Rooftop garden allows downtown restaurant to serve organic, local goods

Hyperlocal cuisine.

That’s the latest buzzword among chefs and restaurateurs. It’s a philosophy of sourcing ingredients as close to home as possible. And of preparing those ingredients in a way that showcases their natural flavours.

The last time we were in San Francisco, I called a restaurant to make a reservation. During the conversation, the person on the other end of the phone mentioned that their cuisine style was “Bay Area.” “Not Californian?” I asked. “No,” he said. “Everything comes from within 30 miles of the restaurant — vegetables, meats, seafood, wine.” So Bay Area it was. That’s hyperlocal.

While we may be a bit shy on local wine and seafood around these parts, many Calgary chefs scour the farmers’ markets and visit local producers on a regular basis. Many have herb gardens — check out the indoor herb garden at Market — and a few have contracts with farmers to provide them with produce. And Darren MacLean, chef and owner of Downtownfood, has taken it one step further. He’s planted a garden on the roof of his restaurant in the heart of downtown at 628 8th Avenue S.W., (587-353-3474).

MacLean says that he created what he calls the Urban AgProject partly to show that you can grow high-quality produce on a barren downtown rooftop. He also wanted to spark discussion on where our food comes from, helping make people more aware of the food they eat.

A few months ago, MacLean teamed up with GreenGate Garden Centres to build the garden. GreenGate supplied all the soil, seeds, pots and supplies that MacLean needed and Paul de Jonge of Lethbridge’s Broxburn Vegetables & Cafe provided mentoring and greenhouse space to start MacLean’s seeds. He also showed MacLean how to use companion planting, such as snapdragons with tomatoes, to keep pests away. Later, he helped MacLean introduce friendly insects, such as ladybugs and rid the garden of soil pests that were attacking his cabbages, all while keeping the project organic.

MacLean’s staff has been keenly involved in the project, too, and participate in the daily watering and weeding. MacLean says the interaction with plants has made his staffers more sensitive in handling their kitchen ingredients. Having grown it themselves, they take more care with how they prepare it.

MacLean has planted over 40 varieties of vegetables and herbs, from strawberries and Japanese eggplants to chard and Jerusalem artichokes. He’s on his third planting of lettuces, and his potato bags are bulging with spuds that are almost ready to harvest.

Back down in his kitchen, MacLean has incorporated his produce into the menu. He thinly slices the Japanese eggplant and folds it around Noble Meadows goat cheese to make crispy eggplant wonton tempura. He glazes baby carrots, dries strawberries, and lays baby herbs over a watermelon salad.

And if you’re lucky, there may be a chunk of sweetly oozing honeycomb sided with a piece of Okanagan Tiger Blue cheese and a rooftop-raised fig for dessert. Eliese Watson of A.B.C. Apiaries has provided two hives of honey bees that are producing a bumper crop of honey. Free to roam in the downtown core, the bees have been sampling freely from downtown’s abundance of balcony flower pots, hanging plants and foliage along the river. The result is a true taste of downtown Calgary.

MacLean’s Urban AgProject has been such a success that he plans to expand it next year with more plant varieties and a wall of strawberries. He’s also going to install a small greenhouse on the roof to lengthen his season.

MacLean says the whole project has been a positive experience, from staff reaction to customer approval for his hyperlocal dishes. He’s also happy with the reaction of highrise neighbours who look down onto his tiny oasis. He’s received e-mails, tweets and calls thanking him for improving their view.

He also hopes other Calgary restaurants will jump on the urban agriculture bandwagon next year bringing more hyperlocal dishes to Calgary’s dining scene. In the meantime, he’s waiting to sip a Downtown Beer. It’s being brewed right now at Big Rock from his rooftop hops. Now that’s hyperlocal.