Chef Ben Kiely’s route to Burnaby was paved with love and cooking.
He met a Burnaby woman in Greece, fell in love, and after some time in Europe, found himself teaching cooking and raising a family in British Columbia.
Kiely has worked in some of Europe’s finer hotel restaurants, mostly in London but also in Brittany and Paris, France and Spain’s Canary Islands. He was trained in classical French cooking, but his style is heavily influenced by contemporary West Coast cuisine.
Once children were in the picture, Kiely wanted a job with more family-friendly hours, so he switched to teaching, first at the Art Institute and now at the Pacific Institute of Culinary Arts.
Kiely spoke with the NOW about Burnaby’s burgeoning culinary scene and his exploration of national identity and diversity through food. He will soon be a regular in the Burnaby NOW, offering seasonal recipes with local ingredients.
Q&A:
What are you planning to focus on with this column?
What I’d like to do is write some recipes. If I asked my students to tell me five French dishes, they can, no problem, five Japanese, five Mexican, no problem. But it’s very hard for them to identify five Canadian dishes. And I think that’s really interesting, because we have such a melting pot of nationalities here. Obviously people have been here for thousands of years as the First Nations, so I feel like it’s very important we define who we are culinary wise, because we have some of the best ingredients on the planet known to us. If you walk around Granville Island, we’ve got seafood, local vegetables and wine and cheeses available to us. That’s a real strong basis to identify us through cuisine. We can take from each other techniques but try and use as many local ingredients as we can to start defining who we are as British Columbians, culinary wise.
What’s different about your column?
I’ll try to identify different cultures we have in Burnaby and focus a little bit more on their cuisine. Burnaby is pretty strong for that. We’ve got Cioffi’s up on Hastings Street, really (good) Italian meat, Bosa Foods. Burnaby is growing, and I think the food scene is growing because a lot of talented chefs are moving out from Vancouver. We’ve got the Hart House, we’ve got the Pear Tree - some pretty good establishments.
What originally got you interested and passionate about food?
Growing up, I used to love going to markets. Living in Europe, it’s quite easy to travel, and getting to know someone else’s culture is by learning their food, so going to markets was a really big part of it, identifying ingredients. I loved the creativity of plating and the presentation (at culinary school in London). I come from quite a small town outside of London, and it was something new to me. It was just so exciting.
Would you say you have a signature dish?
I really like cooking with lamb, and I think Salt Spring Island lamb is one of the best lambs I’ve ever had. I think it’s beautiful, because it eats the seaweed, so it naturally becomes salty, seasoned meat. I like simple food, but just done really well.
What would you do for vegetarians?
I think vegetables are really overlooked, but I personally love vegetables, I think it’s a really trending market right now. The price of meat has gone up 35 to 40 per cent in restaurants, so there’s a huge market for vegetarian food. You have to be a better chef when you’re dealing with vegetables, because you have to be more creative. You have to use different vegetables, different colours, different techniques. It’s a real challenge for a chef to do vegetarian done well because you always get stuck with the mushroom risotto, but they want way better than that.
How would you describe Burnaby’s culinary landscape?
We’ve got so many different ethnic-based restaurants in Burnaby, which are competing with corporate restaurants. It’s really hard for the local small neighbourhood restaurants to compete on the scale of those ones, so I think they become more creative. The restaurant scene in Burnaby is getting a lot more diverse.
What do you see here?
Especially around Metrotown, in the last couple of years I’ve noticed, I see a lot more mom-and-pop kind of Asian style restaurants – Japanese, Korean. Korean food has never been more popular than what it is right now.
What about hidden culinary gems in Burnaby? Where would you go if you wanted something nice to eat?
The Hart House is really nice for brunch. The Pear Tree is definitely one of our higher end restaurants. I think Scott Jaeger is really, really good. For Asian food, especially that little bit around Metrotown. There are some hidden gems around there, with the hot pots they do, and they have some cool sushi places. And then you’ve got the fish and chips. You’ve got lots of different things.
For more info, go to www.picachef.com/chef-instructors/ben or email Kiely [email protected].
