inthekitchen
inthekitchen
a moveable feast
restaurant of the year:
Diversity Food Services
GOODFOODMANITOBA
2 0 1 5
Ciao! magazine’ s annual awards for producer, retailer, and restaurant of the year celebrate the creative use of and dedication to regional ingredients
by Joelle Kidd
Have food; will travel. This could easily be the calling card of Diversity Food Services. This band of mobile mavericks has served fresh fare in school cafeterias, banquet halls, fields of dairy farms, even on top of frozen rivers and on the Esplanade Riel bridge, all with exceptional quality and creativity. Above all, it is the commitment to spreading the word about regional sustainability that earns Diversity the 2015 Good Food Manitoba award.
It all began in 2009, with the University of Winnipeg. The administration had dared to imagine a campus replete with fresh, made-from-scratch local food, and chef Ben Kramer was brought on to make this vision a reality.
The strategy was simple: win people over with taste. Using the best local ingredients and preparing them well proved to be the deceptively simple key to University food service. Sourcing locally and organically, fighting for the environment, delivering massive amounts of food, and doing it all on a budget was, as Kramer jokes,“ taking on everything difficult about the restaurant industry, and doing it all at once.” Going against the grain of institutionalized cooking has proved to have its perks; with control over every item leaving the kitchen, chefs are able to cater to any demographic or
8 ciao! / aug / sep / two thousand fifteen