The best restaurants serving extraordinary and innovative food are often in tiny, rural places. Perhaps the wide-open spaces, the easy access to beautiful seasonal produce, or talented chefs choosing country life over city kitchens give rise to a wellspring of creativity. Founders House in Annapolis Royal, N.S., is a good example. Every plate from the kitchen of co-chefs Ryan Howell and Bryce Heron is a small work of art.
A Japanese cucumber and snow crab salad had me swooning for days. It featured a multitude of textures and techniques, delicate and thoughtful, with every element on the plate there for a reason. Clarified cucumber juice created a thin, crystal clear gel sheet to wrap the Nova Scotian snow crab. In contrast, the pale green, compressed raw cucumber was crisp and fresh and seasoned with a vinaigrette made from the cucumber skins. Coins of herbed crème fraiche with anise hyssop from the restaurant’s garden dotted either side. Black beads of wild, sustainable Acadian sturgeon caviar, harvested in New Brunswick, topped everything off. This was one of eight dishes on the Founders House tasting menu, all exquisite and creative.
“We appreciate our surroundings and focus solely on what this valley has to offer,” says Chef Howell. “The incredible quality of the selection we have is truly unmatched. People in small towns have a much stronger and community-oriented passion, driven by a help-your-neighbour attitude. I’m a Newfoundlander, born and raised, and in our culture, food means everything. It signifies family and friends and is intertwined with love. It’s more than just fulfilling hunger; it resonates deeply within us. So, I’ve learned that we can’t succeed without each other, nor can we fully appreciate the bounties of the Annapolis Valley if we don’t support one another. Those local carrots, corn, and plums signify something deeper.”
The chefs embrace an almost obsessive approach to seasonality, which means the menu changes every two weeks. It’s a snapshot of what’s in season, grown on surrounding farms in Annapolis Royal. And fewer food miles mean there is always a new and delicious star on the menu.
“Stratton’s Farm in Granville Ferry is just one great example,” says Heron. “I speak to them about three times a week to ask what’s growing, when it might be ready and how much I can be supplied, and that relationship, coupled with their adventurous growing spirit, makes our jobs as chefs very easy.”
It’s one strand of the allure that drew Heron to Founders House in the first place. “When I lived in Toronto, I was surrounded by concrete and glass and had to drive an hour outside the core just to see what was growing in Ontario. Now, on my commute, I pass by fields of fruit and produce that I can almost hear speaking to me.”
One of the ingredients speaking to the chefs now is Roscoff onions. With a sweet taste and pale pink hues, the unmistakable French varietal is being grown by Strattons Farm for the restaurant. “I love onions in general as an ingredient, because it allows us to show off different techniques and the versatility of a humble ingredient and create a dish with cohesive variations of the same ingredient. In my personal approach to cooking, I strive to create dishes around vegetables and garnishes first and seek to elevate the ingredients,” says Heron.
Founders House is a beautiful space. A New England-style house built in 1874, painted a seaside blue with bright, white-framed sash windows, flanked by pretty gardens, sits at the edge of the Fort View Golf Course. “From the beginning, the whole concept of the restaurant was to drive the local economy by executing a hyperlocal program, from food to drinks, to art, to labourers … you name it, we tried to keep it here,” says Laura Hamilton, the general manager.
Operating an elevated dining establishment in rural Nova Scotia comes with its challenges. Founders House has had its fair share since opening in 2018 and has had to navigate a rapidly changing hospitality world.
“We’ve learned to be very fluid and open to change, and pivoting to meet market demands is vital in this industry. Our ability to build relationships and rely on our community for support is something we would never be able to achieve in an urban setting,” says Hamilton. “We also decided to move to a tighter team and restrict the number of diners we accept during each service. Which meant that we required two strong individuals to run the kitchen.”
Co-chefs Howell and Heron work as teammates, not an easy thing to accomplish in any kitchen, particularly elevated dining driven by vision, creativity and attention to detail.
But the menu at Founders House speaks for itself. The chefs take equal spotlight on individual creations like the P.E.I. Blue Dot beef tenderloin with charred sweet and sour cabbage, garlic scapes (the flowering stem of garlic, delicately delicious), and a crispy wonton filled with oxtail (Heron’s nod to late-night Asian eateries in big cities), and Howell’s elegant white chocolate mousse on a crumbly sablé with white crystalized white chocolate sprinkles and raspberry sorbet.
“Being a co-chef has been such a phenomenal experience. Chef Bryce possesses a vast range of knowledge and experience in many areas where I know I can improve, and I can humbly say he feels the same way about me,” says Howell. “Our different views and styles, after some fine-tuning, create a unique dining experience that strikes the perfect balance between two chefs.”
Heron and Howell have honed the formula and have kept the creative process simple. “While we are opposites in many ways, our input into dishes has a very yin and yang effect, which helps charm the menu. We each come up with dish ideas for a date range and then sit down every two weeks to hash them out or pick the best parts and turn them into what they are. The rabbit and snails dish on our current menu is a great example of our shared vision.”
The entire team at Founders House deserve high praise for everything they've achieved in just four years. Making clever, intricate, locally sourced cuisine in a rural place, without appearing overly earnest and virtuous is not an easy thing. Founders House is charming.
I finished my two-hour dining experience with the walnut cake, a dollop of elderflower cream and a quenelle of basil ice cream. For a short while, everything felt right in the world, which is precisely the point of hospitality.
After all that, you’ll need a lie-down, and we stayed at the new Fort View Golf cottages on the same property down the road. The cottages are tranquil, Nordic-style white and wood accommodations overlooking the golf course.
Recipes