NB’s Chefs Will Gather And Tell The Province’s Food Story At Tourism Symposium
MONCTON – For Chef Jesse Vergen, who owns the Saint John Ale House, childhood in New Brunswick includes eating periwinkle snails with garlic sauce on the beach. He says telling local stories and experiences like that through food and beverages could elevate the province’s tourism game.
“We want to tell the stories of our brewers; our fishermen. We want to give experiences like putting periwinkles on the menu because it was something that I remember eating as a kid,” he said.
Vergen, a Top Chef Canada alumni, will be a keynote speaker at the inaugural Eating Heritage’s Food Tourism Symposium in Dieppe November 4-5 alongside renowned food writer Amy Rosen, and chef and TV star Matty Matheson.
The bilingual symposium is organized by non-profit organization Really Local Harvest, in partnership with the provincial government, Parks Canada, and others.
It will include food tours, tastings, networking, and an invite-only off-the-grid lunch at historic site Fort Beauseajour on November 6. The tours offered include experiences like oyster, beer, and wine trails.
Vergen says he and Rosen will explore the concepts of “taste the place” and “terroir” with Rosen on stage, and how that can help elevate New Brunswick’s food tourism sector. These concepts focus on local flavours.
“It’s extremely important that we understand these ideologies because that’s what people are looking for nowadays,” he said. “When they come to the Bay of Fundy, they want fresh lobster, they want clam, they want beer that’s made in a brewery not far away that tells a story…they’re looking for all those kinds of gems.”
One of the chefs going by those concepts is Pierre Richard of Little Louis Oyster Bar in Moncton. He’ll speak at the opening of the symposium and cook for the lunch at Fort Beausejour. He says New Brunswick’s landscape is his personal inspiration.
“What drives a restaurant is connecting with the local market, local producers, local farmers, going to their farms, going to wherever they’re oyster farming…those are the main veins that puts it all together. Also, we like to forage stuff that comes from the forest and marshlands. I think those are all things that connects the dots,” he said.
Food Tourism
The symposium hopes to inspire and connect local producers, tourism operators and destination marketing organizations to tap into the potential of food tourism.
Tourism in general is key for New Brunswick’s restaurants, breweries and other service providers in the hospitality industry, Vergen says. Slow seasons are a part of life, but New Brunswick can be more aggressive about growing the tourism sector, he said.
“The more tourists that come here, the more visitors in restaurants. I think all the stakeholders in the industry need to come to an understanding of how important it is,” he said.
He said New Brunswick is getting better at telling its own story to attract tourists, but it’s still behind its neighbours. P.E.I., he notes, has successfully prolonged the tourist season by holding a five-week culinary festival called Fall Flavours Festival.
“P.E.I. is such a small province with such a small population and they have such a small window to capitalize on the tourist season. But by focusing in on fall flavours, bringing chefs in, celebrating their cuisine, now, where everyhting would have shut down in September, they have one of their busiest months with tourists. Specifically food tourists,” he said.
Tourism has helped Vergen and Richard’s restaurants significantly.
Richard said in the past few years, he’s seen more people come in the summer months. Almost all of them are tourists from the U.S., other parts of Canada, and Europe. In those months, when locals are also traveling out of the province, business would be slow if it weren’t for the tourists, he said.
New Brunswick’s tourism sector supports more than 42,000 workers (nearly 9 per cent of the province’s labour force) and contributes around $520 million in GDP, according to Tourism Industry Association New Brunswick’s website.
“I’ve been saying it for years to multiple governments that we need to take a more aggressive stance on our tourism industry. We need to raise the bar and put the tools in the hands of the stakeholders to be able to do that,” Vergen said, adding that the hospitality and tourism sector needs the kind of funding that goes to support the opening of new plants or corporate offices.
Vergen hopes the symposium will help attendees see the value of food tourism. He said the diversity of New Brunswick’s farms, landscapes, fisheries, tides, bodies of water, as well as traditions from Indigenous, Acadian, English, Irish and other cultures in the province can be shown through food.
“We have amazing culinary talent in our province. We have amazing products,” he said. “We have all these different pieces to an amazing food story that we’re just starting to tell now and the [symposium] is getting all these people together to have these discussions and try to figure out how do we elevate our game.”
The symposium will also be a networking opportunity for chefs and others in the industry. Vergen and Richard say most people in the industry are really busy trying to keep their businesses running, so it’s difficult to have time to know what else is going on in the province.
“There isn’t a whole lot of networking spaces for people in this industry,” Richard said. “We really have to take advantage of the time that we have together.”