Indian Summer Festival’s 2021 launch party fuses food, wine, and art
Chef Vikram Vij and Volcanic Hills Estate Winery’s Bobby Gidda collaborate on a gourmet meal to enjoy at home during the art-filled bash
Volcanic Hills Estate Winery Bobby Gidda (left) and local chef Vikram Vij are collaborating on a gourmet food-and-wine-pairing for Indian Summer Festival’s Opening Party - Metamorphosis. Photo of Vij by Aaron Aubrey
Indian Summer Festival 2021 runs June 17 to July 17 online and in-person. The ISF2021 Opening Party - Metamorphosis takes place online June 17 at 7 pm PDT.
“HOME”, TO RENOWNED Vancouver-based chef Vikram Vij, is not a single place but two: his native land of India and the nation he has lived in since 1989. One of the facets of the Indian Summer Festival that the local restaurateur loves is how the annual event connects the two countries. Through the transformative power of the arts, borders come down.
He also sees the fest as breaking boundaries within the arts.
“The festival is a perfect example of bridging those gaps,” Vij tells Stir by phone. “It bridges the gap between India, the country of my birth, and Canada, where I live. It’s the bridge between the two countries; that’s where the flavour is.
“It’s an extremely beautiful part of the scene, and I think we should be especially thankful now with what is happening in the world,” says Vij, of Vij’s Restaurant (with Meeru Dhalwala), South Surrey’s My Shanti, and Victoria’s Vij’s Sutra. “It is also bridging those gaps between sectors: art and food. You can’t have one without the other.”
Vij is curating the menu for the June 17 ISF2021 Opening Party - Metamorphosis. With food and drink being delivered to Premium Pass holders’ doors, the event kicks off the festival’s 10-event lineup running online and in person to July 17.
Sirish Rao and Laura Byspalko launched the Indian Summer Festival in 2011 with an eye to breaking stereotypical notions of South Asian art as traditional and nostalgic. Since then, the annual event has expanded from a focus on diasporic South Asian identity in British Columbia to a multicultural expression of ideas and issues at the crossroads of diverse communities through a South Asian lens.
This year’s theme is “shapeshifting”, in part because it reflects the festival’s re-invented hybrid format, with digital and in-person events. Then there is the broader concept of transformation that the arts can invoke.
“Fluidity is what I’m feeling right now,” Rao tells Stir by phone. “As we all look around at the world, it feels like a cascading series of things that are brutal and heart-rending, but all of these are rashes, symptoms of a deeper disease. They’re not surprising, but a sign of bigger issues. In a way it does feel like we are all being called upon to change in some way.”
Amid troubling times, the arts can a form of respite and rejuvenation. Rao, a prolific writer whose books have been translated into 17 languages, recalls a recent conversation he had with Musqueam artist Debra Sparrow about the role of artists play in the face of difficulty. (Earlier this year, ISF unveiled a new visual art project in collaboration with Punjabi Market Regeneration Collective, featuring street banners around the market with artwork by Sparrow and ISF2021 featured artist, Jag Nagra.)
“She said you have to shine—shine so bright that the light dims the darkness,” Rao says. “This is what artists have to do.
“Ever since the fest started, it’s been a place to really bring a certain kind of exuberance to the city,” he says. “I often use the metaphor of the table; feast and festival both come from the same word. It is about a garrulous long table we invite people to sit at. I think of the poem by Joy Harjo [“Perhaps the World Ends Here”]: “The world begins at the kitchen table”.
Indian Summer Festival co-artistic director Sirish Rao sees the fest as a long-table dinner in a way, a place to gather and tell stories.
The ISF opening-night bash is a celebration of the arts, and the way Vij sees things, food is art. “You can’t have one without the other,” he says. “If you look at it historically, the greatest artists were always really good eaters. Food is not just to fill you up. Good food, that is good quality, is artwork; it’s a different form of artistic expression; it’s an artistic expression of different cultures and parts of the world. If it’s somebody’s visual art or their music or something they write, that’s their artwork, their interpretation, their passion. The only difference with my artwork is you can taste and eat it.
“I love that the festival has been so good at bringing artists and chefs together—musicians, writers, thinkers, and philosophers who love art,” he says. “With Indian Summer Festival, my food is part of the creative process.”
