Ottawa chef Briana Kim wins the 2023 Canadian Culinary Championship at the Shaw Centre

Briana Kim, chef and owner of Alice Restaurant on Adeline Street, took home gold at the 2023 Canadian Culinary Championship, which concluded Saturday night at the Shaw Centre.

Kim, a self-taught chef whose restaurant ranked 50th on last year’s list of Canada’s 100 best restaurants, prevailed over eight other chefs who like her had won regional qualifying events in the fall of 2022.

Kim, whose cooking is plant-based and highly reliant on cutting-edge techniques, was taking her second crack at winning the national title. She competed at the 2018 event held in Kelowna, B.C. after winning Ottawa’s Gold Medal Plates competition in the fall of 2017. At that time, she was the chef-owner of Café My House in Hintonburg, which she subsequently closed to open Alice.

At the Shaw Centre, Kim served judges and event-goers the same dish that won at last September’s qualifying event in Ottawa for the national championship. Kim’s deeply imaginative and surprisingly savoury dish consisted of an onion tuile, smoked potatoes, rhubarb jerky, maitake mushrooms, pickled onion, dill, lacto-fermented green tomato and koji broth.

The dish was the unanimous favourite of the event’s judges. Head judge James Chatto lauded its “incredible depths of flavour” and “wonderful, subtle nuances of fermented things.”“I feel overwhelmed and so excited,” Kim said after her victory was announced. “My team and I dreamt about winning the Canadian Culinary Championship five years ago. We couldn’t have prepared more for this competition, ever since we were selected for the regional event. We worked hard and our hard work paid off.”

At Alice, Kim serves a blind multi-course tasting menu of highly inventive and seasonal creations that rely on many ingredients that have been fermenting for months in a large cabinet visible to all guests.

Vancouver chef Bobby Milheron of Homer St. Cafe and Bar won silver. His dish at the finale included wild Canadian geoduck, B.C. spot prawn terrine, a sunchoke crisp and bull kelp in shellfish jus.

Winning bronze was chef Serge Belair, a Gatineau native, representing the Edmonton Convention Centre. At the finale, Belair’s dish was selection of desserts that included warm chocolate cake, white wine sabayon, sous vide pear, pear ice cream and citrus-pear macaron.

The championship included one other event, held Friday night, in which the nine competing chefs had to create a dish to be paired with assigned wines. Kim was the winner of the people’s choice award in that event.

There was to have been one more event on Saturday morning, in which the chefs created dishes from a box of surprise ingredients. But that “black box” event had to be scrapped midway due to a power failure at the venue, Algonquin College.

Kim is the third Ottawa-area chef to have won the national championship. No region has had as many first-place finishers in the event’s 16 editions.

Chef Yannick La Salle, now the chef for the Supreme Court of Canada but formerly the chef at Les Fougères in Chelsea, won gold at the nationals in 2019. Marc Lepine, the chef-owner of Atelier on Rochester Street and like Kim an advocate for cutting-edge fine-dining, won the national championship in 2012 and again in 2016. He is the event’s only two-time winner.

In addition to crowning a national winner, the culinary championship is a fundraiser, along with its Great Kitchen Party regional qualifiers, for Spirit North, MusiCounts and assorted local food charities.

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phum@postmedia.com