LCBO Food & Drink Early Summer 2017

FIVE qUESTIONS WITH…

BY CYNTHIA DAVID  •  PHOTOGRAPHY BY ROB FIOCCA

FRANK DODD, EXECUTIVE CHEF, TRIUS WINERY RESTAURANT, NIAGARA-ON-THE-LAKE, TRIUSWINES.COM

A fter cooking at some of Britain’s finest hotels and country homes and travelling the world, Frank Dodd has spent the past decade loving life among the vineyards in a quiet corner of Niagara. These days he’s bracing for the annual rush of summer visitors eager to taste Trius wine, savour local ingredients, get married or listen to music.

How did you get your start? My high school in England of- fered a home economics class aimed at teaching girls how to cook and sew. My friend Tony and I decided to take it as a way to meet girls. I found out I was good at cooking, and other students began coming to me for help. I got a job near home cooking part-time, and the chefs there encouraged me to move to London to work. Where did you receive your wine education? In Europe I worked with a vast selection of wines. In Australia, people were more open about pairing wine with food and making easy-drinking wines. When I arrived here in 2000 I didn’t even know Canada made wine. It’s been getting better and better, and now we’ve got some stellar wines. When pairing wine with food, where do you start? The idea is to pair wine and food so one doesn’t domi- nate the other. If you’ve got

a heavy red wine with lots of tannins then you look for food to tame those tannins. If you’ve got a beautiful fruity Riesling, look for something with a little spice. How do you get diners to think about what they’re drinking? At our monthly Black Glass Dinner we serve a wine in a black glass for each course. You don’t even know if it’s red or white. When you take away sight it makes your other senses work harder to guess what’s in the glass. What do you cook for your summer music festivals? Our Trius jazz and blues fes- tivals attract more than 2,500 people and keep us going from 5 a.m. to 10 p.m. We set up a pavilion serving burg- ers, duck-fat fries and pulled pork. It’s a great atmosphere, with people dancing on the grass. After each set, perform­ ers mingle on the patio with Back Stage Pass visitors enjoy­ ing a four-course meal.

May brings a rush of local greens, from peas and spinach to asparagus. We get fresh fish from Lake Erie and Huron, pork from Perth County, lamb from Northern Ontario and beef from Wellington County.

156  FOOD & DRI NK EARLY SUMMER 2017