HaCHere pop-ups offer taste of something new

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This article was published 19/05/2018 (2998 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Something new is hatching in Winnipeg’s food scene.

For several weeks of Sundays, the HaCHere (pronounced “hatchery”) Pop Up Collective will give diners a chance to try multi-course meals from local chefs and catering companies in a sit-down restaurant setting.

The brainchild of Allan Pineda — who runs regular Filipino-themed pop-ups himself under the Baon Manila Nights banner — HaCHere is a co-operative concept that brings together chefs, some fledgling, some established, to learn from each other and help each other while getting the benefit of a restaurant kitchen and low overhead.

On the Monday before Loaf and Honey’s Mother’s Day pop-up, some of the participating chefs gathered at InFerno’s on Academy, the River Heights bistro that is playing host to the Sunday-night series.

From their conversation, it’s clear why Pineda wanted all of them to be part of the project. As they discuss how many plates they need and who’s available to help serve on which night, there’s a supportive vibe.

Though each chef has his or her own culinary style, they all share a similar philosophy. Many of them worked in larger kitchens and found the focus wasn’t on the kind of ingredients they wanted to use or the type of experience they wanted to provide. These are the kind of chefs who know the names of the farmers they buy tomatoes from, or the vendors who make their cheese.

Soon, two of those names will be Rachel Isaak and Dustin Peltier. The chef couple, who run Loaf and Honey event and catering company, also make cheese based on a Trappist recipe passed down to them by Brother Alberic, a monk from a monastery in Holland, Man. The unpasteurized cow’s milk cheese is hand-washed and aged for 60 days, according to a method that’s been used since the 1700s.

Appropriately, their May 13 meal was going to be cheese-heavy, though their monastic variety won’t be ready until June; they will be debuting it in July.

“We make everything from scratch, from our pastas on,” Peltier says. “We age and cure meats, going back to older ways when nothing came out of a can and there were no preservatives. Getting back to real food, simple, let the ingredients speak for themselves.”

Sunday, May 27, belongs to Roughage Eatery, a vegan catering company run by chefs Jessie Hodel and Candice Tonelete. The duo’s theme is Mexican and their Fiesta Verde menu (no meat or dairy) includes mojo-spiced tofu tacos with pico de gallo, tamales with cashew queso freso and jackfruit carnitas, and coconut flan.

For Hodel and Tonelete, the pop-up is a way to introduce themselves to a wider Winnipeg audience. Their eventual goal is to open a vegan restaurant — something the city is sorely lacking — and the first step is showing carnivores that vegan cuisine isn’t restricted to salads and raw food.

“We’re still starting out, so not everyone knows about us yet, but we’re getting the word out to say vegan food is really good and fun,” Hodel says, adding that many people’s experience with vegan options in restaurants is being served a regular menu item with the meat removed or the cheese scraped off. “You can make amazing vegan food that takes time and care, not just throwing some carrots on a plate.

“You’re not missing anything; you’re expanding your mind on what good food is. It doesn’t have to be delicious bacon-fat-fried something.”

“Agree to disagree,” Steve Strecker says with a laugh. Strecker, formerly of Era Bistro in the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, now runs a catering company called Atomic Dinner Rolls.

“I’m treating it as the big reveal behind the business,” Strecker says of his pop-up on June 10. “The concept behind the brand is retro-futurism. I’m trained in classical French, but because we’re in the middle of Canada and have such an eclectic, diverse country, I try to take a little bit of everything and work it into a fusion.

“I’d like to show all the things I find fun about food, transformative. I dabble quite a bit in molecular gastronomy, so I’m using a lot of elements from that and then also focusing in on local, sustainable products. It’s what I’ve been taught after spending a few years at the human rights musuem; I see the value in that. That’s what I want my brand to be: we could be a really good vessel for a better future based around food.”

For Prairie Kitchen Catering’s Matty Neufeld, the pop-ups are a chance to go out on a limb and focus on perfect pairings between food and beverages, and the use of local, beautiful ingredients.

“It’s not this cookie-cutter formula — OK, I bought a tomato for this (price), so I have to sell it for this,” says the former executive chef at Pineridge Hollow. “Our overhead is less and the appeal of doing pop-ups makes these functional for us because we don’t have to pay staff and rent and everything else, but we still get to cook the food that we want to do.

“This is just a fun time, I think, to show our creativity, as opposed to what you can do in a big restaurant… this is your passion, your secret that you don’t want to tell anybody but just invite your close friends, this is the food that you want to do, your crazy ideas in the middle of the night that you put down on your notepad. This (pop-up) is for those ideas, I think.”

For more information on HaCHere, see the Facebook event page at wfp.to/hachere.

jill.wilson@freepress.mb.ca Twitter: @dedaumier