Anna Wallner remembers being a little girl in Toronto and seeing her mom propped in bed, reading a cookbook as if it were a novel. Her mother operated a small catering business, and so for Wallner food easily became a focal point in her formative years.
Anna Wallner (Photo courtesy Savoury Chef)
Eventually those cookbooks became the source material for Wallner in the kitchen as she endeavoured to absolutely nail recipe after recipe. Fast forward to now, and it makes perfect sense that Wallner's Instagram handle is @annasinthekitchen; the kitchen is a comfortable space.
"I plan my life from one meal to the next," Wallner explains.
And so it also makes perfect sense that in February of this year, Wallner took over as the owner of Savoury Chef, a full-service catering business based in East Vancouver.
Even though it was journalism that took Wallner out of Toronto and to Vancouver, that passion for food always stayed with her, and though she's done several high-profile projects in the field--like the television series The Shopping Bags and Anna & Kristina’s Grocery Bag--there came a point last year when she took a good look at her life and decided it was time to commit to food.
Perfect timing, as Savoury Chef was in search of a new owner. Before taking over, Wallner says she honed her skills in the kitchen through an eye-opening course at the Northwest Culinary Academy, and she put energy into growing her own produce. For fun, she'll embark on a weekend adventure of comparison tasting a produce item she's grown in her own garden versus the same item from a grocery store and the farmers' market.
A beet and carrot salad by Chef Geoff Rogers at Savoury Chef (Lindsay William-Ross/Vancouver Is Awesome)
So, yes: Wallner is kind of a food geek. But she doesn't do the cooking at Savoury Chef--that's the domain of Executive Chef Geoff Rogers, who oversees the impressive kitchen space and staff, along with the Savoury Chef team, most of whom were all on board before Wallner took over.
Wallner's self-bestowed title? "Foodpreneur," she tells me one sunny afternoon over lunch inside the Savoury Chef's headquarters.
Like her garden, Wallner's goals for Savoury Chef are pretty straightforward: Grow it.
The thing about spending almost a lifetime thinking about food and the way we eat is that you cultivate a desire to spread the gospel of the pleasures of food. Do pleasure and catering intersect? Wallner is confident that they do, and they can, for more people and more often.
"Cooking becomes an event," Wallner says of those times when a host or hostess gets trapped in the kitchen ahead of a special gathering, and the fun goes out of it. For some families, that event is a drama that's played out nightly in the never-ending pursuit of sitting down to a healthy meal at a decent hour, with time to actually enjoy the food, and focus on being together.
Beyond weddings and office parties, there are day-to-day scenarios where Wallner thinks catering could slide right in, if more people were open to it. But--and this is key--what Savoury Chef aims to do is not be too "precious."
"You can have a nice meal, and get on with the business of the day," describes Wallner. And those nice meals take on many forms; cruise their website's "menus" section and there's everything from small dinner parties to summer BBQs to large-scale buffets to taco bars. Even just a good old-fashioned Sunday dinner can be easily arranged.
Assembling a charcuterie board (Photo courtesy Savoury Chef)
That sort of street-level access to catered food is what Wallner sees as the next step for the business, and add to that some tangible street-level enhancements for Savoury Chef, the place.
Though everything is in the idea stages, Wallner is hoping to make the most of the company's physical location near a bike path and some breweries and explore ways to reach more locals in the community, whether it be through a cafe or something along those lines on site.
This is all in the purview of a "foodpreneur" and a busy one, at that. Wallner also works for an award-wining Italian olive oil company, and is preparing to direct a Canadian documentary about the life of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, too. It's a lot on Wallner's plate, but she sees a "close alignment" between running a production and running a catering business.
"It's the same cast of characters, the same thing of having lots of balls in the air," she jokes.
Then there's the powerful aspect of storytelling, perhaps a bit more of an obvious tenet from Wallner's world of journalism and documentary.
Where storytelling comes into play for Wallner at Savoury Chef, I ask. She answers without missing a beat: "Oh, that's all done through the food."
