On a mid-December afternoon, ten chefs made their way to Charlottetown’s Founder’s Hall to prepare a meal for 33 guests. They carried preserves and pickles, dried herbs and sprouts, local honey and butter, herbs, mosses and fungi foraged from the forest or the shore, and meats, seafood, and greens they had procured from local farmers and fishers. The event—An Island Collective. Chef Nick Chindamo, wild food enthusiast and engineer of extra-ordinary dining experiences,  partnered with Chef Jesse MacDonald, chef instructor with the Culinary Institute of Canada (CIC), to coordinate their second Island Collective dinner event. 

Island photographer, and lover of all-things butter, Al Douglas was there to capture the evening. He joins us and the chefs to talk about the dishes they brought to the table and the experiences they left with.

Chef Adam Sweet

Sweet, originally from New Brunswick, came to Charlottetown via kitchens in Alberta. He left restaurant work to set up shop as a knife-sharpener and soon established the well known Cook’s Edge in the heart of the city. He and his wife are raising their sons in a veggie-forward way, enjoying the occasional roast-beast over a campfire with friends. “The real way to experience the island is to get into the countryside,” Sweet says.

Chef Alex Seaborn

Seaborn left Toronto, and a career in restaurants, with his partner Kat and set out for a new life on the Island. He joined the Humble Barber in Charlottetown and last year, as a side hustle, he and Kat launched Seaborn Snacks, a culinary pop-up and catering company. Curious how to cook a beef heart or whip up some homemade ricotta? Seaborn is your guy.

Chef Adrianna Remlinger

Originally from Saskatchewan, Remlinger studied culinary arts and set off for kitchens in Montreal. It wasn’t long before she landed at the Island’s Inn at Bay Fortune where she is now honing her butchery and charcuterie skills—“I find animal butcher exciting,” she says with a smile. In the off-season, she is enjoying quiet island moments, nettles, and studying holistic nutrition.

Chef Brittany Boothroyd

Following graduation from CIC, Boothroyd worked in kitchens in the Alberta Rockies before setting off to travel and cook. She took her passion for vegetables to Melbourne, Australia to immerse herself in one of the world’s most vegan cities, returning to the Island to establish Wild Kitchen, where she offers veggie-forward culinary classes. She and her husband are expecting a wee little chef this spring who will most likely love squash.

Chef Jason Mullin

Mullin studied culinary arts in Toronto and has explored food and cultures everywhere from Chile to Vietnam, Australia to India, Charlottetown to Churchill, Manitoba, extensively documenting his travels and food guides, eventually joining the team at Inn at Bay Fortune in 2018. He is currently diving deeply into the world of fermentation, misos, soy sauces, while making the most of the off-season with his partner—Chef Adrianna.

Chef Jesse MacDonald

MacDonald is an Islander through and through. He grew up in Launching, on the eastern tip of the island where his parents were lobster fishermen. He got his first restaurant job washing dishes when he was 14 and, after several years of kitchen jobs and lobster fishing, he enrolled in the CIC’s culinary arts program. Now over a decade later, he is the executive chef at The Wheelhouse and chef instructor at CIC. Seven of his students joined in the Island Collective dinner, as servers and assisting in the kitchen.

Chef Leslie Flynn

Flynn is also an Islander. He's from Georgetown and started his kitchen career as a dishwasher—at the age of 13. He roomed with MacDonald during culinary school and is now chef at Charlottetown’s Merchantman where seafood is his game. When he has time to cook for himself striped bass is at the top of his list and secret ingredients from his garden and his grandmother's kitchen. His favourite thing—heading out on a tuna boat is his idea of the best time.

Chef Lexi Orbanski

Last fall, Orbanski had dinner at Oxalis Restaurant in Dartmouth, N.S.. She’s now their pastry chef! She grew up north of Winnipeg and travelled east for CIC’s pastry arts program, working as pastry chef at the Inn at Bay Fortune after graduation. She makes exquisite desserts called Smoke in the Woods and Not a Mushroom. At December’s Island Collective, students watched in awe, the faint whisper of “what the --?!”, with her every perfect rocher of ice cream.

