The Original Feast
Chef Christa Bruneau-Guenther of Feast Café Bistro in Winnipeg, Manitoba utilizes Indigenous ingredients to create food that nourishes the body and soul.
One of Christa Bruneau-Guenther's earliest memories in the kitchen involves canned soup and a house full of children.
As one of the oldest children in a large extended family, Christa was often called upon to babysit and feed herself and her younger cousins, even when she was as young as eight.
"I remember opening up a can of mushroom soup and opening a can of mushrooms and putting those in a pot and making that for us to eat and I just felt secure and confident and proud because I was able to feed us," she said.
Christa grew up surrounded by food insecurity, intergenerational trauma and poverty. The peace she gained from learning to nourish herself and others stayed with her and shaped her life's work.
On the surface, Christa's story is already remarkable: a homecook and mother of three turned acclaimed restauranteur who captured world-wide attention as a judge on the Food Network's Wall of Chefs.
But look deeper and her layered story is even more incredible.
Christa grew up in Winnipeg, in a poverty-stricken urban environment far removed from the traditions of her Métis and Peguis First Nations roots. Her urban Indigenous community had little to no connection to the land and food of their people.
Christa struggled with the challenges of her environment throughout her teens but managed to find her way to entrepreneurship and advocacy work, thanks in part to a few "angels" as she calls them.
The first was a teacher who helped build her confidence and helped her find meaningful work as a teenager. The second was a woman who guided her toward her first career as a daycare operator.
At just 22 years old, Christa sold her car and invested all the money she had into a daycare business. She took workshops, applied for grants and became acquainted with children who had special needs due to things like fetal alcohol syndrome, emotional behavioural problems or diabetes.
It was this career, created to serve her community, that ultimately led Christa to Feast Cafe Bistro — but there was a lot of learning along the way.
Nourishing Children: From Daycare to Food Advocacy
Christa opened up her daycare, providing a much-needed service to her Indigenous community. She worked with children who were hungry, malnourished and unable to focus.
"This was not bad parenting," she says. "This was poverty, number one."
It was a combination of inexpensive packaged food accessible through food banks and parents who had never been shown how to cook with fresh ingredients.
"So I ended up applying for extra funding from the provincial and federal government to develop a food program. It would be breakfast, snack, lunch, snack and sending them home with very simple healthy recipes that I would develop for these families."
At first, the children refused to eat the food. But Christa was undeterred. She started taking the children on field trips to the grocery store.
"We would count the apples and identify all these different foods," she said. Christa then developed a cooking program so the kids would help cook the food, contributing to making the meals so they would be more invested in eating it.
In short, she empowered them in the same way she felt empowered the first time she emptied that can of soup into a pot.
"They wanted to eat the food and after two or three weeks of being able to be in control of their food and their food diets, they were sleeping, they were learning, they weren't fighting as much and they were more active outside. It was this huge transformation."
Discovering Her Roots Through Traditional Foods
Christa continued to hone her cooking skills by watching shows on the Food Network — never imagining that one day she'd be on the channel herself.
What pushed her even further towards discovering Indigenous traditional food was the arrival of the Canada Food Guide created specifically for First Nations, Inuit and Metis. She saw traditional ingredients on there that she'd never cooked with before.
"I was so disconnected from both sides of my culture," she said. "But I was very intrigued by a lot of these ingredients."
When library searches for Indigenous cooking and ingredients brought up nothing, Christa turned to an elder in Ottawa who had been instrumental in helping write the Canada Food Guide. The Elder became another one of Christa's angels, connecting her with more local Indigenous resources.
Christa planted a garden to grow some of the heritage ingredients and began to develop recipes in which to use them at home and in her daycare setting.
The more she learned about her cultural roots, the more she incorporated into her teaching. Although she wasn't able to serve wild meat to the kids due to regulations, she would take them on field trips to the zoo to show them what bison look like and why they are important to Indigenous communities.
"It was like a great healing happened, especially with myself but also with my Indigenous staff," she said. "When you can connect to who you are through your culture it actually gives you a sense of pride and self-worth and an understanding of where you come from and who you are. It was so empowering."
From Home Cook to Restauranteur
By the time Christa was asked to open a restaurant in the space where Feast Cafe Bistro currently sits, she had come a long way from the canned soup of her childhood.
But it was those early lessons in food empowerment that pushed her to say yes to the opportunity.
"I'm not a trained chef, I've never gone to cooking school. I don't have a business degree, I've never run a restaurant before, I've never cooked in the back of a restaurant before," she said, listing all the reasons why she first said no.
But then she realized that Indigenous cuisine was severely underrepresented in Canada and needed to be celebrated so that others could also experience a healing journey.
"So I just thought this is something that I really got to consider doing."
Feast Cafe Bistro opened in Winnipeg's West End in December 2016, serving accessible foods rooted in traditional Indigenous ingredients.
Christa adds Indigenous touches to familiar foods, like her Eggs "banny" which is a take on the typical Eggs Benedict or "Benny".
The Eggs "Banny" at Feast is two poached eggs on traditional bannock with lemon chive hollandaise, smoked Manitoba Bison brisket and hash browns.
Feast's Cedar Manitoba Trout dish incorporates a vast amount of traditional ingredients — fish, wild rice, carrots, fresh bannock — into a beautiful dish.
The trout comes from the cold fresh waters of Manitoba's lakes. Surrounded by fresh waters (Manitoba has more than 100,000 lakes), fish is a staple in the traditional diet.
For red meat, Christa doesn't serve any beef in her restaurant, sticking instead to bison.
She served her braised bison short rib with smoked wild blueberries and juniper maple demi-glace. On the side, she includes garlic potato squash mash, roasted carrot spears, seasonal veggies and fresh bannock.
Even today, after all of her international success, Christa uses air quotes when she calls herself a chef. And her restaurant is so much more than just a place to eat.
"I'm a community-driven person, not a culinary-driven person so I thought how can I make this be more than a restaurant," she said.
Some of Christa's ideas are simple, like keeping a bucket to store water left over from guests, which she then uses to water her many restaurant plants, or sourcing ingredients locally from her community and local farmers.
But other ideas are much larger, like bringing excess food to the homeless — complete with "the butter and the jam and the napkin and the cutlery" — and offering jobs to people who have barriers to employment.
"If people hadn't believed in me when I felt I didn't deserve to be believed in, I would be here today so I want to do that for others," she said.
Together, Christa, her staff and their guests are rewriting the Indigenous narrative around food.
"A lot of our food culture is rooted in trauma, obesity, diabetes, suicide, all of those negative things," she said. "So we are here at Feast saying lets talk about it in a positive way. Let's share, lets think about our history. Let's think about how the bison has sustained our people for thousands of years and the positive things we need to bring back into the light and celebrate."
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