Cooking in Niagara- Chef Jan-Willem Stulp

Jan-Willem Stulp, executive chef of Vineland Estates Winery in Niagara, tells us in his own words about cooking in the Niagara region.

Absolutely very, very important. My parents both taught, so they both were teachers in the system, which means first of all that there’s a rule they have Saturdays off, that this particular career is not conducive to that. But on some days, whereas for a lot of people it’s the day that they sit down and have like soup and buns or macaroni and cheese and they keep it very simple, my parents would pull out the stops and do up a spread—a very, very cool inspiration for me. Every now and again, I still am—I’m watching how my dad does the marinade to see if I can get it just like that because he cooks for the family and he cooks to his own palate obviously. But to be able to do that and then replicate it on a setting like this, that’s very different. The first actual recollection that I have of cooking was when my grandmother for St. Nick’s present had got me a Baking for Kids book. I would have been 7 or 8. That was very exciting because we got to make cookies and cakes for a little while because mom wouldn’t let us in the kitchen after a while. It’s just too much for ‘Pigs Day’. And then for me, it’s always just been something I enjoyed doing. Even as a teenager, we’d go somewhere. We’d have a youth rally or something like this, and I’d be at the kitchen playing with food because I enjoyed doing that. And then, there was a point where I needed to make a decision on a career because the field that I was in was not fulfilling, and I don’t mean that on a physical sense but—and so, I sold my half of the business I was in at the time and enrolled in culinary school. My first food-related job would have been with Chef Mike Olson when the Inn on the Twenty opened. And the story there is very neat actually. My dad during the summers because he was off would work there in a warehouse just to sort of manage and help out, etcetera, etcetera. A whole bunch of school kids would be there. And then, the warehouse got sold to Mr. Penechetti because it was the old Jordan Winery building. And so, I’d been in this warehouse and had seen it as a place of books to the ceiling—because it was a book warehouse—and then conveyor belts and forklifts and all the stuff. And all of a sudden, here’s this whole cleanup crew and they’re starting modifying this building. So I drive by this building everyday and it’s being transformed into a restaurant. And so, I basically knew most of the people there by the time it was ready to open. I am now also enrolled in culinary school. When it was opened, it was—I don’t want to say it was a natural inclusion but I had applied and I got a position that opened. Actually, I started out as a server and that lasted all of two weeks. When Mike Olson found out I was in culinary school then I got yanked off the floor into the kitchen and it went from there. From a business perspective, I would have to say that the bulk of mentoring I received would have been from Chef Bocconi absolutely, not only from a cooking perspective and understanding how food interacts with wine, what wine does to food, what the two mean, but there’s far more to cooking than just the food. It’s also about understanding a costing of—for example, a staffing issue, a work ethic, a process of hiring and management and so on and so forth. It was never about—you know, the first thing that he would do is I would walk and he’d go, “You need to polish your shoes,” right? And things of that nature, it was never just about the food. It was about understanding what it takes to do this particular task, this job, this career.