For rising star Chef Zach Keeshig of Owen Sound, the best stories are worth telling through food.
By Natalie Goldenberg-Fife // Photography by Anya Shor
It’s after-hours at the Owen Sound Farmers Market and one of Canada’s most significant, timely and remarkable dining experiences is about to take place.
The historic market square has been transformed into an intimate restaurant pop-up space where 13 diners will embark on a nine-course tasting menu journey into “Progressive Aboriginal” cuisine, a description coined by Chef Zach Keeshig to describe his restaurant concept, Naagan.
Naagan, pronounced “Naa-aah-gan,” means “dish” in Ojibwe and represents the passionate work of this culinary artist, storyteller, forager, community leader and educator. Keeshig, 32, is First Nations Ojibwe from Nawash unceded territory. His goal has been to shine the spotlight on Indigenous food in a way that incorporates modern cooking techniques with philosophies he learned from some of the country’s most renowned culinary minds including Jonathan Gushue (formerly of Langdon Hall), Michael Stadtländer (Eigensinn Farm) and Eric Robertson (Pearl Morrissette).
Storytelling has been used by Indigenous communities to pass on knowledge for thousands of years. It’s an ancient and crucial artform through which teachings about the world are passed down by the elders from generation to generation. At Naagan, storytelling is woven into every detail and every dish which Keeshig presents throughout the four-hour culinary experience.
“The stories I tell represent memories from the food I ate in my childhood on the reserve. When I had the idea to transition my cuisine by modernizing old Indigenous recipes and began to do my own recipe research with elders and family, I quickly discovered there wasn’t much to pass down because of colonization,” says Keeshig. “I realized I would need to reinvent things myself and decided to become strict, focusing on the food that grows around us and only using local products to create a modern version of Aboriginal food.”
Take the first two dishes: Indigenized Sourdough and A Memory From My Childhood.
“I created Indigenized Sourdough after noticing, through my travels and eating at some of the best restaurants in the world, that everyone has a signature bread course. I indigenized it by adding wild rice, brown flax and pumpkin seeds,” Keeshig says.
“A Memory From My Childhood is based on something my grandmother used to make for me. She’d make bannock to wrap around hot dogs much like a pogo. I wanted to introduce people to this traditional ingredient but with a contemporary spin, so I made the bannock with spelt and added locally produced Southampton yogurt, Georgian Bay lake trout caught by Robichaud Commercial Fishing and topped it with a seasonal garnish.”
I walked away from the nine courses feeling completely buzzed, but not in the way you might think. Alcohol is not and never will be served at Naagan. Instead, a collection of “wild juices” infused with medicinal cold-pressed ingredients that pump your bloodstream with vitamins and minerals make up the drink pairings—think antioxidant-rich superfoods like chaga and sea buckthorn.
“The juices are inspired by my aunts. When I was younger, they would bring over cedar tea. It didn’t taste great because it was boiled for too long and served in a Mason jar,” says Keeshig.
Cedar tea is extremely high in vitamin C and contains many anti-inflammatory properties. Cedar is one of the four sacred medicines in Ojibwe tradition (sage, cedar, tobacco, sweetgrass).
At Naagan, storytelling is woven into every detail and every dish which Keeshig presents throughout the four-hour culinary experience.
Rainbow trout with elderberry capers, halibut stock and dill froth, Anise hyssop, sorrel and spinach.
A Memory From My Childhood.
“We serve it at every dinner to kick off the meal. It’s lightly boiled, sweetened with maple and served chilled. The main reason I went to Pearl Morrissette was to research the cold-pressed juice program they offer as an option instead of wine pairings. I wanted to do the same thing but with an Indigenous spin on it by incorporating more medicinal plants,”
says Keeshig.
To eliminate ingredients not native to Canada, Keeshig had to find replacements for flavours like lemon and vanilla. Lemon is replaced by the pickling process or by using sea buckthorn for its acidity.
But perhaps one of the most remarkable replacements is sweet woodruff for vanilla, which appears in one the most memorable dishes of the tasting menu, the sorbet. Sweet woodruff, or wild baby’s breath, is a wild perennial plant with rich green leaves and luminous white flowers. It has a sweet grassy aroma and is much more flavourful than vanilla. It is also medicinal, with antioxidizing, antifungal, antimicrobial and antiviral properties.
Naagan’s sorbet course appears just before the main dish or “second act,” as Keeshig calls it. Yogurt, a sweet woodruff sorbet, a tuile of wild ginger dusted with wild ginger leaf, a salty blackcurrant compote along with drizzles of blackcurrant juice and sweet woodruff oil encapsulates everything this wildly talented chef is trying to do. The dish is like eating a fairy tale, where so many different medicinal, new, wild and expansive flavours hit your palate in a way that allows you to taste the magic of plants, flowers and creation all at once.
Indigenized Sourdough.
Quail two ways, spinach ravioli with sunchoke puree, nasturtium, watercress, mustard garlic with wild garlic and quail jus.
Raw scallop, lemon thyme, pickled rose, dames rocket, and New Brunswick caviar, in rhubarb and lemongrass tea.
Keeshig’s star is on the rise. He was recently recognized with the award for Business Leadership by Canada’s 100 Best and Naagan was named one of Canada’s Best New Pop-Ups by enRoute magazine.
So, what’s the story behind the storyteller?
“I started cooking young, around 10 or 11 years old,” recalls Keeshig. “I was raised by a single mother who was always working, so I cooked for my younger brother and me. I would even pretend I was on a cooking show. At 16, I moved out and needed a job to pay rent. I started working at a restaurant with a small kitchen and large menu. I fell in love with the kitchen atmosphere and decided I would go to culinary school. I enrolled at 19 and finished when I was 21.”
One major chapter of Keeshig’s culinary journey was a six-month stage with Michael Stadtländer at Eigensinn Farm.
“Zach was very quiet, observant and ambitious. Like a sponge,” remembers Keeshig’s former mentor, Stadtländer. “I really saw his talent and how he had blossomed when he came to the 2022 Wild Leek Festival last year to operate his own station. My philosophy around mentorship is that it’s not so important how much they know, but more about if they really want to learn and see what we are doing. I like to teach the whole idea of lifestyle, garden and working with the seasons. My philosophy is to be a caretaker of the land. Storytelling through food is important so you can remember your ancestors and how they lived.”
Naagan is open from spring through fall and will continue to focus on culinary education and its bread program in the winter. The price for the tasting menu is $150 plus tax and $40 for the optional, but recommended, medicinal drink pairings.
“No matter how much the demand is, the price from now on will be fixed. It’s not cheap but it’s also not as much as other tasting menus,” Keeshig says.
Eventually Keeshig hopes to move Naagan into a custom-built wooden cabin which will operate as a culinary school during the week to inspire the next generation of cooks.
“My future is to stick with Owen Sound and keep expanding here,” Keeshig explains. “I always wanted to make something of myself. I didn’t grow up with a father. Everyone told me I was crazy and that nobody would come eat my food. It’s what drives me to keep going.”
