Rockland chef planning restaurant opening

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Chef Nouk Couturier-Bernard is in the planning stages of opening a restaurant in Clarence-Rockland, the place where he was born and where he says his vision will be a unique addition to the local food scene.

Couturier-Bernard, 25, cut his teeth at Ottawa restaurants — including a stagiaire at Atelier, one of Canada’s best restaurants owned and operated by chef Marc Lepine — and now wants to create a venue, La Micheline Wine Bar, that showcases his Acadian and Franco-Ontarian roots.

“I’ve been cooking since a young age, with my grandma and with my mom. But in the kitchen, I was about 14 years old when I started working here in Rockland,” he says.

The evolution he sees in the industry locally is for a finer dining restaurant that pays homage to his family’s heritage.

“My grandmother Micheline actually got me into cooking when I was young. So I’m naming it after her. There’s memories for me, as well as a lot of her recipes that I will be using.”

At a recent pop-up event with Pearson Street food truck in Embrun, Couturier-Bernard put up three or four special dishes — a lobster-langoustine roll, a Mariposa duck dish with soba noodles, steak frites with the beef from Embrun’s La Ferme Gillette and a dessert — that caught the attention of dozens of food lovers.

“The recipe for the pop-up ‘grandma’s pie’ was her recipe, a traditional one from her Acadian background. My grandma was Acadian, my mom, my whole family is Acadian. I’m born here actually, but I still consider myself Acadian. I go to New Brunswick once a year and try to get a bit of what they’re cooking down there to bring back,” he says.

He describes La Micheline Wine Bar as “French style” with dishes something similar to what you might experience on a tapas menu.

“I can’t call it tapas, but it will be a lot of smaller plates in a wine bar setting and with as many local ingredients as possible. The pop-up duck was from Plantagenet and Mariposa Farms. The cheeses that we used were Ontario and Quebec. La Micheline is going to be a restaurant like that with a lot of little touches of local stuff, including my aunt’s heirloom vegetables from Wendover.

The pop-up was a way of introducing people to his cooking — Couturier-Bernard has done several pop-ups but never on a food truck.

“The idea of collaborating with Pearson was just to bring together diners that I didn’t know and who didn’t know me. To introduce them to my food and to help both our businesses.”

It makes sense — and it drove several hundred people to the event

Currently, Couturier-Bernard and a business partner recognize the “size of the ask” of building out a restaurant. He says they have a potential location, but they are still seeing to the details.

“We just don’t want to rush into a location,” he says. “We want to make sure it’s the best location we can get.”

Another way Couturier-Bernard is introducing finer-food lovers to his cooking is a multi-course pop-up dinner slated to take place on August 10.

“The location is still to be determined. We have two choices,” he says.

The menu, with wine pairings, will include east coast oysters, scallops, a bison tataki, Mariposa Farm foie gras, pithivier and a dessert with seabuckthorn.

“It will be delicious,” says Couturier-Bernard. “Each dish tells a story of the land and the hands that craft it.”

Stay tuned to his Facebook page for further details.

[Banner photo/javiex2prod]