Ian Riddick

After a lifetime of overseeing hotel kitchens, when Ian Riddick opened his own place in Ucluelet in 2018 he “didn’t want to pigeonhole it too much.” And so Heartwood is a restaurant, but also a catering company, an outfitter, a cooking school, a place for grab-and-go lunches and, once in a while, a pop-up Chinese takeout joint. “I wanted to get back to cooking,” Riddick says. “This gave me a chance to do what I want.”

Riddick started cooking when he was just fifteen, back in Toronto, and spent decades working mostly for Delta Hotels, moving ever further west. Eventually he ended up in Tofino, at Long Beach Lodge Resort, and fell in love with the wild west coast, its incredible ingredients and its “amazing culture of chefs.” As he says, “I loved the climate. Summers are amazing. My priorities were shifting to a better lifestyle, too.”

Then he learned that a heritage building down the road in Ucluelet was for sale, and Heartwood was born. “It was a restaurant before we bought it. We opened the kitchen because I love to entertain and be part of the experience,” he says. But he also loves catering weddings and doing “old-school garde-manger work.” He loves the spontaneity of changing his menu on the fly if someone drops off twenty pounds of chuck flats or a bucket of chanterelles. And he loves inviting his neighbours in to be guest chefs for a night while he assists them.

“We have this improvisational spirit so we can adapt to whatever we need to do at the time,” Riddick says. “In a tricky market like this, I needed to do more things, something that would allow me to change as my years go on. That’s the true spirit of Heartwood Kitchen.”

Excerpted from Island Eats: Signature Chefs’ Recipes from Vancouver Island and the Salish Sea by Dawn Postnikoff and Joanne Sasvari. Photographs by Gabriel Cabrera and Danika McDowell. Recipes copyright © 2021 by individual restaurants. Excerpted with permission from Figure 1 Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.