Casino Hotels — four hotels

The island carries pavilions, paths and water, and no ground that anyone works for food. So the kitchen leans on growers spread across Québec and on the public markets standing across the channel in the city. Whatever the kitchen uses arrives over a bridge, in whatever order the season and the roads allow.

Farms across the province raise the produce, and the municipal market halls act as the gathering point where those farms already sell. Buyers meet vendors who have held the same stalls for generations, and the resort kitchen sits at the plain end of that municipal supply line, buying the way a household on the same street would.

Anything the province cannot raise in a cold year has to travel, and in winter that share grows. Citrus, coffee and warm-weather produce come from far outside Québec, because the outdoor ground here gives nothing at all for months.

Fruit farms and vineyards fill the Niagara Peninsula on every side of the town, and the kitchen leans on that belt. Tender fruit, grapes and field vegetables grow within the same county, on a strip of land warmed by two lakes. Supply here is a local matter for a good part of the year.

Family orchards and vineyards on the peninsula grow and pick the fruit, many of them holding the same benchland their grandparents planted. Regional packers and wineries gather what the farms bring in, and the resort buys through that established chain rather than running any land of its own anywhere near the town.

Outside the growing season the belt closes, and fruit comes from other countries instead. Fish, coffee and anything from a warm climate travel year round, because the peninsula grows fruit and vegetables well and produces almost nothing else the kitchen needs.

Water does most of the work here. The resort stands on the Fraser, near the fishing docks of Steveston, and the kitchen leans on what comes off the river and the coast. Around the building lies the delta, flat farmland that carries greens and root vegetables through a mild coastal season.

Boats working the Fraser and the strait land the catch, and they sell at the docks a short way downstream, where crews have unloaded for well over a century. Delta growers, many of them families farming reclaimed marsh, supply the vegetables. Both trades were in place long before the resort was built beside them.

Coffee, warm fruit and grain travel in, as they do anywhere on this coast. Richmond sits at a port, so distant supply is ordinary here, and the difference is simply that the fish and the greens do not need to make that journey.

Lake Couchiching lies at the edge of the property, and Simcoe County farmland surrounds it. The kitchen leans on that county: field vegetables, grain, dairy and meat raised within a short drive, on soil that has been farmed since the district was first surveyed. The resort stands on the lands of the Chippewas of Rama First Nation.

Simcoe County farms grow it, and many of them are family operations selling through the same regional distributors that serve the towns nearby. Growers here work sandy ground north of the city belt, and the resort buys as one more account among the schools, hospitals and restaurants of the county.

Ontario winters shut the fields, and from late autumn the county sends little. Produce then comes from other provinces and other countries, along with coffee and warm fruit, which never grow anywhere near this lake in any season at all.