enRoute names Michael Smith's FireWorks 3rd best new restaurant in Canada
Laura Chapin | CBC News | Posted: October 25, 2016 10:00 PM | Last Updated: October 26, 2016
'It felt surreal. It still does. I'm still tingling about it'
Michael Smith's FireWorks restaurant in Bay Fortune, P.E.I., has been named the third best new restaurant in Canada by Air Canada's enRoute magazine.
The magazine's list has become the gold standard of success in Canada's culinary scene. Smith opened FireWorks in the spring of 2015 at the Inn at Bay Fortune, which is owned and run by Smith and his wife Chastity.
It felt like an amazing way to end off the year for all the hard work that the team has put into this year. — Cobey Adams, FireWorks head chef
"We are ecstatic. It's huge," Smith told CBC News Tuesday.
"It's just an amazing honour because really what it says is this crazy idea that Chazz and I had, just an outlandish way of dining and coming together around the table, that it works."
The magazine's annual top ten list is one of the most recognized honours in the restaurant industry, Smith notes.
Smith himself had been one of the enRoute judges who would travel the country trying out new restaurants but he had to step away from that a couple of years ago when he decided to open FireWorks.
'Correcting what I've been doing'
In an online video shot by enRoute, Smith describes FireWorks not as a restaurant but as a feast, where people eat communally at long butcher-block tables.
"I think in some ways this entire project is me correcting what I've been doing for the last 15 years," he explains in the video.
Smith became a household name the last two decades through his time as a Food Network chef and the author of many cookbooks.
"So much of the food media culture that we've created has put food on a pedestal and turned it into something unapproachable, unattainable for a lot of people and created a set of expectations about what food should be that I strongly disagree with."
FireWorks is about respecting the food ways of the past, Smith explains. Everything served is grown on the Inn of Bay Fortune property or foraged nearby.
As he states in the enRoute online video, "It's anything but dials, knobs and switches," with everything cooked over a live fire.
Honour for the team
Cobey Adams, the 24-year-old chef de cuisine who led this year's kitchen brigade of up to 16 people , is still digesting FireWorks making the top ten.
"It felt surreal. It still does. I'm still tingling about it," said Adams.
"It felt like an amazing way to end off the year for all the hard work that the team has put into this year."
Several judges that work with enRoute spent a few days at the restaurant after it made the shortlist of 35 out of the hundreds of new eating establishments that opened up across Canada last year.
That was an incredible boost already, but Adams describes ending up in the top ten as huge.
"I mean we were so off the beaten trail, slowly making a name for ourselves through just solid food and amazing experience," said Adams.
"And now to have this accolade this year, it just gets our name out to that many more people."
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