ROW FOURTEEN
ROW FOURTEEN
THE RESTAURANT-ON-A-FARM FROM KLIPPERS ORGANICS FARMERS
Our dinner reservations are at 7:00 pm but we can see the restaurant from the window—just a stone's throw through the orchard. It's 11:00 am and my fiancé and I have come to visit Klipper's Farm in Cawston, B.C. for two nights, staying in their guest suites and dining at their new restaurant. We decide to wander through the field and check out what the building looks like. Past peach, pear, plum, and apple trees sits Row Fourteen, the farm-to-table restaurant from longtime organic farmers Kevin and Annamarie Klippenstein.
As we approach, we see that the restaurant is open for lunch. Letting our excitement catch the best of us, we wander in to take a look. The interior is expansive, bright, and tastefully designed. At the back, a sous chef picks green leaves off a purslane stalk while another slices peaches. The Klippensteins aren't on site: like every weekend, they're in Vancouver. The duo has been selling their family farm's organic produce at the Vancouver Farmers Markets for over a decade: their children often by their side, running the cash (and market coin) tills. Yes, the Klippensteins are dedicated vendors, but from youth, their dream was always to start a restaurant. Today, they can do both.
"Annamarie never sleeps. All week she's up at 4:00 am to farm and she's here putting her touch on the details until midnight," front house manager Alessya Lautner explains as she guides us from the Untangled cider tasting room, included in the building's launch, to the dining room of Row Fourteen. I ask who they hired to do the interior design. "Oh, it was Annamarie too. She has an eye for design." Colourful flowers are placed carefully around the room—they too, are grown on the farm.
We approach the plating counter that stands in front of the large, open-faced, wood-fire hearth in the open-concept kitchen. Chef Derek Gray is prepping vegetables for lunch and dinner—menus for both of which closely mirror each other. Gray's "Heirloom tomatoes & peach tartine" is drizzled in olive oil from Canada's only producer, The Olive Farm on Salt Spring Island (it's virgin to the point of having a dark green hue). He then soaks freshly-picked beets and carrots in water (this way, they don't lose their succulence when he roasts them directly in the fire's coals).
We saw Chef Gray earlier; he was picking herbs from the farm, directly in front of the restaurant. The lemony-flavored purslane leaves were later used to garnish his dry-aged top sirloin from Two Rivers Specialty Meats, also cooked by fire grill. Gray was head chef at Vancouver's Osteria Savio Volpe before heading up the kitchen at Pepinos, but his desire to utilize traditional fire cooking started years before Savio Volpe. "Its something very primal and almost second nature," he explains, adding that this simple technique, "changed the way humans ate forever."
"I wrote down in my journal many years ago that Vancouver was not my final destination; that one day I would have a restaurant on a farm," he says about the move. He's happy to use Klippers' produce. "We want to have a focus of our food system and what it really means to cook from the ground," he explains.
Knowing we can't get too much of a headstart on the menu before our friends arrive for dinner in the evening, my fiance and I sit at the bar and order a "mini" each of two ciders: the "Lionheart", made from the plum and apple trees we walked past on our way over, and the "Tangled" made from apples we can see growing right outside—a nice view from our bar seats.
We give in again and order the "summer fruits" breakfast. This won't be on the dinner menu, we reason. Yoghurt from The FarmHouse natural cheese in Agassiz (they use pasture-raised cows and goats), luscious honeydew and syrupy peaches from the Klipper's orchards, sugary-sweet wild-foraged blackberries, and the kitchen's housemade granola with pumpkin and poppy seeds. We try to stop ourselves, but not before ordering one "craft coffee" with almond milk. The kitchen uses a pour-over method with Elysian beans but will amp up their coffee bar with more espresso options come fall.
Before leaving, we chat to Row Fourteen's onsite beverage manager who is currently collaborating with the team on their cocktail program for a 2020 launch. "It's a dream to be able to work with produce so freshly harvested, which I'm hoping to make tinctures, syrups, and muddles with. The idea is to be farm-to-cup because we really can." For now, she's happy to offer standard cocktails made from B.C. spirits (I later had the Negroni for dinner), the Klippenstein's fruit-forward Untangled ciders, and natural wines from the neighbourhood: Orofino Strawbale Winery is a two-block walk up the hill, Robin Ridge is just around the bend in Keremeos, and Hugging Tree Winery just south of the town down the Similkameen Valley.
ROW FOURTEEN & UNTANGLED CIDER
725 MacKenzie Rd, Cawston, BC