Lauren Mote, Bittered Sling, Vancouver

Mixologist. Sommelier. Architect of potions, tonics and elixirs. Accomplished emcee, writer and cocktail judge. International spirits diplomat. Award-winning bar personality Lauren Mote wears many hats, but she’s perhaps best known as the co-proprietor of Bittered Sling — a wildly successful line of high-quality, small-batch cocktail and culinary bitters— and bar manager of the downtown Vancouver hotspot UVA Wine & Cocktail Bar.

What makes a great bar?

The interesting part about being a bartender is that you get to meet some of the most interesting people. I work in a boutique hotel and the people that come into UVA are often very well traveled, well-educated and intuitive people. I’ve been able to have some of the most interesting, intelligent and engaging conversations with guests, while making them drinks. In these experiences the cocktail is the compliment that can brings the conversation together -- that’s what makes a great bar.

What do you do, and what do you plan to share with delegates at Terroir 10?

I've Been bartending for 15 years and in that time I've run many bar programs, progressive cocktail, spirit and wine programs.  I moved to Vancouver in 2007 and I was the bar manager at Lumiere (which at the time was one of the best restaurants in Canada). In 2012, I opened Bittered Sling Bitters, with my partner and chef Jonathan Chovancek, and we started Kale and Nori culinary arts.

Bittered sling is an award winning product, and is used to inspire creativity from chefs and bartenders alike, both professionals and amateurs across Canada and now into the US and abroad. Being that our company is about 4 years old, it's been pretty exciting to see the growth of something that’s so niche. It's fascinating to see a product like Bittered Sling grow when it’s so focused on olfactory nasal and palette perception. It feels like the right time to focus on this, to bring these concepts to Terroir 2016.

Can you describe a bit about how you approach the process of concocting new flavours and inventing bitters?

Creating bitters is an interesting process and both Jonathan and I approach things quite differently. Jonathan looks at it like making a sauce -  being that he’s been a chef for almost 23 years. I look at bitters as being tools to use in bartending as a way to dry out a cocktail and to add balance and complexity. So the two of us look at bitters from a completely different perspective. To create a bitter, we start from experimenting with the ingredients that we’re inspired by, for example, orange and juniper. We’ll bite into them, play with them in as many different forms as possible, and start recording all of the flavor notes that we sense from them. From there, we compare our notes, and from the beginning we were always surprised to find that our notes were so similar except for the fact that our weights were different because he was building a sauce and I was building an accompaniment to a drink. Then together, we begin the trial and error process of experimenting with these flavor notes and those of other ingredients, to create a final finished product.

We like use the analogy of taking apart and engine and putting it back together again. If you were to describe what orange tastes like, looks like, smells like, and feels like to somebody who has no sensory perception, how would you explain it?

So that’s what we do with our bitters, how we build them.

Would you consider yourself a supertaster?

I think it would be very hard for me to say that I’m a supertaster, but I know that when I build flavours, bitters or anything to do with sensory perception with notes or palate, I’m able to identify and associate names and words and colours and extractions to everything that I taste. I know that I can go toe-to-toe with any sommelier, any chef, with anyone who knows how to taste and understand flavors and palate.

I read Francois Chartier’s* book, Taste Buds and Molecules, and I read his analysis of different flavour compounds. I found that there were many things that I already could taste and knew on my palate, but I just needed more information on exactly what characteristics and chemical codes I was tasting and smelling to better identify them.  

I think that the ability to “super taste”, doesn't mean much anyways if you don’t have the sensory education and vocabulary to identify the things that you smell and taste…

Absolutely. There was this craze about 10 years ago when bartenders were putting up to 15 different ingredients in cocktails and I did the same thing! I would go down one path, trying to express the flavour of a strawberry, for example, and I would find 15 different ways that I could do that. Over the years, I’d learned better to condense many ingredients into less and more complex ones to achieve the same quality of flavour but in more interesting ways.

What do you think we could do more of in terms of education, as an industry, to expose a larger and more inclusive demographic to the value of better understanding flavour and taste perception?

I think that there is a large percentage of people that are interested and passionate about food and beverage, than there are people that aren’t. To reach these people, I think we just have to keep presenting more opportunities, that can act as gateways for people to really get involved in the industry.

To get people involved in this level of understanding of food and beverage, I think it’s just a matter of finding the hook of how to bring people in and make them feel comfortable. Once they get in they’ll never want to leave.

The entire reason that I chose bartending, over continuing to pursue my postgraduate education is that I get to have face-to-face contact with people that will eat and drink every single day of their lives. Through beverage and within this industry, I can actually have a much greater impact on these people.

This interview had been edited and condensed from its original format.

