PRESS RELEASE: Chef Matthew Krizan Invited to Canada’s Table
For Immediate Release
Mahone Bay, August 9, 2017: Chef Matthew Krizan of Mahone Bay has been chosen as one of nine guest chefs from across Canada to represent their regions’ food at Canada’s Table, a 1000 foot table dinner in front of Parliament in Ottawa.
Within six minutes, tickets for the open air dinner at this 1000 foot (305 metre) table culinary event sold out, and sitting in his restaurant in Mahone Bay, the enormity of the event hit Matthew Krizan.
“This has special meaning for me, being that the dinner represents Canada, we [my family] were refugees to Canada, and in Ottawa is where I got my start in culinary, so it impacts me on many levels.”
On the eve of August 27, a portion of Wellington Street directly in front of Canada’s Parliament, will be closed down to traffic, tables and tents will pop up along with all the accouterments expected at a world class culinary event. As one of only nine visiting chefs, Krizan says it is important to represent the Maritime provinces completely in his dish. Lobster and scallops still in their shell, foraged sea grass and seaweed, sorrel he grows at home in Riverport.
“We have so much more to offer the culinary market than I think the rest of the country really knows,” said Krizan.
Krizan has always tied food to the regions he has lived, he was born into a difficult socialist regime in former Czechoslovakia, where from a young age his mother taught him how to make marvellous meals for her family using very minimal or unusual products. They foraged for mushrooms and berries and when immigrating to Newfoundland, they carried on that way of understanding the land and food. Krizan recalls how terrifying it was to escape his home country, leave family and everything they had, with no secure prospect of a better life. But Canada gave him that better life, and he feels a strong pride in representing that.
This year is a particularly big one for Krizan, he has already served Prince Albert of Monaco earlier this summer aboard the Canada C3 Expedition, and he leaves again on Friday, August 11, to serve indigenous foods during the same vessels leg through the Northwest Passage. Krizan spent the better part of a decade working in and around Iqaluit, where he had a dog team, hunted and learned the traditional ways of the North.
He flies straight from the North into Ottawa and will represent all he has learned from his home in Nova Scotia at Canada’s Table. This week Krizan found out he is also invited to be a guest chef at Ottawa’s top restaurant Beckta the following night.
“I am just so honoured,” he said. “I would have never guessed, as a little boy, I would be travelling around Canada creating dishes from the bounty of the terrain. That makes a great country, to me.”
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For more information please contact:
Chef Matthew Krizan, Mateus Bistro
Restaurant: (902) 531 3711
Cell: (902) 521 1126
Email: info@mateusbistro.com
Kira Curtis , Mateus Bistro
Cell: (902) 521 8119
Email: kira@prickleshootmedia.com
Canada’s Table: www.ottawa2017.ca/canadas-table/
Canada C3 Expedition: https://canadac3.ca/en/homepage/