Ottawa chef wins Canadian Culinary Championship

Chef Briana Kim from Ottawa (centre) won the 2023 Canadian Culinary Championship. Kim is flanked by Chef Bobby Milheron from Vancouver (silver) and Chef Serge Belair from Edmonton (bronze). Feb. 4, 2023. (Photo: greatkitchenparty.com)

An Ottawa chef has won Canada's top culinary prize.

Briana Kim, of Ottawa's Alice Restaurant, won the 2023 Canadian Culinary Championship, held this weekend in Ottawa. She was the winner of the Great Kitchen Party Ottawa last September, which qualified her for the national competition.

Kim was the unanimous first-place choice among judges this weekend at the championship. Her winning dish was a plant-based offering of onion tuile, smoked potatoes, rhubarb jerky, maitake mushrooms, pickled onion, dill, lacto-fermented green tomato and koji broth, the same dish that won her the regional title.

Chef Briana Kim's gold medal-winning dish: onion tuile, smoked potatoes, rhubarb jerky, maitake, pickled onion, dill sour cream, facto green tomato and koji broth. (Great Kitchen Party Ottawa)

"I feel overwhelmed and so excited," Kim said in a media release. "My team and I dreamt about winning the Canadian Culinary Championship. We couldn’t have prepared more for this competition, ever since we were selected for the regional event. We worked hard and our hard work paid off."

Kim attended the University of Ottawa before starting Café My House, a plant-based restaurant in Hintonburg. She closed it and opened the vegetable and fermentation-focused Alice in 2019, which was one of Canada's top 100 restaurants in 2022. This was Kim's second time appearing in the Canadian Culinary Championship.

The silver medal was awarded to Bobby Milheron of Homer St. Café and Bar in Vancouver for his dish of wild Canadian geoduck, BC spot prawn terrine, sunchoke and bull kelp in shellfish jus. The bronze was awarded to Serge Belair of the Edmonton Convention Center for his selection of desserts: warm chocolate cake, white wine sabayon, sous vide pear, gorgonzola roasted pear ice cream and citrus pear macaron.

The competition was interrupted Saturday when, during the second event, a power outage at the venue, Algonquin College, prevented the chefs from preparing their dishes. That meant that the judging was based on Friday's "Mystery Wine Competition", during which Kim won the People's Choice award, and the Grand Finale, which was held Saturday evening at the Shaw Centre to a sold-out crowd of 550 attendees.

Proceeds from the event go to support three Canadian beneficiaries: Spirit North, MusiCounts and the Ottawa Boys and Girls Club.