Gourmet Girls Kita Navo (left), Linda Shaben (middle) and Marianna LaViolette (right).
Interview by Blake Morneau
Eating at a music festival is often a monumentally terrible task. Greasy, sloppy food becomes the default rather than a once-in-a-while thing. It can wreak havoc on the body and soul. With that in mind, the Atmosphere Gathering in Cumberland, BC, is taking a different approach to food for its inaugural year. Organizers of the music festival, which includes the likes of Chali 2na, A Tribe Called Red, and The Harpoonist & The Axe Murderer, have turned to local catering crew, Gourmet Girls, to provide healthy, locally sourced communal meals to hungry festival attendees.
In anticipation of the tasty goods that await us when we make our journey to the Comox Valley for the Atmosphere Gathering, we got a hold of two of three Gourmet Girls, Linda Shaben and Kita Navo, to talk about what guides their cooking, their involvement with the festival and, of course, to get a sneak peak into what they have planned for their festival menu.
What are the Gourmet Girls all about? How long have you been doing your thing?
Kita: We’re in our fourth summer of working together as Gourmet Girls. We worked together in a previous business. Linda had a café here in Cumberland called Tarbell’s. We have a family connection as well that sort of cemented our relationship together in the cooking business. When that business changed hands, I followed Linda along on her catering endeavours and we decided to create this thing together.
Is there a mission statement or guiding principal that guides your cooking?
Linda: We like to use local, fresh ingredients and a lot of love. We’re both Aries, so we’re both fire, so we’re both quite free-spirited and creativity is kind of a daily thing. We’re not married to a set of recipes or a cooking style. We’re really inspired but what’s in our kitchen on a daily basis and what the Comox Valley brings to us in terms of food. We both have a background in Middle Eastern and Mediterranean cooking, which inspires us greatly. We also have a strong background in good, old-fashioned Canadian basics, so taking those and mixing them together is quite fun for us.
Do you find that working in cooking makes you want to do it less at home?
Kita: Yep, definitely. When we’re exhausted, the creative ideas for cooking at home are definitely less. We’re blessed to have our kitchen in the same space that we live in, in the same town, so if we’re cooking something we can make some extra for home, so we don’t have to think about it when we’re home.
Linda: For me, the summertime is great. We have gardens and access to different gardens so summer eating is very simple. A piece of cheese, some fresh greens and some tomatoes picked right from the garden. It’s amazing.
That sounds delicious. How did you get involved with the Atmosphere Gathering?
Linda: When I had Tarbell’s we were involved with Big Time Out, which used to be the big music celebration in Cumberland. We worked on a bunch of events and subsequently vended at those festivals and we did food for the volunteers at two of the Big Time Outs. It’s kind of a natural shift to co-sponsoring this event. With Atmosphere they wanted a food portion of the festival, but didn’t really want to deal with a lot of vendors because it’s a smaller festival. So they approached us to come as one of the three hosts for the festival and, even though it’s a ton of work, we thought it would be a really fun, community thing to do.
I really like the idea of having one group provide the meals for a festival. What are the challenges of cooking for so many people?
Kita: The first challenge is setting up an onsite kitchen. We’re calling upon resources in the community so we can get that set up and then, of course, going through the proper channels to get the proper health certification. That obviously takes a lot of time. We’re also coordinating volunteers to help out, so that also involves a big time commitment. We’re also doing a lot of the sponsorship applications from different farms. So, in terms of our menu, we’ve had to be quite flexible. The menu that’s on the website is just a baseline and really there will be a lot of surprises, because we’ll have a lot of surprises from the people that our generously sponsoring us through food. We won’t have all the sponsors lined up and know exactly what the menu is until the last week. So that’s quite fun. It definitely pushes us to use our creativity to come up with something from pieces that have to fit together.
Is there an aspect of cooking, maybe something rewarding or challenging, you feel goes overlooked too often?
Kita: I don’t know if very many cooks talk about the heart connection to food and the satisfaction that you’re really feeding not just people’s bellies, but their hearts and souls. That’s definitely something we feel when we are nourishing people who are dancing in that expanded headspace.
What are your favourite dishes to cook?
Linda: For me, I go back to my Lebanese roots and that would be a dish called meshedra, which is a rice and lentil dish with lots of caramelized onions, but with a big dollop of homemade yogurt cheese, homemade pita bread and a big green salad. The bread-baking is definitely a weakness for me. At the festival we have a saj, which has been used traditionally by Middle Eastern and Mediterranean nomads to make bread. It’s a big dome that sits over a grill, like an upsidedown wok. You roll bread and throw it on top of the saj and it cooks in about 30 seconds. So that’ll be a feature of the meals at the Atmosphere Gathering.
What are you most forward looking to in terms of the music at Atmosphere? Do you even get to watch the music?
Kita: We should have breaks here and there to watch some music and we should have a pretty good vantage point for one of the stages. The main stage will be in the circus tent, so that’ll be closed, but we still be able to hear it.
And what do you want to hear from the tent?
Kita: Definitely A Tribe Called Red.
Linda: A Tribe Called Red.
The Gourmet Girls website can be found here.
Atmosphere Gathering takes place August 15-17 in Cumberland Park on Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Canada.
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