Once a year, Chef Ryan Crawford cranks Roxanne by The Police and takes a shot of bourbon in honour of his most loyal and longest running help in the kitchen.

Her name, fittingly, is Roxanne, and she’s been with Crawford, proprietor of Backhouse in Niagara-on-the-Lake, since he graduated culinary school in Stratford in 1999. The duo have travelled Canada together, journeying to Fogo Island and Prince Edward Island to work magic in kitchens there. And they’ve forged a strong partnership here in Niagara, where Crawford has garnered national and international accolades over the past 15 years  — the last four at Backhouse — for his innovative approach to regional, seasonal cuisine.

No matter the attention he gets, Crawford always honours his tireless kitchen aid with a course of wood oven-baked sourdough on both his chef’s menu and à la carte. Roxanne, you see, is his 20-year-old sourdough starter, figuring prominently in baking at Backhouse, and in the homes of diners gifted some of the fermented flour that makes up Roxanne’s being.

“Roxanne is a mom and she has babies all over North America,” Crawford said proudly. “I’ll get pictures once a month of (other people’s) sourdough. It’s very exciting.”

Crawford is the father of cool climate cuisine here in Niagara

As much as Roxanne is the prolific mother of bread loaves everywhere, Crawford is the father of cool climate cuisine here in Niagara. It’s his unique take on using Ontario — and Niagara — produce almost exclusively, save for the lemons required by Backhouse’s bartenders, or the chocolate that appears in the petits fours. Even the salt Crawford uses to season dishes, such as wood-fired squab with rutabaga gratin, 90-day dry aged beef, or the duck liver mousse beignet with apricot compote, comes from close to home. He sources it from Goderich, Ont., which boasts the world’s largest underground salt mine, or from New York’s Finger Lakes.

Crawford’s dedication to showcasing local never wavers, even during dessert when many bakers reach for vanilla from far-flung places to flavour nearly anything sweet that follows dinner. Backhouse’s vanilla ice cream? It’s only eggs, cream and sugar but they come together to produce intense, authentic flavour, Crawford explained.

“Take vanilla out of your baking and you’ll taste what everything should taste like,” he said. “It’s not making things with other flavours. It’s letting things speak for themselves.”

That’s easy to do here in Niagara. Crawford cooks in the cradle of the region’s finest farmland. He has connections galore to local producers, but he also has a farmer on staff, Ashley Burnie, who grows fruit and vegetables on three acres behind Crawford’s home, a two-minute drive from Backhouse.

Crawford and Burnie sit down together in the winter to map out planting and harvest schedules, which helps the kitchen with menu planning. An additional unheated greenhouse starts the growing season early and prolongs it come fall. The goal is to get nearly all of the restaurant’s produce from the Backhouse farm, which grows everything from peas, bok choy and asparagus in spring to berries, apricots, cherries, and tomatoes from 800 plants in summer, and squash, rutabaga and other storage vegetables in autumn.

What isn’t served fresh is preserved to see the restaurant through winter.

“We planted everything we could. It was ‘Hey, what do you want to cook? We’ll plant it,’” Crawford said.

It’s not as though farm and restaurant only meet in the kitchen when harvests are ready. Everyone who works in the restaurant spends time on the land, learning about the ebb and flow of the bounty through the year.

“You’re sitting there with your hands in the dirt and feeling the energy and life of what’s growing there,” Crawford explained.

That desire to put in such effort comes from when Crawford helmed the kitchen of the former Stone Road Grille, under different ownership but in the same unassuming strip mall location that’s home to Backhouse. Back then, Crawford got his hands dirty raising heritage pigs with Paul Harber at Ravine Vineyard Estate Winery.

“It is so much work,” he said about the endeavour. “It taught us a lot about how much work farmers really put in. It really got me thinking about sustainability and waste. My thing about sustainability here, I’m giving Ashley, a young farmer, a job. It’s helping the restaurant. If it all works out, it’s less money for us in vegetables, it’s fresher, and it’s giving younger chefs and apprentices the opportunity to respect the vegetables because they know Ashley grows it.”

It’s also giving Backhouse diners an experience. They hear the story of 4 o’clock asparagus — quite literally harvested at 4 p.m. the day it’s served — with 24-month house-cured prosciutto and Ontario-grown saffron. They’re exposed to flavours like white asparagus and rhubarb in a savoury soft serve garnished with seed asparagus and served as an amuse bouche.

“They want to hear the story. We’re trying to tell the story of food in Niagara,” Crawford said. “It’s having that interaction with people and giving them something special.”

There was a time when it looked like Crawford would fulfill his dreams of such an endeavour elsewhere. He spent three years searching for the perfect location to open a Canadian version of an agritourismo, those farmhouses that combine gastronomy and overnight stays in Italy, after he left Stone Road Grille. He was close to inking a deal on land elsewhere in Ontario when his former bosses let him know they were closing the restaurant.

Coming back to the location where he repeatedly earned praise from out-of-town media for his inventive take on fine dining made sense. The relationships and his reputation were established in Niagara, but it’s also where Crawford could work with grape growers and vintners to make his own wine, a hobby he hopes to pick up again this fall after a few years’ break.

Really, though, cooking with local produce — and, of course, baking sourdough bread starring Roxanne — over wood fire in a space that belies its strip mall location is about something else, something more intrinsic.

“For me, it’s being true to my world, Crawford said. “It’s teaching the general public about respect (for the ingredients) and giving people jobs and and opportunities. Profitability, for me, is rooted in happiness. It makes me happy serving people. My staff comes first, making them happy and energized to be here, excited to be and work, and that comes through in the food.”

