Yannick La Salle, chef for the Supreme Court of Canada , cooked Monday night’s winning dish that qualified him to represent Ottawa at the 2027 Canadian Culinary Championship.
At the sold-out regional event held at Raphaël Peruvian Cuisine on Elgin Street, La Salle topped four other top-tier, award-winning Ottawa-area chefs.
“It was an incredible evening filled with talent, passion, and, most importantly, great camaraderie from start to finish,” La Salle said Tuesday morning. “I would like to congratulate all the participating chefs on their exceptional work.”
Jason Sawision, chef-owner of Stofa on Wellington Street , finished second, while Ian Carswell, chef-owner of Black Tartan Kitchen in Carleton Place , came third. Also competing were Lizardo Becerra, whose downtown Ottawa restaurants are Raphaël Peruvian Cuisine and Barrio , and chef Joe Thottungal, whose restaurants are Coconut Lagoon and Thali .
Monday night’s competition was billed as a battle of all-stars as in recent years each chef had won a previous edition of the Ottawa-based qualifier and gone on to compete nationally. In 2017, Thottungal won silver at the national level .
A panel of judges who ate the five competing dishes blind, without knowing which chef had cooked each of them, chose La Salle’s dish as the best. The judges awarded points for taste, presentation, texture, technique, beverage compatibility and wow factor to grade each dish out of 100. Among the six judges were Ottawa chefs Marc Lepine of Atelier and Briana Kim of Antheia . Both are past winners of the Canadian Culinary Championship, renowned for their creativity and cutting-edge food.
Next year’s national event, to be held in Ottawa on Jan. 29 and 30, will be its 20th anniversary edition. In a change of format , it will be a two-chef team competition. Representing Ottawa will be Lepine, who was a national champion in 2012 and 2016 , plus La Salle, who won gold nationally in 2019 . Then, La Salle was the chef at Les Fougères in Chelsea. In 2022, he left that celebrated restaurant to cook for Canada’s top court .
“I’m incredibly excited for the national competition and being a part of chef Marc Lepine’s team,” La Salle said. “It won’t be easy, but we’re going to bring the heat and give it everything we’ve got.”
Having eaten at the Ottawa qualifying event for more than a decade, during which time it was first called Gold Medal Plates and then Canada’s Great Kitchen Party, I can say that Monday’s night’s five dishes wee all exceptional. Simply put, this year’s qualifier offered the best and most consistently impressive food that I’ve sampled at this annual autumn highlight of Ottawa’s culinary calendar.
After all, I’ve eaten at enough of these events to remember the year that an Ottawa chef served sauteed duck testicles .
When covering previous events, I often tried to second-guess their judges, presenting my rankings before theirs were announced. On Monday, sitting with more than 100 people who packed Raphaël Peruvian Cuisine and ate all the food the judges ate, I could have filled in a scorecard similar to those the judges used, but for the addition of the names of each chef. Instead, I’ll just tell that I was wowed dish after dish and could have made qualitative arguments for most of them to take home gold.
Take, for example, Becerra’s seafood-based dish, which was served first. It consisted of three elements — a warm tart that starred citrus-marinated Canadian Manila clams, leek and apple, aged B.C. sablefish sashimi and a Manila clam gelato.
This entry that had “I’m here to win a chefs’ competition” written all over it, striving for full marks for technique while combining complex hot, chilled and cold elements on the same plate. It reminded me of the three-element, seafood-based dishes that Vancouver chefs have served to winner at the national level in recent years, except that it was more interesting.
In a night of culinary technical marvels, Becerra’s clam tart was a standout achievement. Having eaten at Michelin-starred restaurants and international fine-dining destinations in Vienna , Hong Kong and Lima in recent years, that sophisticated and novel tart struck me as the competition’s most “Michelin-restaurant-worthy” item.
While Raphaël Peruvian Cuisine serves more direct, but upscale dishes, Becerra’s dish is a reminder that he cooked at some of Peru’s most celebrated and elevated restaurants and his homeland is a global culinary hotspot with good reason. It also won the night’s people’s choice award.
Sawision’s second-place, lobster-based dish was more like a hyper-fancy course that you might eat at his restaurant. That’s to say that it allowed Sawision to load his plate with all kinds of rarefied indulgences and hits of flavour. The star of his plate was a disc of lobster and langoustine wrapped in crunchy kataifi, the finely shredded phyllo dough that notably figures in some Middle Eastern desserts.
As a counterpoint, Sawision added a folder agnolotti made with lobster coral and stuffed with mascarpone and lobster reduction. Sawision put more ingredients, flavours and even fragrances on his plate than anyone else, including smoked beef tongue and corn salad to a passion fruit-vermouth sauce and vadouvan curry mayo. If I had a quibble, one would be that the pasta was just thick. Also, as tasty as this dish was, my palate couldn’t pick everything that was Sawision had included on the plate.
Like Sawision, Thottungual served a dish that I could have seen at his St. Laurent Boulevard restaurant, Coconut Lagoon. “It’s me on a plate,” Thottungal told the crowd in the restaurant. His dish was also a tribute to Canada, he said, pointing in particular to the Bay of Fundy, the source of the lobster that starred in his creation.
Thottungal paired his just-cooked seafood with a vibrant sauce of roasted tomato and bone marrow that couldn’t help but remind people of butter chicken, while a gastrique of Malabar tamarind and maple syrup symbolize Thottungal’s journey from India to Canada, where he has flourished. This dish was irreproachably delicious. It’s practically a shame that food this good and enjoyable went unawarded Monday night, passed over in favour of some less direct, more involved dishes.
In contrast to the night’s more epic dish descriptions, the summary of La Salle’s dish was succinct: veal sweetbreads with celeriac, apples and horseradish. “We need to be proud of what Canada has to offer,” La Salle said, justifying his dish, which included a maple leaf tuile.
As straightforward as La Salle’s dish looked, it was also simply flawless, with ingredients cooked and presented optimally and depth of flavour and precise textures in every bite. La Salle’s dish felt superbly composed and perfectly calibrated, but also generous and indulgent.
“I’m all about feel-good food,” said Carswell, who said that his dish, when you get right down to it, was meat and potatoes. It was also a lovely and seasonal composition featuring venison, potato, beets and haskap berries in which star ingredients sang multiple notes.
Sitting at the back of the restaurant near its kitchen, I was able to watch something almost as impressive as the food the chefs turned out. Although they were competing, chefs were assisting one another in making each other’s dishes to feed the packed dining room at Raphael Peruvian Cuisine.
The biggest show of competitiveness Monday night was seen in the welcome dish that Atelier chef Lepine served before the competition proper began. His hamachi crudo in a green aguachile, in addition to being a great starter, threw shade at the Vancouver culinary scene whose chefs have prevailed three years in a row at the national championship.
“Vancouver sucks,” read the edible crisp that adorned the plate.
“No apologies for that at all,” Lepine told the crowd, before he acknowledged that Vancouver’s chefs were like the Sidney Crosbys of Canada’s culinary landscape. “It’s time for Ottawa to bring the title back.”
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