East, west, home

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 17/11/2015 (3825 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Today, I’m happy to report the recent surfacing of a local underground restaurant extraordinaire.

Actually, the report comes via my wife. Athina arrived home from a night out with a girlfriend last weekend raving about the new restaurant — which is a high praise coming from a woman who grew up in a Greek restaurant family and whose secular bible is Bon Appetit magazine. But it wasn’t just the experience that delighted her.

It was the story of the husband and wife behind the experience and the Canadian-focused, yet worldwide vision they are bringing to the food and the concept of the place they’ve named the Sentruhl Project.

The surprise began before Athina arrived, when her girlfriend, Debbie Hirsch, told her where the place was located (at least for now).

Debbie said they were going to a downtown basement in a century-old heritage building that was only open on weekends and had a set menu.

And that weekend’s featured food was Irish.

Anyway, that’s why Athina was surprised by everything when they arrived on the lower level of 370 Donald St., the place just off Ellice Avenue that operates under the name Kitchen Sync that rents space to anyone who needs a fully licensed commercial kitchen.

Enter Gordon and Traci Bailey, and the Sentruhl Project.

“The food was excellent,” Athina said. As was the service, and, surprise of surprises, the “lovely, lovely” lower-level setting. The four-course set menu was $58 per person and Athina had a tasty glass of wine from the limited list of three whites and three reds that was priced at $7.

“Clearly,” she recalled thinking, “they’ve done this before.”

And when she asked more about the young couple behind the weekends-only operation, it became even more obvious they’d done it before.

Athina remembered Gordon and Traci Bailey from reading reviews about their restaurant, Lot 30, when we were visiting Charlottetown. Traci took care of the front of the house and Gordon looked after the kitchen; Lot 30 had been rated by Maclean’s in 2008 as one of Canada’s top-50 restaurants.

Unfortunately, we couldn’t get a reservation when we were in Charlottetown or so much as a taste of Gordon’s award-winning clam chowder.

We also didn’t know of Traci and Gordon’s Manitoba roots.

In 1998, Traci was 20 and Gordon 21 when the two who had met at high school in Selkirk bucked the trend to move west and set out for Prince Edward Island for a couple of years that nearly turned into a couple of decades.

Gordon had been hooked into the restaurant business as a teenage dishwasher. He went on to graduate from culinary classes at Red River College and worked at the Manitoba Club and St. Charles Country Club under two of the Winnipeg’s most renown chefs, Bernard Mirlycourtois and Takashi Murakami.

What eventually lured Gordon and Traci (now in their late 30s) back to Manitoba was being with family, plus an opportunity for Gordon to be an instructor in Red River College’s culinary arts program. And, of course, how energized the local food scene has become.

Opening another restaurant was a given. So it was last year Gordon and Traci packed up their belongings, their two 14-year-old dogs and headed home. With them came Sean Audet and Spencer Smith, two young men who worked with the couple in P.E.I. about the same age Gordon and Traci were when they headed to the East Coast to learn how to prepare seafood.

And now they’re all here, where they’ve partnered for six months with Kitchen Sync owner Sheila Bennett, who supplies the “super cool space,” as Traci describes it.

They’ve been featuring the food of their own countries of ethnic origin (they being Gordon, Traci, Sean and Spencer), plus a tour of regional Canadian cuisine.

This weekend, the featured country is France.

It was scheduled before Paris was targeted by terrorists last week, but as a way of doing their part, the partners in Sentruhl are donating 15 per cent of this weekend’s bills and gratuities to the International Red Cross.

Meanwhile, Traci and Gordon are looking for a permanent place with more regular hours to move Sentruhl.

Which reminds me… you’re probably wondering why they named it Sentruhl.

Well, according to Traci, it was in honour of Winnipeg and its central location. Maybe because they’ve lived on the East Coast for so long, now that they’re back they see as few of us see ourselves.

“Being in the centre of everything,” is the way Traci describes it.

Eat your heart out, Toronto.

gordon.sinclair@freepress.mb.ca