Andrea Carlson is perched on a rock at the Pacific Ocean’s edge, staring intently at a piece of purple nori. The saltwater quietly laps against the rocky shore, and coastal B.C.’s quintessential misty rain has, mercifully, subsided for the moment. The chef and owner of Vancouver’s Michelin-starred Burdock & Co holds the seaweed in her hands, gently tugging its ends to demonstrate its elasticity.
“I just love it,” she says, putting a piece in her mouth.
As she stands there, her Blundstones muddy and wet, a smile on her face, her brain’s creative wheels kick into motion. Maybe she’ll wrap the seaweed around some scallops and sear them. Or maybe she’ll stretch it over a piece of lingcod or sablefish, or turn it into a sauce or a puree to add to a dish. Maybe all of the above. Or maybe something else entirely that she hasn’t dreamed up yet.
On this particular day she has brought her kitchen staff to the remote town of Powell River on B.C.’s rugged Sunshine Coast to forage for ingredients, which will soon be turned into dishes for her next menu. Burdock & Co is currently in its third year of its Moon Menu Series, which sees six seasonal concepts, each inspired by a different moon phase and botanical theme. The purple nori – along with some other wild ingredients, including forest lichen, which the crew forages from a grassy bluff that can only be accessed by scrambling up a steep and skinny trail – will feature in the second phase of the menu cycle: Gathering Resins Under a Budding Moon.
These days, it’s trendy – perhaps even necessary – for chefs to use local ingredients. But for Carlson, celebrating the work of her region’s farmers and foragers isn’t a passing fad, nor is it a marketing tool. It’s her entire reason for being.
Reindeer lichen will be used in Carlson’s April-May menu, ‘Gathering Resins under a Budding Moon.’
“I am so in love with product,” she says. “The creative feeling that keeps me in the industry is coming from that beautiful radicchio. There’s an energy around the products when you’re sourcing from these organic farmers.”
Unlike many of her peers, Carlson’s path toward a Michelin star didn’t involve a stint in Europe or Asia. Instead, her journey is entirely Canadian. She was born in Vancouver but spent her formative years in Ontario, namely Ottawa and Richmond Hill. When she was 13, she wandered into a bookstore and bought 1961’s New York Times Cookbook by Craig Claiborne. She’s not entirely sure what compelled her to pick up the book that day, let alone take it home and start trying recipes from it. Her parents didn’t cook much; instead, they ate out a lot, and at home Carlson was largely left to fend for herself.
“There wasn’t a strong culinary heritage that was coming at me,” she reflects. “So maybe it was more a curiosity of, ‘What is this world?’ And once I tried it, I really loved it.”
Carlson attended culinary school at Dubrulle (it has since been renamed and bought by LaSalle College Vancouver). From there, she gained real-world experience at some of Vancouver’s most celebrated restaurants, including Star Anise, C Restaurant, Raincity Grill and Bishop’s. (Notably, all of them are now closed, demonstrating just how fickle the industry can be.)
At chef-owner Adam Busby’s acclaimed Star Anise, where Carlson worked as the garde manger early in her career, she met Robert Clark. He was the restaurant’s sous chef at the time, and he noticed something special about her right away. “The way she handled food – it was magical,” he says. “Like she’d been doing it for years.”
He credits part of that magic to an innate understanding of raw ingredients and how to prepare them. “You could give her something, and she could have no clue what it is,” he says. “Never seen it before in her life: a fruit, a vegetable, it wouldn’t matter. She would take it, she would assess it and she would make something wonderful.”
The popularization of cooking with hyper-local, foraged and oftentimes downright weird ingredients is often credited to Danish chef René Redzepi of Copenhagen’s celebrated Noma, which first opened in 2003. But for Carlson, it was working at Vancouver Island’s Sooke Harbour House around the same time that shifted her perspective on sourcing. Located about 45 minutes from Victoria, the boutique hotel sits on a one-acre property; every day, Carlson and rest of the kitchen staff were tasked with crafting a menu based on what could be found in the onsite gardens.