Edouardo Jordan, Chef & Owner Solare Restaurant, Seattle, Washington

Edouardo Jordan is the chef and owner of Solare Restaurant in Seattle, Washington -- a fairly new restaurant. Chef Jordan aims to share his experience of working up the kitchen ranks as a minority in fine dining environment until his experience today owning and running his very own establishment.

Can you elaborate on exactly what your experience has been like, as a minority in the food and hospitality industry?

There’s not many black owners, or chefs, especially in the fine-dining scene. It’s a rarity right now, and it’s also a struggle because I’ve never had many people that I can go to for advice that resemble my own background. I’m originally from St.Petersburg Florida and as a minority from the south, coming into the professional food scene, I wanted to explore food beyond my foundation.

Like most chefs, French and Italian cuisine became the basis of my professional development.  I’d never traveled, never had major experiences in French restaurants or cooking prior to coming into the industry, so it was a whole new world to me. I began getting more training, learning more, tasting more, and understanding a cuisine that was very far fetched from what I had grown up with as a southern black man.  Throughout all of this, I didn't have a lot of people I could turn to, or mentors, because I didn’t know people in the industry, no true leaders at least, that shared my background and my culture, that I could give a phone-call and ask, for example, ‘How was it for you back in the day?’ ‘What do I have to look forward to?’ That was somewhat of a struggle for me, just trying to find my path and to stay on path too, once I found it. I made it I guess...

*laughs*... I’m still getting there.

What led you to pursue a career as a chef?

I always knew I wanted to either work either in the restaurant industry or to have my own restaurant, ever since I was a little kid. I started cooking at a young age, with my grandmother and my mother, just kind of helping out, baking cakes, mixing this, turning that... I always had a passion for being in the kitchen, helping out, seeing the outcome of working with them and having happy family members praise me and my grandmother for the beautiful dishes that we made. That was always part of my lifestyle, part of my soul.

I ended up going to the University of Florida and graduated, still itching for the food industry. So I ended up deciding to go to culinary school and started taking things seriously. I’m the kind of person that once I dive into something, I really want to be the best at it, so I put that to heart and just started running. I decided that I was going to work the hardest, become the best chef that I could possibly be and to, one day, become the owner of a restaurant.

You began your culinary career with a food blog and you would have been one of the early adopters of the blogosphere which has subsequently exploded. How has the culture of food blogging changed since its earlier days?

When I graduated from the University of Florida I started a food blog, called Tampers.com. I was dabbling, still trying to learn myself. It was my initial means of getting into the restaurants community, tasting food, developing my own taste and opinions and then presenting those opinions to the general public. It didn't really work out that long for me *laughs* but it was a good start. Nowadays, we have Yelp, Facebook, Instagram and everything else, so now everyone’s a critic and everyone is instantaneously able to share their opinions.  Social media has definitely shaken the food writing scene as a whole.  

What would you consider to be your specialty, as a chef?

I work a lot with my southern heritage, present a lot of southern influences on my menu and I am also learning more about West African cuisine. Unfortunately, I don’t technically have access to African ingredients here, but I kind of respectfully bastardize some of the original recipes, to create my own take on the dishes of West Africa. My specialty is bringing a little bit of my own heritage into my cuisine.

Looking at my cuisine in particular, I do love making cured meats. I know everyone is into that now but I do a lot of charcuterie and a lot of salami making and I think, personally, that’s one of my biggest specialties.

I read that your philosophy is, “Don’t mess up a good ingredient”. What does this mean to you, as a chef and a lover of good food?

That philosophy kind of stems from my fine dining training, which I’ve slowly begun to distance myself from. The whole concept of über fine dining began to really upset me. It was a great foundation for who I am today, my future, and all those things that prepare you to be a great chef but the amount of waste that I saw and had to deal with, as a chef, training in fine-dining restaurants... it freaked me out. With the rise of molecular gastronomy, it kind of changed a whole other aspect of cooking.  

The most important thing for me is knowing, how to cook, using traditional and classic techniques.  I understand and appreciate, many of the modern methods of cooking, but I realize that it isn't for me. That’s not the way I look at food and it’s not the way my grandmother taught me to cook, so this is the direction that I’ve moved in.

As you step away from fine-dining, what are you moving towards with your cooking and your restaurant?

With my food, I just want to be in touch with my heritage. When I started cooking professionally, I kind of shamelessly turned my back to my heritage because I thought that the French cooking and cuisine was the only way to go.  After training in French and Italian cuisine and learning the foundations of cooking, I realized the importance of re-embracing my heritage and bringing it back into my food, while also, still retaining and utilizing what I was taught from a professional standpoint.

