Here at Local Harvest, we are excited to be featuring Love Catering Co. as they embark on their locally-sourced culinary catering adventure. This is an exciting new project/company based out of Toronto, ON, and we are pumped to share their story with you! Check out what they have to say about what they call their "labour of love":
Love Catering Co. is a unique boutique-sized catering company run by two guys and a girl from Toronto. We use locally-sourced, organic ingredients. To further explore our creative culinary roots, we are excited to experiment with growing some unique produce on a small piece of metropolitan Toronto greenery- something we are very thankful for- but we are far from urban farmers. We are also excited to be sourcing produce, meat and dairy from small local farms that are run by like-minded individuals. When we say like-minded, we mean passionate. Elias and Spencer are crazy about what they do. Coming from a 35-seat restaurant, they have been taught to solely rely on ingredients from Ontario farmers and small-time suppliers. Its a humbling way to work- letting the weather and climate dictate the menu takes us back to the way mankind used to eat, it also ensures that everything tastes as fresh as possible. We started Love Catering Co. because we saw a void in the market for organic, locally-sourced catering. Sure, Toronto boasts plenty of restaurants that enjoy abundant business from residents who appreciate gastronomic genius borne from the fruits of our countrymen's labour- but as far as finding a culinary service that provides catering, all we could find was the standard mock-exotic fare. We prefer to celebrate local cuisine. As Ontarians we are privy to an incredible variety of produce, meat and dairy. It would be a bit of a snub not the celebrate that.
In the following weeks we are going to give you a look- make that ultra no-holds-barred access- into the labour of Love Catering Co. You get to share all of the joys and disappointments that come with building a culinary business from the ground, up.
The company has been in the works for just over a month and a half, which is long enough to start taking things seriously and barely long enough to finally start talking about it. We have just recently begun to tackle the arduous tasks of branding, advertising and legalizing; and the fun part: sourcing suppliers- AKA tasting our way through numerous beets, herbs, game birds, and loaves of bread.
Looking at our to-do list today, there isn't much that can be done in the garden or on the road despite the gorgeous weather: Spencer is stuck on the couch due to a torn MCL from falling in a hole. (Nature: 1, Love Catering: 0) So we are both glued to our laptops searching for dependable, Toronto-based boulangeries- That's a place that makes bread. Google Maps makes this look easy: "Bakeries are like chicken pox on this thing!" Spencer says. But really, it’s not like locating the closest Starbucks. Just like the French will tell you, not all boulangeries are the same. We have decided to go on a bread-tasting mission on Thursday afternoon. If all else fails, (and I certainly doubt that it will,) I am all-over the task of making our own Love bread. Spencer and Elias say this is a terrible, terrible idea- I guess I'm the only one with the Martha gene.
Mission bread-sourcing having failed, we moved on to the confusing task of incorporating. I'm sure I don't have to tell you how much fun that is.
In the very early stages of Love Catering Co. (way back when 'Elias & Spencer' and 'Les Enfants' were both name options,) we had ordered a few packs of seeds which would, with a little luck and sunlight, turn into the stock from which all of Love's customers would eat. Unfortunately, judging by our recent volume of bookings (and size of those bookings) it looks as though Love Catering Co. is not going to be able to survive on merely the fruits of our own backyard labour. As mentioned before, we are on a mission to find Southern Ontario's greatest produce, dairy and meat- a long delicious road lays ahead and I for one am not all that upset by the amount of "work" it will take to do our "market research". No pun intended. This blog will focus on our quest for ingredients, and we promise not to leave any juicy details out.
Next Week: The outcome of Thursday's bread tasting and a peek at our fresh new logo.
http://lovecatering.tumblr.com/ [5]
