Quinton Bennett Brings a Global Career Home
Quinton Bennett has joined O’Rourke Family Estate as Culinary Director, bringing one of Canada’s most decorated chefs to the helm of Row 188, the estate’s fine dining restaurant in Lake Country. For Bennett, the appointment centres on that specific stretch of shoreline within the wider Okanagan, and on what he calls “the connection between the terroir, the wine, and Carr’s Landing,” a relationship he intends to define through everything the kitchen sends to the table.
As Culinary Director, Bennett’s mandate extends beyond a single kitchen. He leads culinary direction across both O’Rourke Family Estate and Peak Cellars wineries, shaping menus, standards, and vision for the group as a whole. At Row 188 specifically, he works in close partnership with Executive Chef Julien Lamrani, who continues to oversee daily kitchen operations. Lamrani brings his own considerable pedigree, with years spent in Michelin-starred kitchens in Paris and other celebrated dining rooms abroad, and the pairing gives Row 188 two chefs with deep European and North American fine dining experience, now applied to a single table.
Bennett arrives with a career built inside some of the world’s most demanding kitchens, and a four-time Michelin Star earned at Enigma Restaurant in Toronto, where he held the distinction from 2022 through 2025. It is a rare credential in Canadian kitchens, and it speaks to the discipline he now carries into the Okanagan. Along the way he has cooked at Hawksworth in Vancouver, consistently ranked among the country’s finest restaurants, trained at Northcote Manor in England, a Michelin-starred institution, and completed a stage at Noma in Copenhagen, long regarded as one of the fifty best restaurants on earth. That experience now shapes the terms on which he judges the property itself. “It sits on Okanagan Lake with granite soil and a west-facing orientation, and those characteristics make it exceptional for wine, for orchards, and for farming and foraging in general,” Bennett said, describing the same land his menu is now built around.
That land, rather than any outside supply chain, sets the pace of service. “The menu is designed to be fluid, and it evolves with almost every service,” Bennett explained, adding that “we let the local environment dictate what gets featured” rather than planning dishes weeks in advance. He pointed to one recent example: a local partner offered a fresh ingredient midweek, the kitchen tested it, had it harvested Friday morning, and had it on a feature dish that same evening. “What is best right now, from our own gardens or our local partners, is what ends up on the plate,” he said. “What we grow and gather on the estate, the gardens, the orchards, the vines, and what we forage, is the foundation.”
Guests taste that philosophy before the first course arrives. They are greeted with a macaron, “which is always our opening bite,” according to Bennett, and one that plays against expectation. “A macaron is traditionally sweet and normally sits at the dessert end of a meal, so guests don’t expect it as the first thing they’re served,” he said. Past versions have drawn inspiration from a smoked salmon bagel, built savoury against the familiar sweet form, in keeping with his instinct to “take something familiar, put it somewhere unexpected, and make the first bite a signature.”
For Bennett, the region itself offers something his international training rarely afforded him. “The quality of the ingredients, and the degree of control,” he said, is what distinguishes Row 188 from the kitchens he has worked in abroad, thanks to “oversight from seed to fruit through our own on-site growing program,” paired with the estate’s own wine production. “We control almost every element on the table, from the food itself to the wine it’s paired with,” he said, noting that “the pairings and the produce are developed together, on the same ground, rather than sourced separately and matched after the fact.”
Row 188 offers two distinct settings for that vision to unfold. By day, the dining room opens fully to the vineyard through a wall of glass, where wood-beamed ceilings and a cluster of lantern-style pendant lights sit above tables angled toward Okanagan Lake and the mountains beyond, with a curved banquette anchoring the room’s centre. By evening, the space shifts into a darker, more intimate register: channel-tufted sofas and low lamplight replace the open-air brightness, an exquisitely designed bar anchors one end of the room, and floor-to-ceiling drapery softens the space into something closer to a private club than a winery restaurant. The estate itself spans a 20,439 square metre facility on a granite knoll, with more than forty hectares of vineyard and an underground network of wine caves.
With Bennett’s appointment, O’Rourke Family Estate positions Row 188 among a small group of Canadian restaurants where Michelin-level pedigree meets a working vineyard, granite caves, and lake views, a combination the estate is betting will carry its culinary reputation well beyond the Okanagan.