Chef Stephane Levac

Nova Scotia forager and Chef,  Levac was drawn to cooking by necessity and intuition. He is Ojibway and grew up in the northern Ontario town of Sturgeon Falls and Ottawa. While living in Ottawa, he and his wife Sarah developed a passion for cooking for large groups. They moved to Annapolis Valley, where Sarah grew up, and leaned into this passion, starting a catering company, doing pop-ups at local vineyards and filling the bagel gap at the local market. He is now head chef at Maritime Express and spends as much time as he can foraging in the forest or on the shores of the Bay of Fundy.

Chef Nick Chindamo

Chindamo came to the Island four and a half years ago to work at the Inn at the Bay Fortune and follow his dream of being a chef. What he found, instead, was the chance to get to know himself as a cook. “I deepened my passion for food, and for wild food,” he says, “and I took it in a different direction. Now I run parallel to the restaurant industry.” Chindamo’s path may seem parallel, but the way it criss-crosses with the restaurant world is opening space for new pathways that head deep into the wild world of creativity.

Chindamo and MacDonald invited eight chefs to join the second in their Island Collective series. The guidelines—100% local, zero waste and get creative. As with the first dinner, all proceeds would be donated to a local non-profit.

“We wanted to give each chef some exposure,” Chindamo explains. “They are all super friggin' talented.”

“And we wanted to keep things very local,” MacDonald says. “The cool thing is everyone ran with their own flavour profile.”

In developing her dish Orbanski says, “At first, I had to really think about my ingredients because I wanted to keep everything local to PEI. So I chose Juniper, wildflower PEI honey for the gel on the plate and the mousse.”

An Island Collective dinner is not a ten-course dinner but a dinner of ten dishes, each created by a different chef.  “Everyone was cooking their own dishes,” Chindamo explains, “so when building the menu I wanted to be sure an overpowering flavour wouldn’t run into the next dish.” He assigned himself a couple of palette cleanser dishes—including an acidic pear dish. “I sliced the pears really thin,” he explains, “compressing them in a vinegar made from blackcurrant leaves, a little blackcurrant oil and blackcurrant gel, to hit the guests with an acidic burst of flavour and clear their palettes.”

A taste of nostalgia

“The theme, a taste of nostalgia,” Chindamo explains. “was interpreted differently by everyone.”

“When Nick suggested the theme, it was December,”  Remlinger says, “and I thought Christmas—we always made tourtières with my mom. She’s French Canadian and I can remember loads of them on the dining room table. So I thought how could I take that and refine it.”

“The nostalgic part for me,” Sweet says, “was braising and butchering which is what I used to do a lot in my career as a chef.  I also don’t get to hand roll pasta very often with two young boys at home so I made an egg yolk pasta and one of the apprentices [CIC students] made orchetti/cavatelli noodles. I turned all of the bones into a rich jus and we did braised lamb with the jus and orchetti with lots of cheese from New Glasgow. Some nice braised meat with orchetti and cheese. It really reminded me of being in the industry.”

Going full rip

Chindamo, who the Globe and Mail just named as one of Canada's next star chefs, is keen to push himself and other chefs out of their comfort zones. The Island Collective has grown out of another of his projects where he invites chefs “to bring their food scraps and we create a ten course dinner with only those scraps. I don’t promote it because it’s just to explore their own creativity,” he says, “and hopefully head back to their restaurant with new ideas on how to reduce food waste.” Similarly, the Island Collective is meant to engage chefs in pushing the boundaries of their own cooking. 

“There weren’t any flavour profiles that we thought wouldn’t work,” Seaborn explains. “We could be more creative while keeping it grounded. It wouldn’t matter what these people were serving because everyone is trained well enough that they will make it work into something that is really supremely delicious.”

“It was the opportunity to be yourself unabashedly,” MacDonald adds. “It’s for you so you can really explore what a certain ingredient means to you or a certain technique.”

