When suppliers can’t get food to the Fogo Island Inn, chef Murray MacDonald looks to the pastby Karen Pinchin

For a chef working on a remote, rocky island, accessible only by ferry or chartered plane, Murray MacDonald seems strangely unconcerned about when his next food delivery will arrive.

As executive chef at Newfoundland’s Fogo Island Inn, MacDonald and his team are responsible for cooking beautiful, delicious dishes to the high standards of the inn’s well-heeled clientele, whether or not fog has grounded planes or the ferry is locked in ice. And that’s how he likes it.

“We do what our ancestors did in the spring, summer and into the fall, and we get everything ready for winter,” says MacDonald. “We’ll be eating root vegetables, bottled and pickled ingredients, foods that have been cryoblanched [compressed and vacuum-sealed before being frozen], salted, fermented. That’s our menu, and it’s my favourite food we do all year. There’s something pure about it.”

“Summertime’s too easy,” he adds with a laugh. “All these fresh vegetables coming in? Put those on a plate, slap some meat on it and it goes out. Winter’s more fun.”

Ambition and a sense of duty

This damn-the-torpedoes attitude is characteristic of the Fogo Island Inn, the pet project of millionaire Newfoundland native Zita Cobb, where her Shorefast Foundation is working to turn the island into a hotbed of art, culture and cuisine. Finished in 2013, the four-storey, 44,000-square-foot, 29-room inn is perched on what seems like the end of the earth, and is where culinary artistry, ingenuity and commitment to the island’s past is being stretched to an ambitious limit.

Born in St. Anthony, on Newfoundland’s Northern Peninsula, and raised in Deer Lake, MacDonald went from a self-described juvenile delinquent who barely scraped through high school—“If it weren’t for the culinary world I’d probably be in jail, and that’s no joke,” he says—to graduating from PEI’s acclaimed culinary school and cooking around the world at boutique hotels in remote locations. He was working to help open a hotel restaurant in Vancouver when he first heard of Cobb’s ambitious plans for Fogo.

“I sent a blind email out: Newfoundlander, travelled the world cooking, interested in moving home, do you need an executive chef? I sent along my resume and they called me six hours later.”

According to Cobb, the decision to hire MacDonald came down to his experience at small, high-end, 24-hours-a-day boutique hotels as much as to his island origins. “It was serendipitous,” she says. “I feel a responsibility, as a Newfoundlander, as an interpreter, to get [this project] right on my watch. Murray feels that responsibility, that strong sense of duty to his homeland.”

“Look at what this place gives us”

When planning the inn’s restaurant, the team reevaluated the meaning of luxury in the context of the island and its history. “When I grew up here, whatever we ate, which wasn’t what the merchant brought in terms of sugar, molasses, tea and salt, we produced ourselves,” Cobb says. “We all need to stop and think about food, and what we have become attached to, as essential and necessary.”

Practically, for MacDonald and his kitchen staff, about half of whom are locals, this meant engineering a flexible menu that views traditional, humble ingredients in a whole new light. “We agreed that if this place is going to be successful, we’d have to get extremely versatile with carrots, cabbage, turnips and potatoes,” he says. That means, for example, starting with a cabbage and using its outer leaves for cabbage rolls, fermented sauerkraut or a grilled side dish, then curing and salting the core for pickles. Or using leafy carrot tops to make a pesto or a sauce. “Why cut the tops off and throw them out?” asks MacDonald. “And when you peel it, why throw away the peel? Why peel it at all?”

Most vegetables used at the inn come from four Fogo farmers, while fish is from the islander-owned Fogo Island Co-op fishery. Duck, quail, pork and lamb is sourced from Newfoundland, while beef is brought in whole from Prince Edward Island and cut at the inn.

More exotically, MacDonald’s kitchen uses sea salt distilled from Atlantic seawater, reduces molasses out of beet juice and cooks with foraged ingredients like spruce tips, and the island’s plentiful juniper berries—“We need to get a gin distillery on the go, something fierce,” quips MacDonald—caribou moss, seaweeds, and seaside herbs like rocket, wild celery and oysterleaf. All bread and pastry is made in-house, and the kitchen is proud of its homemade vinegars flavoured with local botanicals, from wild berries to Labrador tea, which tastes of green cardamom and citrus.

Cobb’s vision of a simultaneously upscale and authentic Fogo Island experience provides fuel for the inn’s culinary innovation. “We ask ourselves every day: What’s high end? Is it orange juice somebody dragged all the way from Florida? Or is it the juice that we made from berries that we picked last fall at daybreak?” she asks. “Why on God’s good earth would we serve orange juice?”

She hopes the inn has helped Fogo islanders pause and see what they have. “We have the bounty of the North Atlantic, the bounty of the barrens, wild game. The only thing we need to continue believing in is our own imagination.”