Nick Serves Real Mexican
Nick Benninger is a relatively fresh face in the Kitchener Market crowd, but his considerable talents as chef have been well known to local flavour hounds for years. He and his partner helm two lauded restaurants just a short trip along King St. into Waterloo – the eponymous Nick & Nat’s Uptown 21, and its upstart sister kitchen around the corner, Taco Farm.
Both dining spots hinge on finding and using good ingredients, serving up delicious dishes and drinks, and offering a relaxed atmosphere with very serious attention to detail. When Taco Farm decided to open another outpost at the Kitchener Market, the motivation was mostly to expand their off-sales of chips, salsas and tortillas. More than a year later, Benninger is pleased to have underestimated the value of that small booth in the bazaar.
“We get this chance to talk to customers and really sink our teeth into them, and that’s how you attract real, committed regulars – by simply getting to know people,” he says. “I love being able to engage with the people who are buying our food, see them eat it, talk to them about it. As the guy who’s helping make all of it, that’s a great experience to have.”
Benninger has also booked catering jobs and found employees though his conversations with Saturday shoppers, and “the unexpected benefits that have come from the market are just fantastic, they’re not simply the sales.” And like many other market-goers, a big part of the attraction also lies in enjoying the bustle and random interaction that takes shape. “The people-watching is awesome, and I’m a part of that too. We think we could quite easily do a reality TV show out of the market that no one would believe is reality.”
Tell us about one of your favourite tools.
It’s just a basic French chef’s knife. It’s the one tool that I would absolutely need to do my job. Mine’s a Shun kitchen knife, which is higher end but not rare or anything, just a particularly nice looking knife, it’s got a pretty wooden handle. And I’ve had for a long time.
I’m into the idea that every tool has to have multiple purposes – there’s no room in life or in a kitchen drawer for something that has one purpose. You can pretty much do everything but fry the food up with this knife.
What was the first dish you made that you were happy with?
Years back, as a prep cook, I wasn’t making anything from start to finish, I would never really see the end stage of the dish or the plate even, I essentially worked in a basement. But the piles of well-cut vegetables, piles of prep getting done, that was my job, and I was really slow at it at first. Then I learned to get faster and I could get a bunch more done in one swoop, that was the first thing I was happy with. I hated that job at first, only because it seemed like I would never crack the code or get good at it, so that was pretty satisfying.
Anyone can cook at home, and at that point [age 17] I had proven to myself that I could put a meal together for a girlfriend or something, but it’s different to see that you can do it for a living, that I could get paid for it and maybe people won’t fire me.
What makes you make the things that you make?
Nat and I are both very committed to doing something that we’re proud of, and it has to be real. We’re pretty critical and cynical about the world; I don’t like things that are bullshit or too corporate or commercial, so instead of being someone who bitches all the time or thinks they can do it better, we have to try. We like that a lot, we like being our own bosses, we like working with people and getting to pick our team and our customers to some extent, and we like picking what we do for a living. I think I’d have found a way to do that no matter what my interests or skills sets were, but they happen to be food and eating and entertaining people, so that’s what we do. I don’t know that I could ever work for someone else. I’d probably be a pretty shitty employee.
What attracts you to the materials you work with?
Whether you’re a shoe salesman or a watch repair person or whatever, I think you have to love what you do. And I just love eating. I love food. I love the history in it. I love entertaining people, whether it’s at a restaurant or at home. There’s really only one business that I could be in to accomplish those things.
I make a lot of pasta at home. On the weekend I was rolling cavatelli with this awesome little wooden board with grooves in it – you can make all different styles of pasta on it just by pushing it out with your hands. I have a lot of fun with that, and I get to involve my kids, we’ll sit there and work on pasta together, which is fun. And then we get to eat it – also fun.
I’ve always been drawn to things that you could do rather than read about or learn about them or watch a TV show about it. I like to put things in my hands and work with them.
Who made you into a maker?
Probably me. The way I learn is definitely with my hands. I hated school because I just couldn’t really stay focused. I’ve had far more success doing anything I could do with my hands, so I followed the path that seemed most fruitful.
My mom encouraged me to get in the kitchen a lot too. Like any teenager, I didn’t like a lot of the food that was going on to the dinner table, even though my mom was a great cook. She would be like, ‘Go ahead and make your own dinner then.’ So I started to, and I enjoyed the process of making food, even though it wasn’t anything special back then. That led to cooking for friends or girlfriends in high school, and you could really impress someone without spending much money, and get to make something cool for them. Plus I’d get to eat it too.
What are some of your essential resources or collaborators in Kitchener?
I’d say the great restaurants that have been here have been my best resources – getting to either work there or eat at them, or just watch them exist. Now, with social media, you can be inspired and taught by something from far away, but in the old days it was very local.
I remember eating at a restaurant called La Costa in downtown Kitchener and being blown away by how beautiful they’d made the restaurant look, and by everything else that went along with their food – the way the servers behaved, the way food was presented with garnishes, and different sauces for different things. It was the first time I’d seen anything like that. I later got a job there – that’s where I cut all the onions and stuff in the basement – and I stayed quite a while, so it became one of my best learning experiences, especially working with different chefs there along the way.
Working with the tortilla machine is also really cool. I’m not a very mechanical person, I still can’t restart my lawn mower, but I know how to fix that machine pretty intimately.
When we decided to make a taco restaurant, as we looked at places in Mexico or the States where tacos are huge. They would never use frozen tortillas like we do everywhere here – only fresh tortillas. So step one was figuring out and getting the tortilla-maker we needed, then making a space and a menu that would fit it. We ordered our machine from a company in Los Angeles, we went down to their shop where they showed us how to use it. It was pretty daunting to see this thing and realize that once we got it back to Canada we were essentially the experts on it, we couldn’t just call up a repair person to deal with it.
I pretty much ran it for the first while and I was really nervous, because without it we’re just a normal, fake Mexican restaurant. With it, we’re Taco Farm.