I created my restaurant for my neighborhood, my family and to support a sustainable existence in the community, that the people can love and enjoy for a long time.

What value do you hope your restaurant will return back to its neighbourhood community?

Most importantly, it brings people, families and friends together. I have created a very open and welcoming restaurant without sacrificing any quality of the food.

It’s important to bring families together in a neighbourhood that’s open to embracing your restaurant, to call it there restaurant and feel comfortable coming inside, regardless of whether it’s only for a quick drink and to read the newspaper or to enjoy a really high-quality meal. I want to offer the neighbourhood a place to come and restore -- there’s nothing pretentious here at all.

People always ask me to describe my food and it’s hard to explain. It’s not really French, Italian, or Southern, I don’t know what to call it -- it’s just f*cking good food!

This interview had been edited and condensed from its original format.

Mark Best, Chef and Owner, Marque Restaurant, Sydney

It may be hard to imagine, but one of Australia’s most acclaimed chefs used to work as an electrician in the mines of Western Australia. These days, however, Mark Best brings electricity to the kitchen of his award-winning, French-influenced restaurant, Marque. Located in the hip, inner Sydney suburb of Surry Hills, the sleek dining room of Marque is a far cry from the searing temperatures and dusty, ochre landscapes of outback Kalgoorlie.

What brought you from working as an electrician in the gold mines of Western Australia to your current place in the culinary world, as a symbol of new Australian Cuisine?

After working in the mines for four years, I spent a period of time refitting submarines for the Australian Government before finding my feet working with food. I simply found myself working in a job that I didn’t like and under quite arduous conditions, so at this stage, I was looking for any means to escape. Food revealed itself to be the answer to what I was looking for, and it just so happened that I was kind of good at it as well. Being a chef is obviously a stressful job and I went into it with a full awareness of that. I went into it purely for the love of cooking and that continues to be what drives me today.

What factors and influences have defined new Australian Cuisine? (I couldn’t help but notice the shocking absence of kangaroo and vegemite recipes in your upcoming cookbook, Best Kitchen Basics)

It’s funny actually because most of the general public here in Australia still struggles with eating at least one half of our coat of arms (The kangaroo part, that is, for those who aren't familiar). It’s the cute factor, I suppose.

In terms of influence, Australia’s geographical connection to Asia & given the fact that a significant part of our population arrive through immigration has had an enormous positive effect on our culinary culture. Nearly 40-percent of Sydneysiders speak a non-English language at home and more than 250 languages are spoken in Sydney. These language groups are quite concentrated in Sydney (far less so in Melbourne) That means that these language centers are also cultural centers of religion, food etc.

The biggest influence for me has been the way we as chefs eat in Australia via the continent’s multicultural diversity. It also means that we access the local ingredients grown and push our creativity to use them in unique, non-traditional ways. The Australian landscape is unique in that it is particularly rich in diversity -- rich, but also harsh. These environmental extremes define and bring the Australian ‘flavour’ to our cuisine. Indigenous ingredients are also now becoming more widely recognized amongst consumers and their supply is at a consistency to be taken on as everyday staples in our commercial kitchens.

How would you like to see the current face of Australian cuisine recognized on an international level?

I think that we’re already well on our way to being recognized internationally, however, it is mainly through travel by chefs as well as tourism that the awareness that something different and special is happening with our culinary community here, down under, is spread.

I don’t wish for Australia to be seen as better or more recognized for its cuisine than any other country, just different and flourishing, which is in an of itself something to be acknowledged and celebrated.

With the upcoming release of your book, Best Kitchen Basics, what statements on culinary culture do you wish to convey and what message are you attempting to bring into the home kitchen?

This second book of mine is a collection of home-style recipes that I want to add to the Home Cooking lexicon. I want to challenge tradition a little and get the average home cook to think a little more about what they are cooking, why, and where their ingredients are coming from.

These days, technology of all forms continues to have a exponentially growing presence in all of our lives, in our homes, and in our communities. As a chef, do you find yourself embracing these advancements as an asset in your kitchen environment, or does technological presence instead fuel a nostalgic tendency towards the use of more basic methods and techniques?

Technology is simply a means to an end and cuisine needs to either advance or atrophy in its wake. At my restaurant, Marque, we have always used the latest technology in conjunction with traditional and artisanal techniques. I don’t believe in using any technique as a gimmick or for theatrical purposes, but instead as a means to broaden my choices in the way that I use my ingredients.

This interview had been edited and condensed from its original format. 

