Rouge - Chef Paul Rogalski

Chef and Food Activist Paul Rogalski on Sustainable Food

In August 2009, Wild Salmon Supporter’s Tiffany Hilman talked to Chef Paul Rogalski, co-owner of Calgary Alberta’s Rouge.

TH: What’s the history of Rouge and the historic Cross House?  
PR: Back in 2001, a friend of mine found a restaurant and we ended up opening it up together. He’s originally from Provence and he had moved to Canada on an entrepreneurial work visa. It was a pretty good fit, because I’ve always cooked high-end French-influenced cuisine and he was genuinely from France so it qualified us to give ourselves a French name.
TH: So you’re credibly French.
PR: Yeah, it makes me laugh.
I always dreamed of having a garden like Sooke Harbour House (in Victoria, BC). I remember when Sooke started getting a lot of attention back in the day – I’ve been doing this a long time. This is my 26th year as a chef.
TH: Congratulations.
PR: Thank you. Anyway, I remember being jealous of those guys. And my grandmother always had amazing food and she grew all her produce herself. She spent every waking moment in the fall jarring, canning, preserving, and making pasta – loading up the pantry and freezer. I was spoiled.

So, Olivier found this site. We have an acre of land and we’re only five minutes from downtown, which makes us unique in North America. At that time it was used as a banquet facility. We made a decision that rather than have large group functions out in the yard, we would rather have the ability to offer our regular customers homegrown produce.

TH: Does your on-site garden produce most of your fresh produce? Do you supplement?
PR: We have to supplement sometimes, because of the volume we require. Other times we have a surplus. We try to support local produce, whenever possible. If we can’t use our own product then we go to the next closest source. In the spring, we will receive products from the Kelowna area, the Fraser Valley and sometimes even Vancouver Island. Our lentils come from Saskatchewan.

TH: Besides freshness, why is that connection to the land and to the garden so important to the quality of your food?
PR: I think any good cook should know where food comes from. And I’m somewhat of a believer in the spirituality of connecting with the earth. Growing life, respecting life – that’s important to me. Over the past few years, it’s pretty apparent that I’m not the only one. There are a lot of people that are willing to stand up and say, ‘hey, what we’re doing is wrong.’ The slow food movement, Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch program, Ocean Wise from Vancouver Aquarium, and also what you are doing – we’re all savvy to the fact that there’ve been some huge mistakes made and we’re all trying to make sure that it’s not too late. We also all have to eat, so we have to be responsible.

TH: How has the consumer consciousness generated by movements like slow food, organic, or sustainable seafood affected your cooking? Do you feel you’ve been responding to that consciousness?
PR: I think initially. The more I learned, the more I felt it is my responsibly to cook regionally -- and I like it. It comes down to flavour.

But it is a little hard to get the public to buy into it. There have been a couple influential restaurants. You’ve probably been talking with River Café and Chef Scott Pohorelic. That was the first restaurant in Calgary to take a stand and look after sustainable food practices. I think we are a little behind them, but able to learn from them. The good thing about Calgary is that we support each other.

We’ve been very lucky that as we’ve grown and learned, we’ve received a lot of media attention. Now we’re getting international recognition for what we’ve done – recently, Conde Nast Traveler contacted us. So now, we are in a leadership role. We welcome the opportunity to educate the public as much as possible. We’re lucky to have that ability -- people actually respect what we’re saying rather than feel like we’re giving them a sermon.

TH: How do you see your role as that educator? All over, the profile of chefs is increasing. Chefs like Rick Moonen and others are educators. How do you see yourself?
PR: Food activist.

I worked with Rick in Monterey in 2008. And this year, I received an award from Julie Packard of the Monterey Bay Aquarium, right beside Thomas Keller, for our sustainable food practices. I can’t remember the wording of the award, but it was special recognition for sustainable food practices and support of the Seafood Watch program. That was pretty cool.

TH: Now that you have that status, maybe it’s been a little different but has it been a challenge to try to be sustainable and successful at the same time?
PR: A little bit. And it’s a matter of timing because the economy has a bit to do with it. We do fine dining, and I think being in that fine dining market now is a challenge all on its own. I do believe that in the fine dining market, as far as the public and the media are concerned, it is almost a prerequisite to be slow food orientated.
TH: Yes, people want to know where their food came from. It’s a story.
PR: It is a story -- and you can taste the difference. That’s so important for us. In the past, we’ve capped our volume coming in. Let’s say we have the potential for 150 people. We’ll cap ourselves at 80, because we want to make sure that everybody can have a chance to enjoy themselves and go for a walk in the garden. And that gives us a chance to share the gospel.