• • • • •

CONTACT

Backhouse Restaurant
Phone: 289-272-1242
Website: backhouse.xyz
242 Mary St, Niagara-on-the-Lake, ON L0S 1J0

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Nicolette Novak has an amazing ability to strike up a conversation with anyone. It can be your first time meeting her but you immediately feel at ease, like with an old friend. There’s no formality, but a sense of familiarity instead.

Take the cool, wet day in early June when two women sat down at a table under the covered patio in the bistro of Novak’s Good Earth Food and Wine Co. in Beamsville. They started wrapping themselves in fleece blankets when Novak cut in to empathize — even apologize. It’s June, after all, but one that could easily be confused with late October for its lack of sunny, warm weather that normally makes Niagara shine at this time of year.

The women shrugged at Mother Nature’s confused ways. It’s cosy, they assured, which led Novak to ask the obvious: “Where are you from?”

“Georgia,” one woman answered. It was the perfect segue into Novak telling them peaches grow here, though the growing season is about a month behind this year. She points to the swath of trees beside the bistro.

“Those are all peach trees,” Novak said, sensing the women’s disbelief that peaches grow in Canada. They marvel. But that’s typical. Marvelling is what happens at The Good Earth — as Novak intended — the moment a visitor turns down the gravel laneway, through a welcome mat of vineyards and orchards, to the winery, bistro and cooking school that borders Beamsville. It serves as a bucolic reminder that, despite the promise of condo high-rises being built around the corner, this is still Niagara farm country.

It’s also still Novak’s home. The bistro table where those women sat was little more than a 100 metres from her front door.

“One of the things I set out to do to differentiate from other places… I really think of this as an extension of my own home,” Novak said. “It has that feel of someone’s places. It still has warts, there are weeds, our driveway isn’t paved. But once you turn onto that driveway, you really are transported somewhere different.”

Ultimately, that’s what happened to Novak when she returned home after her father had been killed in a car accident 32 years ago. A twenty-something at the time, Novak had been carving a career path in Toronto, working for a Member of Provincial Parliament. But with news of her dad’s death coming on the first day of peach harvest, she knew she had to return to Beamsville to help the farm and her family — it was Novak, her mother, Betty, and her grandmother — carry on.

“There were no options,” Novak recalled.

The farm was 220 acres at the time, a mammoth swath by Niagara standards. But she enjoyed it until a streak of bad years compelled her to sell most of it. She kept 55 acres, which she leased out, and returned to the city to work in public relations.

But in 1998, she was beckoned back to Beamsville. Niagara was on the cusp of something new and more convivial than the hotels with their expansive and formal dining rooms in Niagara-on-the-Lake that had been serving as the region’s calling card for tourists seeking something more refined than waterfalls and wax museums.

Wineries with inviting tasting rooms and restaurants were opening and a new culinary identity was being forged for the region, thanks to a crop of big city chefs who’d come here seeing the potential of cooking in the middle of one of Canada’s most unique agricultural areas.

 

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Novak contributed to the effort by opening a cooking school on the property.

“It was so long ago, there were only five wineries,” she recalled.

That eventually led to catering events, and in 2008, the next natural progression in rural Niagara: a winery.

“I made the fateful decision to make wine, which was an awful decision,” Novak said. “It’s hard. It’s very capital intensive and there’s still a threshold of what people are willing to spend. And in Toronto, there’s still a perception that Ontario wines suck.”

Still, The Good Earth is clearly a good place to be, even on a cold, rainy June day.

People come, and when the first sunny days that hint at summer and stone fruit harvests arrive, they come in droves. They come to attend a session at the cooking school that’s more edutainment than hands-on. They come to sample some of The Good Earth’s vintages, made by winemaker Ilya Senchuk, who has a talent for teasing out the best in Niagara grapes. And they come to wrap themselves in a fleece blanket and eat lunch on the bistro patio.

 

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Despite the challenges, Novak admitted it’s been a successful venture. She has a classically trained chef, St. Catharines native Andrew Thorne, doing monthly seasonal menus in the kitchen. She’s surrounded herself with staff with the same salt-of-the-earth vibe as their boss.

“I’m really fortunate. They all have personality and they’re not afraid of showing it with people. They’re real,” Novak said. “I can say with confidence the food is excellent and we try to keep it as seasonal as possible. It’s a wine and food environment that isn’t foreboding. It isn’t pretentious. And it’s pretty. We work hard to make it pretty.”

All that’s changed over the years is the audience. Novak sees more twenty- and thirty-somethings attending the themed cooking classes, or arranging private dos, that run three hours, feature three courses plus an amuse bouche, and wine.

“It’s laid back and there for you to enjoy,” she said. “You take away from it as much as you want. We don’t like to micromanage it because the idea behind (the culinary school) is to expose people to what they might not normally have ordered (to eat).”

They’re still Novak’s favourite part of her entire endeavour. Within moments of gathering in the small outbuilding dedicated to the instructional sessions, strangers become friends. It’s also not uncommon to find Novak cleaning up afterward instead of relegating the task to her staff. But then, that’s all in keeping with The Good Earth’s MO of feeling like a visit to someone’s home.

“To me, it’s like after a really good dinner party,” Novak said. “It gives me time to reflect, to come down.”

And perhaps remember that there’s only one place she can do this.

“The driver for this whole business was that this is home,” Novak said. “I had a strong foundation in agriculture and an understanding of what this place called Niagara has here.”

• • • • •

CONTACT

Good Earth Food & Wine
Phone: 905-563-6333
Website: https://goodearthfoodandwine.com/
4556 Lincoln Ave, Beamsville, ON L0R 1B3

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