Roni Saslove, Winemaker, The Tasting Room, Tel Aviv, Israel

Roni Saslove is a winemaker and and a viticulturist. Half Canadian and Half Israeli, she trained at Brock University of Niagara’s Tawse Winery before returning to Israel tending to her family's vineyards in the Golan Heights.  Currently she runs the very hip wine bar - The Tasting Room in Tel Aviv’s newly renovated Sarona district.

Tell us a bit about yourself….

I’ve been making wine full-time for over 12 years now, and have been a part of the winemaking process for over 20-years. Wine had always been apart of my life, something I enjoying drinking, but as I began working in the winery more and more, I became completely hooked.

Growing grapes and just experiencing all the parts of this process that are….both scientific and very magical. To make wine from a  scientific perspective is not challenging, but to create beautiful, delicious wine, is a product of so much more than academic knowledge -- it requires an incredible amount of passion, of soul and energy.

What role do our personal perception and taste affect our experience, and our appreciation for wine?

Through my education in sensory analysis, I learned to better understand and appreciate our perspective as wine tasters. Our perception of the wine that we taste is ultimately influenced by so many things other than the wine itself, most of which, we’re rarely aware of. The way that each individual experiences a certain wine, no matter its quality, can be completely unique and I find that to be very enriching.

In Hebrew there’s a saying, Al Tam Vereach, En Litvak Eachon: On taste and smell there’s nothing to argue about. I feel this is very true, there’s no place for argument, but there is a lot of place for sharing our experiences, of flavor for example, with one another.

What is Israel’s history, as a wine country?

Israel is a very young wine country, and a very ancient one at the same time. We’re filled with so many diverse Terroirs; from the Golden Heights, the Upper-Galilee, the Lower-Galilee and to the desert, that each create different styles of wine, while all retaining something distinguishable in common. When you taste an Israeli wine, there’s a very unique taste to it. Because we’re a warm and sunny region, and most of our grapes are grown at high-altitudes, our grapes retain characteristics of green, as well as a bit of the capstone, the asparagus, and a lot of mint as well, that really set them apart from those grown anywhere else in the world.

Since Saslove Winery was first conceived, until now, how has the face of Israeli wine changed both from a global and national perspective?

I’ve been living in the wine industry here before it really was, when it was really unrepresented in the global market. There was a time when, if anyone heard of anything regarding wine that had to do with Israel or with Kosher, because many times it goes together, they would think immediately of the Manischewitz, which is clearly not the best thing to be associated with when you’re trying to sell a high-end product. Ironically, North America’s Manischewitz is unknown by most Israelis and is a far cry from the reality of Israel’s many great wines.

Many years ago the head buyer of Whole Foods in the States came over to Israel to taste some wines, including my own. She told me that she’d love to order from me, because she thought that the wines really were amazing, but that she couldn't at the moment because of the lack of demand for them, because of Israel’s reputation. At that time -- and it’s changing, although slower than I’d like it to -- if you would buy Israeli wine it would be because you’d either be Jewish, or pro-Israel or need something Kosher. Unfortunately, at this time, it wasn't like you opened the news and heard about all the great wines we make here in Israel.

However, things are changing: great wineries here are sending the best of their products to highly recognized international competitions, and returning with amazing rewards. I am happy that through these competitions and through people like Robert Parker and Jancis Robinson, who have given Israeli wines very impressive scores, Israeli wine is beginning to become better showcased and appreciated on a global market.

Why do you feel that it’s important to place such an emphasis on our perception of flavour and our understanding of it, when experiencing wine?

We’re not like France and Italy where wine has always been such an integral part of the culture. Only in relatively recent history has wine drinking really become popularized in Israel. In this time it’s morphed into what’s become perceived to be an elite product, and a symbol of high social status, and I really feel that this perception actually does a lot of damage. In my experience, people drank a lot more wine, before it was considered something elite or something “snobby”, and I want to take us back to this place.

I am trying to encourage people of all sorts to just go for it; to drink, taste and experiment with flavour. I want to show people that through experience, you can learn understand why you prefer one wine over another, making the experience more exciting -- not intimidating. I really try to emphasize the value of the experience solely between the person and the wine. People don’t need to fear if they don’t know how to say Gewürztraminer -- it shouldn't feel like a test -- just enjoy it. I feel that part of the joy of drinking wine has been sacrificed with the growing emphasis on knowledge and sophistication that has come to proceed it. A wine doesn't have to be the most acclaimed, the most expensive or the most sophisticated, to bring you pleasure.

What about your current project, The Tasting Room?  

Two years ago, we sold the winery Saslove Wines, deciding as a family that we all wanted to continue to do new things. Since then my father’s been living on the beach in Goa, India, and I’ve been managing and creating The Tasting Room.