Levac agrees. “The Island Collective is a great opportunity to showcase what you don’t normally in the restaurant,” he says. “I wanted to feature something that I forage because I often can’t go full rip with foraged ingredients in the kitchen. I like working with game meats but we can’t get our hands on it very often. So I did rabbit terrine with wild nuts and brushed with a fermented fir cone syrup and a juniper custard. I made an apple butter, and a black chanterelle infused cracker with my own fennel salts from the tidal pool water.”

“I do have creative freedom in the kitchen,” Mullin says about his work, “but the Island Collective is a way to break out of the typical dinner and really harness what you want to do.”

In addition to pushing it creatively, each chef had the rare opportunity to present their dish to the guests. “Everyone is waiting for the moment to happen,” Douglas explains, “and, whether it was Alex, Adrianna, or Jason, or any one of the chefs, the guests were hanging on every single one.”

“I was the first course so that was pretty nerve-wracking,” Remlinger says. “I introduced myself and shared my tourtière story, telling them we made tourtières for the post office lady, the bus driver, all the teachers at school. I filled each pastry shell with ground beef, toasted black walnuts and oats in lard—we always had a very fatty oatmeal stuffing as a child—and peas from my garden, island black currants and the secret layer of caramelized onions on the bottom.”

Zero Waste

Perhaps one of the more challenging, and exciting, elements of An Island Collective is the zero waste rule—every bit of every ingredient to be used in the meal. “I did chilli and thyme roasted butternut squash with the peel on since we were going zero waste,” Boothroyd explains, “with wild sumac soy cheese, PEI honey and chillis and I roasted the seeds for the crunch.”

“I did a beef heart with beet tartar with a slew of other ingredients,” Seaborn adds. “We were going for the zero waste idea so as you’re creating more off-cuts, you’re creating more components.”

One of Chindamo’s zero waste tricks is something he calls compost tea. “I collect all of the food scraps—carrot peel, onion skin, meat trimmings—from everyone’s prep and brew it into a really flavourful and layered tea of sorts. What was interesting is that when I told the chefs about this no one wanted to be that person to give me lots of scraps so I had very little to work with which was awesome. That was the whole point of it.”

The Island

The Island Collective brings chefs together from near and far, all with a passion for local, island food. “The food culture on the island is very strong,” Mullin explains, “and I like how the Island Collective reflects the island so well.” 

MacDonald dug into his island roots and prepared a Scallop Crudo, “a nice island dish with a parsnip and maple mousse,” he explains. “I had a little bit of a broth, an Island dashi which was spruce forward, and used a lot of the scraps as well: the peel from the parsnip, the adductor muscles from the scallops themselves and napped the broth over the scallop themselves.” Flynn created a pork belly dish, with pickled beets from his garden and his grandmother’s mustard pickle, for a taste of island tradition. “Using a preserve is a nice way to go zero waste,” he adds.

“Coming from an Islander’s standpoint,” Douglas says, “Events like this can grow our comfort zones and these things are here on PEI and we can appreciate them just as we appreciate a whole lobster plate, or a lobster roll, or fish and chips. So I’m excited to see ingredients that are native to PEI and very plentiful here, start to make it on some of those dishes.”

Camaraderie

“One of the common philosophies between Jesse and I in the creation of the Island Collective is collaboration and connection,” Chindamo explains. “I think the coolest thing is seeing these chefs come together when they never really have before, some never having even met before,” Douglas adds, “Seeing them all jump into their zones and get it done and push out these amazing looking dishes was very cool for me.”

“It was nice to have that feeling of being in a restaurant again,” Sweet says, “and have that camaraderie—it energized me and made me want to cook again.”

The next event?

“We want to continue this project,” MacDonald says, “to uplift anyone interested in joining, including the students who volunteer to be a part of it.”

“This is wonderful thing that will always be really intentional,” Chindamo says. “Every single part of it well thought out, and one hundred percent collaborative. That’s the goal.”

An Island Collective @anislandcollective

Al Douglas is a PEI-based photographer who will work for butter, especially if it's cultured.

www.aldouglas.ca