inthekitchen
crowd
pleasing
At the RBC Convention Centre, serving
hundreds of identical, impeccable
plates is all in a day’s work.
by Joelle Kidd
Clad in spick-and-span chefs’ whites and a towering toque
blanche, chef Quentin Harty cuts an impressive figure. Kind,
friendly, and professional, this executive chef wears decades of
cooking experience on his sleeve. He knows the importance of good
management.
His style, he says, is firm but fair. “There’s no room for error.”
Indeed, when hundreds, even thousands, of plates are leaving the
kitchen under his supervision, Harty must be sure his crack team is
operating at full capacity.
In this era of the celebrity chef, open kitchens, and hole-in-thewall hotspots, documentaries and reality TV have spun the image
of a chef as a passionate perfectionist, spending minutes agonizing,
tweezer in hand, over the placement of a pea shoot. But there is
another side to the life of a chef, one that requires just as much
obsession with details: the role of supreme administrator. Each
component on the plate needs to get there with perfect timing and
proper execution. Dish after dish must be created consistently and
flawlessly.
With two industrial kitchens plating up thousands of dishes at a
time, the RBC Convention Centre relies on organized efficiency.
The Winnipeg Convention Centre (as it was then called) opened
in 1975. The first purpose-built centre of its kind in the country, it
was imagined as a revitalizing force for the city’s downtown. More
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ciao! / oct/nov / two thousand sixteen