The Tasting Room is a very unique and fun place of wine, with 40 bottles on an automatic pouring system, so that each guest gets the chance to pour for themselves, anything from just a taste to a full glass, so they can discover as many new things as they wish. Most of the wines that we feature here are Israeli, because that’s where we are, and what I believe in supporting. It’s really a place of gathering, where people of all backgrounds in wine experience can come and simply explore and enjoy wines from all throughout Israel.

This interview had been edited and condensed from its original format. 

Michael Mazourek, Plant Breeder & Assistant Professor, Cornell University

Michael Mazourek is a vegetable breeder who specializes in adapting produce that will allow it to evolve to climate changes, present pathogens, as well as to make it vegetables more delicious and nutritious. Featured in Dan Barber’s The Third Plate, MIchael works as an assistant professor at Cornell University, in upstate New York.  

Michael’s vegetable breeding program is focused on developing new cultivars of pea, squash, melon, cucumber, bean and pepper crop for organic farming systems.  This process of breeding new varieties through traditional methods of cross-pollination is informed by surveys of natural diversity and studies into the underlying genetic mechanisms.  His grower-driven traits focus on fungal and insect resistances in regionally adapted backgrounds to provide a reliable, productive harvest and reduce the need for pesticide applications.  His consumer-driven traits focus on color, quality, flavor and novelty to drive the consumption of naturally nutritious food.  

As we face a looming environmental crisis, how do you predict that our food systems will change?

We need to focus on producing more natural and ecologically friendly ways of growing food in harmony with nature, rather than against it. Hopefully, we’ll see a change in emphasis on where we eat in the food system, and increases in our plant consumption. This requires that plants inspire us to make better diet choices, which is where a certain extent of my work comes in.

The food we currently have access to has different ways of appealing to us. It triggers either some very basic primitive part of our brains and taste buds or it is a food product that has been specifically designed to peak our senses.  We can  create this same effect with whole produce -  it’s simply a matter of being able to create better produce that can compete, against less healthy and more environmentally detrimental options.

As a vegetable breeder, my work focuses  on balancing a combination of flavour, nutrition and convenience in a vegetable.  We then do a lot of research on active working farms to make sure that whatever we breed is going to be something that will also work for the farmer.

After your job of breeding the ideal produce is complete, do you have any say into whose hands these seeds will eventually fall into?

We share our materials with a seed company, that has the capacity to handle the full distribution process. Any of the seed catalogues for example that you might get in the mail, or the larger wholesale ones -- we’re providing the new seeds to a distributer, they provide them to a grower, and a portion of the proceeds are returned to us to continue to support public plant breeding.

What is public plant breeding?

Public plant breeding for us is comprised of our research program here at Cornell: It has a heritage leads back to 1942, so it’s the University effort to continually try to make the best produce that growers need, that the consumer is going to want, and most importantly, that can be independent in acting as an alternative to the typical market forces that would be driving the business in the for-profit sector of plant breeding.

Would you say that the fear of technological intervention in our agricultural industry is misguided?  

In the 1980’s there was the first promise of biotechnology. At the same time, the New York Times wrote an article about being able to have pork chops grow on trees by having the ability to change the DNA in an organism.  Anything to do with change and technology tends to spark unrealistic comparisons to science fiction and it’s often dramatized for effect. There’s certainly a need to do a better job of science education; making it more accessible and letting people be more comfortable with the approaches that are being used. It’s easy for people to confuse technology with innovation.  There are technologies that look at adjusting our current agricultural system and mask issues as we continue to carry on as we have been, and then there are more whole-system approaches that are not just looking at a the genes of a plant,  but adapting and evolving the plant and allowing it (the plant) to find its own solution. We have in fact made fantastic scientific leaps and bounds in our ability to change, directly manipulate, and alter the DNA in an organism, but this is still a fundamentally different approach than the much more evolutionary approach that is plant breeding.  It’s a whole plant adaptation of resiliency.

In what ways can technology serve as a means to not only improve but revolutionize our current food/agricultural systems?

The history of technology in agriculture has been to develop technological solutions to try to conquer nature and to eliminate impediments. The difference between my plant breeding approach and a biotech approach is how one defines the problem or challenge to be solved. The biotech approach is a reductionist approach that tries to define an issue that can can be addressed through a technologically enabled intervention. The issue with this approach is that nature is more complex than we think and will evolve around simple barriers we construct. We need an evolutionary approach that is coupled with using technology to try to understand the complexity of nature.  Plant breeding provides multi-tiered solutions from within nature to create plants that will thrive in nature. Technology should add value to the process and help guide the approach rather than look to create shortcuts.

This interview had been edited and condensed from its original format.