Article content 429 Lampson St., Esquimalt Dinners, Wednesday to Sunday 250-384-0941. Chef Andrea Alridge likes a challenge.
For instance, as a cyclist, she opts to ride an incomprehensibly difficult fixed-gear bike with no brakes. “It’s the most archaic form of bicycles and I love the challenge of it. You have to be focused on your surroundings at all times.
Hyper-focused,” she says during a phone interview. Are you crazy? I ask. “A little bit,” she replies and then turns technical on me.
“You build it, switch ratios out with the build, and ride with that one gear. It’s all in the legs and you never stop pedalling.” As the opening exec chef at Janevca restaurant in the impressively restored Rosemead House in Esquimalt, she’s the same.
Alridge designed the kitchen and menu around a prehistoric style of cooking — with fickle fire, albeit with a state-of-the-art, wood-fired grill. “It’s like riding a fixed gear bike and that’s what draws me to it,” she says. “Every day, it’s different.
The fire is always changing. It’s almost never exactly the same and you learn to really focus and adapt.” Focus, she did, on that day years ago when she was an entremetier (vegetable chef) at Cin Cin Ristorante in Vancouver, which also boasts a monster wood-fired grill.
“A grill cook called in sick,” Alridge says of her baptism of fire. These massive grills are equipped with cranks to raise and lower the grates. “There’s a lot of mechanics.
It’s a ful.