“ Lunch is duck tortellini, which is one of the smaller ravioli. It’ll be floating in a broth of vegetable and parmesan rind that have been simmered for six hours. It’s very cheesy, but also subtle and just really complements a spoon sized tortellini.”

I just met Trever Bass and his wife, Elizabeth Anderson-Bass, at Manson’s Friday Market. Someone had suggested I do a story on them. When I asked Trever  for an interview, he suggested I come over for lunch. 

The duck tortellini was delicious.  

“I love feeding people. A plate of pasta can mean a lot of different things to a lot of people. You can have a lot of different shapes. The pasta can be made from a lot of different ingredients. It can be sauced a lot of different ways and presented in a lot of different ways, so within just making pasta for people, there’s endless variety,” explained Trever. 

“I’m an American living in Canada, making Italian food. It was more of a hobbier business, I would call it. In the most modern terms, ‘a side hustle’ –  a thing that I do to make some extra money to round out  our household income. In my previous life, I ran breweries. I have a certificate in brewing science and engineering, and fermentation science. I really like being an American making styles from all over the world. I am pretty good at it and also just putting my own fingerprint on those traditional styles.  I can make an Irish stout which would be a lot like what you’d have in Ireland, that would be reminiscent of Guinness, but it’d be my impression of it.” 

Elizabeth added “This is all Trever and his magical pasta making. I just get to enjoy it and be supportive. Trever used to be my customer when we both worked in the beer industry.” 

Trever Bass: “I bought hops from Elizabeth for about two years.” 

Cortes Currents: How long have you been together? 

Elizabeth Anderson-Bass: “Coming up on six years, but we’ve known each other for longer.  We got to brew beers together and I watched him work through ingredients and process. He’s just so creative with flavours, processing and recipe development.  It’s fun to watch it transition into pasta and grow.” 

This story  goes back prior to their meeting.

Trever Bass: “I started home brewing while I was in university. Some friends gave me a kit for  probably my 20th birthday. It was like, let’s make beer before we can legally buy it in the States. The drinking age is 21.  So I made a couple of batches and then I finished university. Suddenly I was out of school and  just working.  I felt like I had all this free time. I had a good friend who pushed me and we encouraged each other and it just basically snowballed into a career. I decided that I was probably better going into a career of brewing than going into a career of fine art, which is what I went to school for. It was a little bit more lucrative and a lot more fun.”  

Cortes Currents: Where did this happen?  

Trever Bass: “Flagstaff, northern Arizona. It’s the town just south of the Grand Canyon. I moved to Portland in the beginning of  2010 to work in breweries.  I was there for about 10 years.”

Cortes Currents: When did you start cooking? 

Trever Bass: “I first started making pasta at home for myself,  back in 2002. Some friends  invited me over for a pasta evening. We  mixed one egg and a hundred grams of flour and turned that into a dough and rolled it out and made linguine.  It was amazing. I still have that roller and I still use it every once in a while. That was the thing that showed me  how easy you can make pasta and  how much better it is when it’s fresh versus a box that’s maybe been sitting in a  boat shipped over from Italy, or on a shelf somewhere for close to a year.  That was a key moment.” 

“Then I went to Venice and I saw trays of handmade pasta in a window of all different colours and shapes and that blew my mind.  That was a big moment as well.”  

“While I was brewing, I found that  I enjoyed tasting those things, but I didn’t enjoy  drinking a lot of it. I really needed to scratch a creative itch.  I had two friends that were  in a similar situation. So we got together and cooked.  The idea was to cook our way through the Silver Spoon,  and it ended up being an Italian dinner every week on a Monday night after work. We would cook together and get inventive and we ended up dropping the Silver Spoon. It turns out it’s not such an amazing cookbook,  but we still kept cooking for a couple of years. That would have been in 2016 and 2017.”  

“I moved from Portland to Vancouver to run a specific brewery.  I was running two production breweries, opening a satellite brewery in Calgary. Then I had a health event come up that basically put me in bed for several months. The speed that I was used to just completely fell out from underneath me.  When we came out the other side of it, we just wanted to shift and move to Cortes Island.”

“My stepdad first started coming here in 1980 and my mom moved here in 1998.  I  started coming here in 1999  and love Cortes. It felt like the place to be rather than Vancouver. Slow down,  focus on quality rather than busy.  We moved to Cortes full-time in September 2023.”

Cortes Currents: Why did you make the jump to food as opposed to brewing?  

Trever Bass: “The brewing industry had  shifted and saturated and the predominant exciting styles were moving away from traditional beer components of barley, wheat, water, yeast and hops, and moving more towards something that didn’t taste like beer anymore.  Making alcohol is great and it’s fun, but I just also found myself drinking less and wanting to do more food focused things and be outside more.”

“I had the health event and it just felt like a good chapter break.” 

 “We had originally moved here to spend about nine months.  It was my wife’s first winter here. We wanted to figure out what the winter was going to look like for the two of us and,  last winter was really mild  and it was great. When we started to figure out what was happening, our lease had ran out. We needed to be out in June. Then I had a job offer that came with a full time lease. So we pounced on it  and here we are.  My main source of income is property management, but that’s not a full time job.”  

“I also make pasta and sell it at the market every Friday.   I really enjoy making and selling pasta at the market. I get to talk to all the people that are going to cook and eat the pasta and the ‘face to face’ is really nice. I get to talk about recipes and sauces . Especially if I can produce 50 to 75 pasta meals Friday morning and get those on people’s tables Friday evening, like, how wonderful!”

“A friend and I did a pasta night at Manson’s Hall. We did a pizza window out of the house here that was just super fun and  I’ve done some pop-ups over this last year.”

Cortes Currents: What do you mean by a pop-up?

Trever Bass: “The pop ups that I did this summer were cooking for a group of people, like a catered evening. 12 to 15 people was ideal. You can do five courses. You can make everything before people get too hungry and too antsy, ready for the next course and keep it moving. It feels like a restaurant, but it’s outside on a lawn, we have a limited amount of seats and the menu’s fixed.” 

“Another version is just having three types of pasta and three sauces and two salads and two dessert options out of  Manson’s Hall. The restaurant pops up for one evening  or two evenings and then it’s gone.”

Cortes Currents: What are your sales like?  

Trever Bass: “It’s not huge, but  it supplements our income and I love doing it.” 

Elizabeth Anderson-Bass: “I love the social aspect of it and seeing the community.” 

Trever Bass: “The restaurant  situation on Cortes is  lacking. I’d like to do more pop-ups, maybe some cafe nights in the hall or out of the Co-op Cafe now that it sounds like they’re just starting to do that.  If there was a restaurant on Cortes on the South end, I’d love to be a part of it.”  

All pasta photos by Trever Bass. Photos of Trever in his kitchen and sitting down to a duck tortellini lunch were taken by Roy L Hales.

The podcast opened with some of the sounds Trever made while poping the tortellini into a pan, and closes with the audio clip from an Italian restaurant in Turin, Italy made by MartaZoe at freesound.org.

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