“That was the thought on the food – make it an experience,” explains Geoff Rogers, the restaurant’s executive chef who has worked at a number of restaurants notably Muse, River Café, and Vintage Chophouse, staged in Montreal, Vancouver and worked briefly on a yacht in British Columbia.
Dining has changed in the last ten years as rampant social media has overtaken conversation at the table. Cleverly placing interaction as the focal point of the restaurant, Home Tasting Room boasts not only an open kitchen (with bar seating), but a seasonal menu that entices diners to play with their food with desserts like coffee and donughts, and tasting
plates of High Country Bison Tartar, and Salt Spring island mussels.
“It fulfills one of my big things in food, which is to eat as a group and a community. It’s something we’re losing these days of eating for a specific reason or for a specific nutrient which is a very solitary thing to do. You’re just firing it down because you need to get it in you,” says Rogers.
Though there is still a recipe Rogers is trying to master – his grandmother’s freshly baked bread. “I’ve tried for years to recreate that bread and I can’t. I’ve talked to every pastry chef that I know and still can’t get it right.”
It takes time to bake bread, or butcher a whole lamb, or preserve vegetables, but when you do you get the antithesis of frenetic technology, you get a taste of home.”
Home Tasting Room
110 8 Ave SW
www.hometastingroom.ca
Read more about Home Tasting room in the Summer 2011 issue of City Style and Living Magazine.