“Everything solidified and made sense, because it was about that connection to the product,” Carlson says of that time. “It was: ‘Wow, this turnip just blew my mind. I’ve never tasted anything so good in my life.‘”
Pink algae on the shores of Powell River, B.C.HAKAN BURCUOGLU/The Globe and Mail
She then brought that sensibility back to the Vancouver restaurant scene, where she quietly made a name for herself as an arbiter of industry change. In 2006, for example, when she was chef de cuisine at Raincity Grill, she introduced the 100-mile tasting menu, which only featured ingredients that could be found within 100 miles of the restaurant. It was a concept inspired by local journalists Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon, who at the time were chronicling their year of eating what they dubbed the 100-mile diet for The Tyee. Inventive and fun, it featured such dishes as root-vegetable crisps with tomato chutney and responsibly-farmed sturgeon with Brussels sprouts and sauteed bacon.
In 2012, Carlson and her partner, architect Kevin Bismanis, took over Harvest Community Foods, a small natural grocer and cafe located in Chinatown. Among Carlson’s changes were a menu update to focus on Japanese noodle soups and the introduction of community-supported agriculture (CSA) boxes, which allowed consumers to gain access to farm-fresh produce – and directly support the growers in the process.
A year later, they opened Burdock & Co on trendy Main Street, taking everything Carlson had learned throughout her career and funneling it into one intimate, 30-seat room. The skinny space is as simple as it is beautiful, with one wall covered in white tiles and the other in tasteful wood panels. It’s here that Carlson has come into her own as a chef, introducing diners to ingredients and flavour combinations that they truly can’t get anywhere else. And it’s undoubtedly why, when the Michelin Guide launched in Vancouver in 2022, Burdock was awarded one star (and has retained it every year since). Carlson is currently the only female chef in B.C. to lead a Michelin-starred restaurant.
Her dishes are a masterclass in creativity. This year’s citrus menu, for example, includes a pomme Anna with a bergamot chimichurri and crème fraiche, paired with rosemary-smoked potatoes and potato skin cream; yuzu, meanwhile, is turned into a glaze and served with scallop confit, grilled celeriac and walnuts. And while not offered on the tasting menu, Carlson’s buttermilk fried chicken is a cult classic that’s available on the bar menu or as an a la carte add-on. Her savoury profiteroles are another Burdock calling card; most recently they’ve been crafted with goat brie cream, apple butter, and garlic radicchio.
“When she finally got her own restaurant, it was really, extremely important that she now was free to be who she was meant to be,” says Susan Davidson, who has supplied produce to Carlson for years through the local farming collective Glorious Organics. Davidson describes the chef as incredibly caring, even matriarchal. She recalls a day, many years ago, when Carlson was working at C Restaurant and Davidson came by to make one of her regular produce deliveries. Carlson met her at the door and presented her with a yellow gerbera daisy.
“It’s always been a highlight of my whole time doing deliveries,” Davidson says of that small but precious gift. “I don’t think there’s anybody but Andrea who would have given this crazy farmer a flower.”
Perhaps one of Carlson’s most impressive qualities is her ability to surprise even her suppliers with what she cooks. Davidson remembers being amazed by a Burdock & Co dish that contained salad leaf she couldn’t identify (it was a variegated cress from Salt Spring Island, for those wondering). Similarly, Burdock & Co’s long-time foraging partner Alexander McNaughton recalls being floored by a sorbet that Carlson made from daylilies.
“It showed me that there was more to learn than what I had thought,” says the wild food expert. “And to think creatively to push the boundary of what’s in season and what’s delicious.” It’s not uncommon for Carlson to call McNaughton and request an ingredient that he’d never considered eating before. “It’s not like there’s a big market for resin,” he jokes. “Andrea’s the only one who’s ever asked for it.” (In this instance, the hard, sticky substance is harvested from the bark of a tree on McNaughton’s property.)
McNaughton, who is based in Powell River and has known Carlson for more than a decade, has been tasked with leading Burdock & Co’s kitchen crew on its foraging expedition. As the group balances across beach rocks, scampers up mossy trails and scoots around (or sometimes through) muddy puddles, Carlson happily nods along, takes photos, and poses questions. At one point she disappears in the forest, returning a moment later with a small, fluffy green plant in each hand. She presents them to McNaughton: “Can we talk about lichens?”
