ElderCamp cooks up homemade nostalgia
Barton Street café focuses on fermentation, preservation and slow food while sharing knowledge and building community, all in the neighbourhood founder Kathryn Dieroff grew up in.
Kathryn Dieroff knows a little bit about almost everything. A goldsmith, sewist, and chef, most recently she’s opened the doors to ElderCamp, a grab-and-go café and sandwich shop in Barton Village that specializes in fermentation, preservation, and comfort food.
Founded in 2019 by Dieroff and Nadine Ubl under the name NanaCamp, ElderCamp has already lived multiple lives as a pop-up, at coworking spaces, and as a stall at the Hamilton Farmers’ Market.
“We started out as education workshops because so many people would come up to me and say, ‘Kathryn, how do I hem these pants? How do I pickle these beans? How do I make this loaf of bread?’ I was sort of the on-call person to help with these things,” says Dieroff, who grew up learning and absorbing skills from her parents and grandparents, making pies with Nana, sewing with her mom, processing film and prints in an at-home darkroom, painting, stitching, and creating the perfect sandwich with her brother.
“It was just constant creativity, creative energy, and education,” she says. “I wanted to be able to offer that back.”
Since those early memories of embracing food and craft traditions, she’s strived to find a way to do-it-all-herself at home, approaching her work with care and precision. She completed a honours bachelor of arts degree from Trent University in cultural studies, with a focus on visual and written storytelling, before attending George Brown College for jewellery arts and design. In 1999, Dieroff started her first business and has been self-employed ever since, working in coworking spaces and owning a jewellery store in Toronto, before moving back to her hometown of Hamilton.
Located at 340 Barton St. E., ElderCamp’s walls are lined with art and other ephemera tracing her family’s early days in the city. It’s just around the corner from Oak Avenue, where Dieroff’s grandfather owned his first home. Her great-grandparents lived at Burlington and Wentworth. Though she grew up on the Mountain, Dieroff says she spent most of her time downtown, attending shows, purchasing deadstock fabric from Ottawa Street, and soaking up the small, unique spaces that encouraged community.
In addition to being a café that serves coffee, drinks, and comfort food sourced from local farmers and preserved fresh, ElderCamp strives to be a safe space where people can gather, tell stories, and make connections. Future plans include hosting workshops and non-secular after-hour singalongs. But the vision doesn’t end there.
“We want to have a camp. We want to have a place out in the country with a bed and breakfast and a community kitchen where we can conduct community workshops,” says Dieroff. “People would come together. We could host weddings there. We could have conferences. And we would branch out beyond food to natural fabric dyeing and foraging, and really draw on the efforts of the community to be able to teach people things,” she says.
Dieroff says that as soon as she saw the space on Barton Street, which formerly housed Emerald Coffee Co., she could see ElderCamp thriving, especially by serving made-from-scratch meals to the nearby General Hospital and Westinghouse HQ communities.
“I want to think that Barton Village can develop in a thoughtful way, thinking of the needs of the people, the residents who live in this neighbourhood,” she says, adding that Barton Street has a reputation of being a scary place.
“The thing that gets forgotten is families live here. There are houses all around here. You see parents with strollers, and there are people who live and work in this place,” adding that neighbourhood families need a grocery store like Barton Lettuce and butchers like J Waldron. “They need a place to get their coffee and come sit and work. It shouldn’t be a food desert,” she says. “It shouldn’t be a place that cars just drive through. It should be a community, and we’re hopeful that we’re going to be able to do that.”
ElderCamp focuses on slow food and pure, unique flavours that evoke nostalgia and comfort. Dishes are constructed with sustainability and affordability in mind through a pantry full of vinegars, syrups, ferments, and preserves. Saturday and Sunday brunch boasts tater tot brisket hash, brotzeit (a traditional Bavarian snack), among other sweet and savoury items.
“Coffee is also a fermented food, so is chocolate,” says Dieroff, adding that one of her most popular pantry items is a chili sauce using her mother’s recipe.
At its heart, ElderCamp’s concept is about sharing – not just meals but traditions, skills, and memories. Dieroff believes that sustainability and stewardship lie in filling gaps in knowledge that have disconnected people from their food and where it comes from.
“I want to feed people. I want to feed people and have them experience these things. I also want people to be able to do these things. Ask me for a recipe. I will write it down for you. and help you to do it,” says Dieroff. “I'm not here to protect. None of this is precious. It’s all to share.”
