How a wayward chef and artiste found his ideal canvas under the bucolic and bountiful Niagara sky

From the experimental cuisines of northern California to the exquisite food of China, Hong Kong and Anthony Bourdain's TV show, Frank Sun's current passion is the grapes and greenery of Niagara.

In the shadow of downtown Toronto, the Niagara peninsula features some of the most fertile and diverse terroir in the world.

Frank Sun looks at Niagara and sees California. "Parts of it for sure remind me of the landscape, particularly the produce fields, orchards and the vineyards," says the acclaimed chef, who has recently relocated to the region. His new culinary and lifestyle venture Benchland Blues will revolve around a series of "pop-up" dining events throughout the region, that will not only pair food with local wines but celebrate the unique terroir of Niagara as well. "Honestly, everything that made California cuisine so renowned can also be found in abundance here in Niagara," he said.

Few would know better than Sun, who had a front row seat in the 1960's for a culinary revolution. Born in Taiwan, he moved to San Francisco when he was 12 to stay with his aunt Cecilia Chiang, who had just opened what was to be the first truly authentic non-Cantonese Chinese restaurant in the United States. As The Mandarin restaurant quickly grew in stature, so too did Chiang's profile as one of the most prominent restauranters in America. In 2014, at the tender age of 94, she was honoured with the prestigious James Beard Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award, which recognizes individuals in the culinary and food media industries who have made significant and lasting contributions to the food landscape.

"What Julia Child did for French cooking in the United States, Cecilia Chiang did for Chinese cuisine in America," said Alice Waters, one of Chiang's closest friends and a former student who became a celebrated chef in her own right. Along with the likes of Child, Waters, Jeremiah Towers and Wolfgang Puck, Chiang became part of a new class of celebrity chefs who were instrumental in creating a culinary movement that celebrated the abundance of terroirs by incorporating local ingredients based on both freshness and environmental integrity.

Cecilia Chiang serving patrons back in the 1960's at her landmark restaurant the Mandarin, (below left) with her nephew Frank and (below right) chatting with renowned chef, protege and best friend Alice Waters.

Sun would come to know Waters well and remembers vividly how her restaurant Chez Panisse in Berkeley became one of the prime movers behind the new California cuisine. "Alice was always talking about doing different things, like doing organic vegetables which was unheard of back in the late 60's," said Sun. "The soul of California cuisine is French, perhaps in presentation. The heart of it was Italian, a little rough around the edges with a local flair. Much of it as well was the North American pioneering spirit that maximized rudimentary cooking methods, like cast iron skillets. However, the backbone of California cuisine was farm to table. They were fastidious in searching for the best and freshest ingredients, which California offered like few other places. But again, Niagara has all those elements as well."

Well, maybe not all of the elements. While everything from the soil up is available and fresh produce is not an issue in Niagara, the San Francisco Bay Area has long been a bastion of alternative thought and innovative spirit that very few regions can touch.

From the mid to late 60's, northern California was the counterculture capital of the world and it extended far beyond the music and drug scene. It was a place that was ripe for new ideas and a young Frank Sun needed look no further than his aunt's backyard to see the proof. Not only were the likes of psychedelic pioneers Jefferson Airplane, featuring charismatic lead singer Grace Slick, regular visitors to Chiang's home across the Golden Gate Bridge in Marin County, but so too were young chefs Waters, Puck and Towers.

Grace Slick (center) and the Jefferson Airplane were regular visitors to Cecilia Chiang's restaurant and house.

Also among the frequent visitors were the up-and-coming winemakers of the Napa Valley. "I can remember so many Sunday afternoons out on the deck where chefs would bring food and wine makers wine," said Sun. "That kind of exposure to culinary pleasures was an education basically by osmosis."

Back in the 1960's and 70's, Napa was still fairly raw and its wine considered provincial. But Sun remembers the adventurous spirit and confidence of the winemakers. "They had ambition, but they weren't full of themselves," he said. "They were out to make a difference with what they had in California. They had been to France and back, drank some of the best stuff. But they wanted to make good wine, and they knew they could."

It was no coincidence that as the food improved around the Bay Area, so too did the wine.

"It was a contagious vibe, and it can't help but change you," said Sun. "There was a cross promotion of wine and food. But they never consciously sat down and said, 'let's create a California cuisine.' Everyone just kind of touched it and embraced it without having to say a word." According to Sun, it was the female food writers who really got things going and defined the movement. "They were the inspiration and the voices," said Sun. "It was basically all women, Cecilia included, who made a difference for California cuisine."

Sun would leave northern California for Toronto to live with his mother and eventually attended McMaster University in nearby Hamilton. While studying there he would make a pleasant discovery. "We had the Niagara region on our doorstep," he said. "I was surprised to see all the fresh greens, fruit orchards and the row upon row of grapevines. It was an unpretentious place full of potential and I felt this spiritual affinity. It was quiet but you could sense there was quality."

While the general perception of Canada is that it's one big slab of ice, at 41-44° Niagara shares a latitude similar to Tuscany in Italy and Provence in France. Known as "Canada's fruit basket", the Niagara peninsula is blessed with a unique microclimate forged by Lake Ontario and the Niagara Escarpment that creates deep, nutrient rich sandy soils extremely favorable for growing not only the freshest of vegetables, but a plethora of tender fruits.

Tuscany or Niagara? Colaneri winery on the St. David’s bench has a Mediterranean influence in both design and winemaking.

