Elevated Cuisine: Niagara-style with Wellington Court Chef Erik Peacock

Elevated Cuisine: Niagara-style

Exclusive Q&A with Wellington Court Chef Erik Peacock 

A delightful connoisseur of the wine and dine scene, Chef Erik Peacock pairs his childhood exposure to the food business with the luscious bounty of the Niagara agricultural region to elevate the fine dining experience at his Wellington Court restaurant in St. Catharines, Ontario. This ambitious creator also operates a thriving catering enterprise, as well as the Short Hills Kitchen at Henry of Pelham Winery.

We sat down with Chef Erik to explore the challenges, rewards and fun of cooking up a feast in the heart of Niagara’s wine country. He dished out some fascinating thoughts and anecdotes that are certain to whet your appetite!  

Q: Your Wellington Court location has quite a family legacy. Did that influence your decision to become a chef? 

Erik: Wellington Court is actually located in an Edwardian home where my mother grew up. She and her siblings were raised by my grandmother who operated a hair salon where the restaurant is today. At the end of her hair cutting career, the building sat dormant for a few years and then my mother created Wellington Court café. I had always worked in the restaurant during the summers – my mom was an incredibly good cook and she’s also my greatest critic. She lives just around the corner still. 

As a young adult, I went off to George Brown College and studied culinary arts. That’s it in a nutshell. I moved  into the George Brown College atmosphere and fell in love with running an organized kitchen and completing tasks and always accomplishing a great deal during the day. It’s a very rewarding career. You get to start in the morning and end in the evening and you feel the effects of a job well done. I’ve always been drawn to that. We start every day the same way, and basically end it the same way too. 

Q: How does it feel to see others you’ve worked with embracing what they’ve learned from you?  

Erik: Well after you’ve done something as long as I have, the most rewarding part of my career is now watching these people who have gone on to accomplish so much. I have friends (people I’ve worked with over the years, that I call friends) who are now running hotels on the east coast and big restaurants in Niagara-on-the-Lake. I’m not a father figure to them, I’m a contemporary and they love sharing their wins with me. 

It’s such a great position to be in and something that we talk a lot about in the restaurant because, really, we need to keep teaching. It’s always about sharing and rewarding those who do well. I love that part of it and I insist that everyone that comes into the kitchen shares their knowledge and, hopefully, they see the big picture that down the road they’ll have inspired young cooks to go off and do big things.  

Q: The ambience of Wellington Court… you’re bringing in international flavours but using local ingredients for these dishes? 

Erik: I think a lot of our techniques would be global, inspired by a world of food. Especially with social media. I’m seeing people in Nunavut and watching on Tik Tok and Instagram how they gather and preserve food and share it with their community. After we’ve been working so long, we’ve made lots of friends – all of our gardener friends that we appreciate so much. They’re always keeping us informed as to what’s next, and what they have a lot of and how we can help to move it. We always end up using local products. 

I just had the most amazing spring onions (scallions to some). They had a massive white bulb on the bottom and then a tall green stalk. We cut the stalk off, sliced it on the bias, preserved it in ice water because they’re so intense – and then the bulb was so impossibly sweet. So we took the bulb and used salt and a little bit of white sugar to cure the onions and remove some of the stringent flavour. Then we pat them dry and serve them with pickerel from Lake Huron; pan-roasted, beurre blanc and then finished with the scallion tops.  

It is such a perfect spring dish but frustrating because they’re grown and then they’re gone and then we move on to something else. So our gardeners are our favourite people right now, for sure. In fact a lot of them have pivoted and made greenhouses so we can have fresh green things, even during the winter months.

Q: Is it a challenge to acquire fresh local ingredients for your large catering events? 

Erik: Wellington Court, itself, is fairly small. There are 40 seats on the main floor and  a private dining room, but when we get to these big off-site events, it’s different. For example, we did dinner for 600 a few weeks ago in a gymnasium with a rented kitchen in a weight room. But the conversation that happens there is that we’d love to keep the menu flexible because we need to have these growers be able to produce things for us that keep that off-site work special too. 

So spring vegetables would be a way of keeping it flexible but then we are communicating with these growers, saying, “Listen, we have a dinner coming up and we don’t want to take everything you have but we need to feed 600 people. So I’m either ordering this from a food company in Toronto or we’re incorporating your goods into this dinner but we need something dedicated for us.” And they’re all very helpful if they possibly can be.

Q: With Wellington Court, Short Hills Kitchen and catering, how do you manage with so much on your plate? Literally!

Erik: Staying positive is key because we are frantically working to keep it all happening and build this crew that wants to remain and grow with us. We rely on others to help us – we have a small crew of people that work at the Short Hills Kitchen and a small crew that work at Wellington Court, and then we have a pivotal person that keeps an eye on the Short Hills Kitchen and makes sure they have what they need. At the moment, that person is me. It’s a bit weighted from the May to October period – we’re really busy right now and I’m grateful for the business. 

Q: When you’re having a casual summer dinner at home, what’s on the menu? 

Erik: There’s a roast chicken dish on the menu at Wellington Court that I keep going back to. My friends know that I love Chardonnay as well. So I sometimes pick the bottle of wine first – I’ll know that wine, figure out how much oak is in it, if there’s fresh acidity – and then I will always go to a roasted chicken on roasted or grilled vegetables with a tiny salad. 

In the fall, we roast it with lemons, in the summer I use those spring onions or char peppers. I’ll mince fresh chili, use olive oil and the juice from citrus to make it delicious. And pair that with my favourite wine. Right now it’s ‘The Goat Lady’ Chardonnay from Henry of Pelham – for me, it’s the perfect balance of rich and playful acidity. That is a beautiful wine for chicken or fish. So on Tuesdays, my day off, I enjoy having some family over and making roasted chicken with grilled vegetables and a green salad. wellington-court.com