Niagara Food by Tiffany Mayer

Author:Tiffany Mayer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing Inc.
Published: 2014-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chef Mark Picone is one of the pioneers of Niagara wine country cuisine and helped make the region a culinary destination. Photo by Nathaniel David Johnson.

Meanwhile, the Prince of Wales Hotel had already been putting its trust in a local chef, Mark Walpole, to make its name synonymous with more than just opulent lodgings. Walpole’s early days of cookery were in some of those kitchens pushing out those plates of frozen vegetables that made Rinderlin cringe. Walpole, a formally trained chef, was twenty-nine when he was tapped in 1984 to take over the hotel’s kitchen. Owner Henry Wiens told his young culinarian to “do what you do best within these four walls and don’t worry about what the rest are doing,” Walpole remembers. “We looked inward, not outward, so we were constantly improving.”

Wiens wanted the restaurant to embrace the local wine industry. Walpole did that by hosting wine dinners before they were popular, he says. He had his own gardener to grow herbs and bartered with backyard gardeners for their harvests. Walpole purchased game from Arden Vaughn at Lake Land Meats. His trout came from a fish farm in Fonthill. Word got out among farmers that they should bring their wares to Walpole because he was open to using them in the Prince of Wales kitchen. When he left in 1996, Walpole witnessed a sea change in fine dining in Niagara.

“There was a difference in the product available. When I started in the business, vegetables were frozen,” he explains. “When I worked at the Skylon Tower [in Niagara Falls], we weren’t cleaning vegetables. We were thawing broccoli and serving 1,200 people a night.”

He was grateful when Olson, de Luca, Picone and Treadwell arrived to further propel local dining into its own prestigious brand. “It was nice to be joined. I knew a lot of other chefs in the area, but they were not as forward-thinking,” Walpole says.

There’s no denying the effect this quintet of cuisiniers had on Niagara, taking some of the burden off the Falls as the main tourist draw. “We created a culture here in Niagara that made it a destination people come to for the food,” Picone says. “It was always a world-class destination, but now that we have people making great wine and great food, it attracted more people.”

Emil Rinderlin was just happy to see kitchens finally eschew tomato juice appetizers and start doing scratch cooking with what has always been here: farm-fresh ingredients. “They said, ‘Oh, this is regional now,’” he says with a wry grin about the movement that was afoot at the time. “But anything that improves the cuisine in a region is good. It was for the betterment of all.”

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