How to navigate the future of our Industry

September 14, 2022 @ 11:00am – 12:00pm

Corey Mintz is a freelance food reporter (New York Times, Globe and Mail, Eater, and others), focusing on the intersection between food with labour, politics, farming, ethics, and culture. He has been a cook and a restaurant critic. He is the author of The Next Supper: The End Of Restaurants As We Knew Them, And What Comes After (Public Affairs, 2021) and How to Host a Dinner Party (House of Anansi, 2013), which chronicled 192 dinner parties he hosted with fascinating people, including: politicians, refugees, criminals, artists, academics, acupuncturists, high-rise window washers, competitive barbecuers, and one monkey. He lives in Winnipeg with his family.

Christie Peters was born and raised in a Saskatoon, Sk. At the age of 19 she left home to begin a career as an international model.  While living and working in Toronto, she developed a love of the food and restaurant world. After deciding she needed to gain a practical skill which would serve her throughout her life, she decided to enter the culinary world. Christie moved to Vancouver where she developed her culinary skills by training under numerous chefs. Throughout her career she has travelled to work in kitchens in San Francisco, Amsterdam and Noma in Denmark.

Christie’s goal was always to return to her hometown with the knowledge she has learned abroad. In 2010 she left Vancouver to open her first restaurant, shortly followed by a second.

Sustainability has always been a driving force in Christie’s career, as well as working with the seasons and ingredients that her home province of Saskatchewan provides. Her restaurants harken to an earlier time when there was a “waste not, want not” sensibility. Every part of the vegetable is used, the compost goes back into the gardens, the leftover animal fat gets made into soap. The motto of her restaurant is “High Quality, Seasonal, Sustainable” and these words are carried through in every aspect of how the business is run.

Christie Peters is the chef and owner of Primal Pasta and POP Wine Bar in Saskatoon.

Shira Blustein before becoming a restaurateur, was playing music in punk and indie rock bands that toured extensively through Europe and North America. Those years spent travelling as a vegetarian were both enlightening and frustrating. On a good day, she would find an amazing dish from a street vendor that involved the freshest local produce, created with love. More often than not, however, she would find herself stuck between a brick of tofu and a hard place.

It became Shira’s mission to create a vegetable forward dining experience where creativity reigned, and the uniqueness of ingredients were openly explored and celebrated. Shira and her team have been dedicated to establishing meaningful connections with local farms, foragers and wineries, showcasing the amazing terroir driven food and wine BC has to offer.

Since opening in 2012, The Acorn has picked up national awards for excellence, has been featured in the New York Times, Bon Appetit, and was deemed one of the best vegetable-forward destinations in the world by CNN and The Daily Meal, earning the Number 1 spot for best vegan restaurant in the world by Big Seven Travel. In 2016 Blustein opened The Arbor, a casual sequel to Acorn, with the same uncompromising attentions being paid to quality, detail and plant-based deliciousness.

JAMES IRANZAD

BIO TO FOLLOW