In the early 70's, Niagara's wine industry was very rudimentary and produced low quality wines from native grapes. Change was quickly coming though, spearheaded by Don Ziraldo and Karl Kaiser with their newly formed Inniskillin winery and the introduction of Vitis vinifera grapes.

Change was also coming for Sun who left Ontario to do another degree in Los Angeles at UCLA. He would earn some extra money by working in the restaurant business again, this time at his aunt's newly opened Mandarin Beverly Hills. Despite being around the food biz most of his life, he eventually graduated with a degree in architecture and was soon back in Asia when he accepted a teaching position at Chinese University of Hong Kong.

However his inherent creativity and culinary DNA saw him open a private kitchen that proved so popular, he suddenly found himself back in the restaurant business. He opened Tribute, an edifying homage to his family's food tradition, that was renowned for some of the most original and delectable California cuisine, and all at a reasonable price - not an easy feat in one of the most expensive cities on planet earth.

Chef Frank at work at his popular bistro Tribute Hong Kong,

One day a TV executive was dining in Tribute and asked to speak with the chef. He was impressed with the food and wanted to know if Frank was interested in co-hosting a popular TV show that was going to film in Hong Kong.

"Sure," said Frank. "What's the name of the show?" The show was called No Reservations and featured none other than Rock and Roll Chef turned TV star Anthony Bourdain. Before he knew it, Sun was filming with Bourdain at locations like Happy Valley Racetrack and in Causeway Bay Typhoon Shelter dining on, not surprisingly, typhoon shelter crab.

Sun showing TV chef and author Anthony Bourdain around the town in an episode of NO RESERVATIONS that aired in 2007.

Bourdain loved it all and the two developed a kinship that saw Chef Tony confide in Chef Frank that he was getting married and that his Sardinian girlfriend was six months pregnant. "He wasn't ambivalent because he was happy at the prospect of being a father and having stability in life," said Sun. "But he was also conscious of the changes that would come in his life, particularly toning down his rebellious streak."

Sun remembered that Bourdain could be both personable and distant. "There were two sides to him," said Sun. "He could be joking and gregarious and then out of the blue he would ask me, if you knew you were eating your last meal in life, what would it be?"

When Bourdain died suddenly in 2018, he left an extraordinary but complex legacy. "What I will remember most is how he really opened people's eyes to different culinary traditions and cultures," said Sun. "And he embraced it in a way that I don't think he even realized what he was doing. He was rebelling against the French cuisine influence and I think some of his issues were related to trying to live up to this mythical Michelin star reputation. It was not who he was. What he did in a way was a kind of fusion. He used all this international mindset to come back and reinvestigate and deconstruct what the French influence on cuisine is."

It was a lesson that Sun took to heart both as a person and a chef. "You need a bit of rebellion and irreverence in a positive way, a bit of deconstruction just to turn things slightly," he said. "Because of that people will get attracted to it. Sometimes small differences can make big differences."

Tribute North, which Sun opened in Beijing in 2008 just in time for the Summer Olympics

He currently has no desire to get back in the restaurant game either in Niagara or anywhere in the Greater Toronto Area. Being a roving chef is more than enough to satiate his palette these days. "With the pop-up you have the flexibility to adapt menus and the ability to move from winery to winery and cater to different flavor profiles of wines," he said. "It also gives you more freedom to come up with cuisine that may be not as traditional as it has been here and infusing it with international sensibilities to fit this wine. It's a way to acknowledge the terroirs and the makers of the wine in their particular focus."

To Sun, it's also an opportunity to entertain alternatives of cooking. "It's novel, it's fun, it's interesting and it generates more different groups of people," he said. "We call these pop-ups, Benchland Blues 'temporary contemporary'."

The mantra of the group is fairly straightforward: Think Global, Eat Local. "There may be an international and somewhat experimental edge to what we are doing, but at its core it's all Niagara," he said. "Everything you need, from the produce to the wine, is all right here. Like I said before, whatever California cuisine became - with its farm to table ethos - it has nothing on what we can grow and do in Niagara."

He is also adamant about challenging the conventional notion of matching wine with food. "It should be matching the food to the wine," he said. "The flavor profile of any wine is basically set and so are the levels of acidity and alcohol content. It may breathe a little when you open it, otherwise it is what it is. But your meal is alive and food can and should be customized to fit the taste profile of the wine."

Humble by nature, Sun became an acclaimed chef in Hong Kong and Beijing by developing a relationship with the people behind the produce he was buying. There was not a vendor in the legendary wet markets of Hong Kong that didn't know him by name as he scavenged about for the freshest and most interesting ingredients in the early hours of the day.

"I would like to get to know the boutique farmers and artisans of food making around Niagara, not necessarily the big ones," he said. "But the ones that grow interesting vegetables in particular, and work with them and try to see if we can grow some things. It's the celebration of the boutique makers of lifestyle, such as food, that made the difference in California cuisine. It could easily be the case in Niagara as well."

By the time he left Beijing for good in 2024, Sun had been the driving force behind seven cafes and restaurants over 20 plus years of culinary vision in Asia. A creative soul at heart, his passion is his craft. It's a passion that he is eager to share and broaden in the bounteous Niagara region. "The sharing of the history of food, I think people get that," he said. "It's a dining experience based on culture, not on cost."

Frank Sun can be reached at franksun419@gmail.com