The lineup at this year’s ISF opening party includes musical collective Laydy Jams, beatboxer Shamik Bilgi, multidisciplinary act Her Tribal Roots, and comedian Kamal Pandya. ISF2021 Premium Pass holders get a gourmet meal by Vij delivered to their door along with a wine pairing from Volcanic Hills Estate Winery.
Vikram Vij sees food as art.
Vij’s menu starts with two vegan dishes: Roadside Papri Chaat with local blueberry chutney and Medley of Vegetables in a coconut-vegetable curry. Next is a choice of South Indian-style Black Cardamom Spiced Jackfruit Curry (also vegan) or Vij’s Kalongi Chicken Curry. It comes with chapati and rice, with coconut rice pudding for dessert.
To accompany the celebratory meal is a bottle of Volcanic Hills 2018 Single Vineyard Gewurztraminer.
Bobby Gidda runs the winery with two siblings, the origins of the venture going back to their grandfather. Mehtab Gidda came to Canada from Lambra. a small town in East Punjab in 1958. He spoke no English and had little more than $5 and a metal plate, spoon, and fork with him. But he also brought a deep knowledge of farming from his years growing and harvesting mango trees in Indian. He settled in the Okanagan Valley, eventually bringing his wife and three sons over to join him. They were the first only Indo-Canadian family in West Kelowna for 15 years.
“My grandfather was a tremendous man,” Gidda tells Stir. “He was a hard worker. He enjoyed being outside. Even in his last year, he was still out there pruning those grapes. (Mehtab passed in 2013 at age 83.) “For a man that couldn’t speak English… His dad—my great grandfather—had the foresight to push his son to go on that journey to Canada.”
The family purchased their first property in 1963 and went on to become West Kelowna’s dominant apple farmers. In the 1970s, as wineries began popping up in the valley, one of Mehtab’s sons, Sarwan (Bobby Gidda’s father) dreamed of growing grapes.
Along with Mehtab, Sarwan and his wife, Sudarshana, started planting. They wound up selling their fruit to leading wineries, such as Gray Monk. Sarwan’s children went on to fulfill their father’s vision. After establishing and moving on from Mt Boucherie Estate Winery, the Siddas launched Volcanic Hills Estate Winery in 2010. It’s situated on the southeast slope of Boucherie Mountain, a 60-million-year-old dormant volcano.
Volcanic Hills has a portfolio of more than 25 wines, including Pinot Noir, Pinot Gris, and Gamay Noir, Like Vij, the winery has collaborated with ISF since the very beginning, working closely with the chef to come up with a wine pairing each year. Gidda describes Volcanic Hills 2018 Single Vineyard Gewurztraminer as off-dry with just a touch of sweetness. Medium-bodied, fresh, and round, the versatile wine has flavours of fresh gala apples, lychee fruit, pear, a hint of lemon, and baking spice.
Gidda says the festival gives people a chance to reconnect to their roots. “It showcases our culture in many layers; it’s not just cuisine and wine but also music and language,” Gidda says. “When I was younger, every couple of years I would go back to India, but a lot of people have never gone back or they were too young to really remember it. Over the last year it’s been very difficult for my wife not to go home and see family. This is a way to get to experience real Indian culture. It really brings that feeling of home back.”
Another highlight of the opening night party for ISF2021 Premium Pass holders is the Chatroulette afterparty. Guests will be paired randomly with someone at the event, whether it’s an artist, a certain celebrity chef, or another attendee, for a three-minute one-on-one conversation before they’re paired up again. By the end of the evening, people will have had brief encounters with a dozen others. Everyone has a story to tell—this being the very essence of the festival itself.
“There is nothing more important than storytelling, and Indian Summer Festival is essentially that—it’s an act of storytelling, an act of gathering,” Rao says. “Storytelling is the most basic human impulse; it almost defines us as an animal, that we sit around and tell stories.
“We speak our imaginations into being, and I think this is so important, especially when our daily lives and structures as we know them have gone upside down,” he says. “What saves us are stories, and the possibility to engage in our imaginations and be building some sense of the future together. That happens in storytelling and in gatherings. When individual human beings come together as a group, they can create completely sublime things.”
For more information, see Indian Summer Festival.
Volcanic Hills Estate Winery in West Kelowna is a family-run business with roots in Punjab.
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