I do realize that there are people who are savvy and those who don’t necessarily care. Their reasons for being at the restaurant aren’t necessarily about sustainable food. It’s maybe about an important meeting and they have someone to impress. We respect that.

In either case, we’re doing it and we’re going to lead by example. If someone wants to have the salmon, I’m pretty good at preaching. But I do realize that you can’t force feed information to people. That’s a big challenge – sometimes, people just don’t want to know.

TH: With regard to salmon, are your customers aware, or are they becoming more aware, of the differences between farmed and wild salmon?
PR: A very small percentage have any idea what’s going on with the salmon. They know that things are politically charged and that there’s a battle between wild and farmed, but they’re not aware of any sort of resolution to that situation.

Right now, we’ve removed salmon from the menu. We’ve decided to give the salmon stocks a break – there’ll be one less restaurant using it. I’ve been talking to a couple of people out of Powell River and Campbell River who are saying the charter boats are coming back empty after two or three days. That scares me. I remember what happened with the cod.
TH: And now there are reports about it being a really low year for Fraser sockeye returns.
PR: I love salmon. I know how important they are to our ecosystem. I know that without the salmon there’s going to be something else that’s going to fill the void and the ecology of the sea. That’s not a good thing. Everything has to be kept in balance.

Overall, we’ve picked on species until their gone. We’ve over fished and over fished and we’ve screwed up the food chain in the ocean.  We need to pick sparingly from all sea life and not pick on one species like we have in the past.

TH: Do you think the growing awareness around the seasonality of food, especially of produce, has influenced a trend towards eating in-season seafood? Besides the availability of high-quality, frozen-at-sea wild salmon, do you think salmon would ever again be considered a wild delicacy as opposed to a cheap everyday protein?
PR: I would like to see it go into that territory again. But I think it’s going to happen anyway. We don’t have a choice. We have a global food crisis now, we just don’t hear a lot about it. The wake up call is close and we’ll have to change. And we will change, because we’re not going to have any salmon to eat anyway.

And I don’t blame the fish farms, I don’t blame anybody. It’s a huge cost to put in closed containers to raise fish but at the end of the day that’s what we have to do.
TH: If there’s going to be salmon farming, it can’t be done in a way that’s jeopardizing the natural ecosystems.
PR: Exactly.

TH: Some people assume that the impacts of net-cage salmon farming are only coastal problems that don’t affect those in Calgary or across Canada. How might you respond to this assumption?
PR: It affects everybody. Absolutely. All it takes is going to the Maritimes and talking to people. The people on the east coast, on the Atlantic, they get it. They know that everyone is getting lobster now because there’s a glut of lobster and nothing else to fish. Being centrally located, maybe folks are not as savvy to it, but these problems affect everyone. Again, I don’t blame them. It comes down to the information that we have and the amount of time we put into digging for the truth.

TH: What ingredients are you enjoying experimenting with lately?
PR: I could go on for about an hour about what we’re growing in the garden.

As far as seafood, we are using char and halibut. We will try to get some diver scallops once in a while and spot prawns too. That is one of those educational curves for the public when you give them a lovely dish with spot prawns, they think you’re giving them pizza shrimp. Taste them! They’re amazing and so much better! But it’s all about perception, which will change.

At Rouge, we’re putting our money where our mouth is. We want to do the right thing. We realized as we were working with Ocean Wise and Monterey Bay Aquarium that even though we care so much about what we’re serving, we had made a couple of mistakes. We thought we were making the right decision and we found out afterwards that we weren’t. So, it’s not easy.

The biggest thing to changing things comes down to how easy it is for chefs, restaurants and hotels to make decisions. No one has time and everyone is tapped out. We all have budgets to meet, supply chains already set, and people telling us what we want to hear. I think there has to be a commitment from fishmongers and wholesalers to do that research. They would probably find increased sales, because there’s going to be more public pressure on everyone to do the right thing.

TH: Thank you, Paul.
PR: Thank you.