ABOUT SWALLOW TAIL

For food and wine lovers, Swallow Tail collaborates with local experts from chefs to mushroom hunters to create unique culinary experiences and educational foraging events, taste the wild side of British Columbia.

We’d love to create a custom gourmet experience for your group; company retreats, wedding celebrations, birthdays and reunions. Our activities range from underground dining at the secret supper club in Vancouver to a lunch on the beach with a local fisherman. Learn about edible shellfish and seaweeds while you dine.

Chef/Sommelier/Forager/Owner

In a lifetime of living, harvesting and cooking between the Coast Mountains and the Pacific Ocean near Vancouver, BC, Chef Robin has gathered an abundance of delicious local plants, wild mushrooms and fresh seafood into culinary repertoire. Her cooking has been influenced by her mother, grandmother and many chef mentors from around the world along the way.  Spain, Italy and Japan have long cooking traditions of using similar ingredients to her home, so regular pilgrimages to those places honed her cooking style. Her passion is sharing her collected research with you, connecting the dots from wilderness to plate and revealing delicious secrets from the forest to sea. Her advice is to gently follow the seasons and harvest what is offered freshest each month; shoots leaves in spring, summer seaweeds, flowers, fish and fruit, fall roots and mushrooms, winter seafood. Take the utmost care to pick only what is abundant and leave the rest for other beasts.  To join chef for one of her online classes, foraging field trips in Vancouver or food events this year sign up to our Swallow Tail members list here for free.

Chef Robin has worked to create food events with some of the cities best chefs from Hawksworth including Chef Bruno Feldeisen  (judge on TV’s, The Great Canadian Bake Off), Andrea Carlson of Burdock & Co, Wildebeests Jacob Deacon-Evans, and Campagnolo’s chef Ted Anderson.  Her sommelier studies were under the wise Barb Phillips (Master of Wine) and she’s eaten and cooked her way around the world.   Chef Robin is a member of the Vancouver Mycological society and has been running wild mushroom foraging trips and cooking classes for a decade.  Swallow Tail was created to unite these passions; cooking, drinking, foraging, friends and the great outdoors.   Chef Robin has been interviewed on the Food Network with Bob Blummer, CBC with Steven Quinn, Montecristo Magazine, Vancouver Magazine, the Huffington Post, Conde Nast Traveller and the Globe and Mail.

Chef Bruno Feldeisen (James Beard award winner from France and judge on TV’s The great Canadian bake off), Chef Jacob Deacon-Evans (Wildebeest),  Hawksworth, Andrea Carlson (Bishops, Burdock&Co), Ted Anderson (Roma, Campagnolo), Jane Cornborough (L’Abattoir), Shelley Robinson (Diva at the Met), Chef Brooke Lodge (Cocolico), Alvin Pillay (Bluebird), Jamie Huynh (Farmer’s Apprentice), Eddy Myselweic (our lovely Michelin starred chef from France), Jefferson Alvarez (Cacao).

We are always looking for more chefs and culinary creatives to collaborate with, shoot us an email at info@swallowtail.ca to get the conversation started.