{"id":1329,"date":"2011-06-19T09:01:29","date_gmt":"2011-06-19T14:01:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jameschatto.com\/?p=1329"},"modified":"2012-05-01T10:14:06","modified_gmt":"2012-05-01T15:14:06","slug":"niagara-college","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jameschatto.com\/?p=1329","title":{"rendered":"Niagara College"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Chef Michael Olson in Benchmark restaurant at Niagara College<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

On Friday I was up at the crack of dawn to drive down to Niagara College to deliver a convocation address to some of the students and to receive an honorary diploma in Media Studies. It truly was an honour to be thus gowned and hooded and the graduating students were impressively polite and patient with this old geezer at the podium. The trip also gave me a chance to check out Benchmark, the restaurant in the College\u2019s Niagara-on-the-Lake campus. It has been thoroughly worked over in the last ten months by Michael Olson, the renowned chef (Liberty, On the Twenty) who also teaches at the College. He runs Benchmark as a classroom where students in the culinary and hospitality programs can learn the realities of the business.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s how Niagara College works, with excellent and famously hands-on courses. It also has 40 acres of vineyards on the beautifully landscaped 114-acre campus, tucked up under the Niagara escarpment, where students can learn viticulture, growing the grapes that they then turn into wine in the teaching winery. Those wines are routinely entered for professional competitions and have so far won 140 awards! I remember coming across one years ago when I was one of the many judges for the Ontario Wine Awards. I thought it was a joke until I tasted it. Dazzling! Renowned winemaker Jim Warren was il professore at the time, which explains a lot. I believe it won gold that year. The College also has its own brewery, beer store, greenhouses and now a chic, ultra-modern wine boutique beside the vineyards where anyone can buy the wines. Production is very small, obviously, so this is actually the ONLY place to do that. Reserve wines are referred to as Dean\u2019s List and some of the labels are designed as report cards filled out by none other than Tony Aspler. I strongly recommend you visit and buy, next time you\u2019re down in Niagara.<\/p>\n

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Our very own spargelfest<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

And stop for a meal at Benchmark. Our lunch there was delightful, set in the restaurant\u2019s airy rotunda with its wrap-around view of the vineyards and escarpment. The place is open to the public and is a local favourite, especially now that Olson has done away with much of the formality of service and dramatically lowered prices. The five of us were served family style with platters of food set down in the centre of the table for the appetizer courses. We began with silky slices of Mario Pingue\u2019s yummy local prosciutto and slices of Guernsey Gold from the Upper Canada Cheese company in nearby Jordan. The College\u2019s own semi-dry Riesling was a fine accompaniment.<\/p>\n

Crispy battered shrimp with coleslaw and a peppery aioli followed, then Olson emerged with a casserole of perfect white asparagus grown by farmer Peter Janssen in Simcoe. He doesn\u2019t grow enough for the commercial market but advertizes in German-language newspapers and sells the lot to ex-pats who miss Germany\u2019s obsessive spargelfest<\/em>. Olson\u2019s students cooked it beautifully, dressing it with fresh orange, a Riesling-orange hollandaise and chopped chives from the garden. Our hosts brought forth a second wine for good measure and reasons of scientific comparison \u2013 a gloriously golden barrel-fermented Chardonnay. It was hard to say which wine better suited the asparagus but I think the Riesling was the ultimate winner. There\u2019s something to be said for classic combinations.<\/p>\n

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A preview of scrumptious cookies and pastries from Anna Olson's new show, Bake that starts production in September.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

For a main course I ordered tender pork with a sweet, sticky glaze of maple and beer \u2013 roast potatoes and vegetables were exemplary. Then Olson brought out another unique treat, a sort of soprbet made by freezing the pure wort from the brewery before any hops had been added. It was, as you might expect, marvelously malty and sweet \u2013 quite the most original and delicious ice I\u2019ve had in ages \u2013 and full of the taste of barley. We finished with platters of cookies and pastries that were actually a preview of recipes from the upcoming tv show starring Anna Olson (Chef Olson\u2019s wife). It\u2019s called simply Bake<\/em> and will be well worth following if the scrumptious apricot pastries and empire cookies are anything to go by. \u201cIt\u2019s an inverse puff pastry,\u201d explained Michael Olson. \u201cInstead of starting with dough and adding butter, we start with a sheet of butter and add dough. It makes for a more even result.\u201d Absolutely lovely!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On Friday I was up at the crack of dawn to drive down to Niagara College to deliver a convocation address to some of the students and to receive an honorary diploma in Media Studies. It truly was an honour to be thus gowned and hooded and the graduating students were impressively polite and patient […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[96,1,19],"tags":[441,442,440,439],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jameschatto.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1329"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jameschatto.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jameschatto.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jameschatto.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jameschatto.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1329"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/jameschatto.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1329\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1999,"href":"https:\/\/jameschatto.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1329\/revisions\/1999"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jameschatto.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1329"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jameschatto.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1329"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jameschatto.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1329"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}