, he immediately convinced Paquette to join his kitchen brigade. The nice thing was that Cameron also had a job for Ferland. She did morning prep during the high season and in the slower months, she stayed home with their young children. She’s since started working at Darlings, an Italian-inspired Bloomfield restaurant owned by cheesemaker Jesse Fader.
“We were stuck in the city during COVID and then this opportunity came along and this is a lot more affordable and I can raise a family in a place that's a lot nicer. We were able to buy a house in Belleville last year. We are very happy here.”
Influences and inspirations
Paquette dates his ambitions in the kitchen to childhood when he used to curl up with his grandmother and watch Emeril Live.
“She always asking me what I was going to make her when I grew up and she came to my restaurant,” he says, adding that he toyed with becoming a writer, but is happy he settled on cooking. “Everything that's great in my life has been thanks to the kitchen. Between meeting [Cameron] and running all these restaurants and meeting my wife and having a family.”
When Paquette puts together a dish, he starts with one ingredient and then figures out what would go with it and then he thinks about how to give the dish a Spanish twist.
He names Cameron and Roger Mooking as his top two mentors.
“[Roger] is very present at his restaurants and we worked closely together for the three years the three of us were there,” Paquette says.
He’s also inspired by his colleagues.
“Everyone comes in with a smile on their face here and we're all happy to work together,” he says. “There are three of us who worked together in Toronto and made our way to Picton.”
Bocado
252 Picton Main St., Picton, Ont.
bocadorestaurant.ca | 613.476.2208 | @bocadopec
