The return of the chef

Friends hash out big problems while eating fast food in old cars. Diplomats work out delicate solutions over strange salads. Families scream at each other over pots of spaghetti.

Whether in backrooms, ballrooms or a garbage-strewn Buick, the power of food—to bring people together and to weld disparate interests—remains unmatched.

“It's what gets people sitting down at a table and having a discussion,” Gerry Brandon says. “It's the one thing that seems to draw people out.”

The celebrated chef has always sought to use food to help people gather around the same table. But when his restaurant in northern Ontario—a critic’s darling of French, Anglo, and modern Indigenous cuisine—started slipping out of his grasp, he started looking for a new way to inspire people through food.

The restaurant

In 2019, Brandon and his wife opened a restaurant long in the making. L’Autochtone Tavern Américaine was born in a small city just west of the Quebec border and 500km north of Toronto.

Brandon grew up in Northern Ontario, an Anishinaabe survivor of the sixties scoop. After catching a taste for fine food while working in business, he worked his way up to sous-chef in a fine dining restaurant in London, Ontario and eventually graduated from Stratford Chef School in 1991. Before his return to Northern Ontario, he spent a decade in Vancouver working as a restaurant consultant—employment Brandon describes as “the Gordon Ramsey thing.” He also taught culinary arts at Seabird College in Agassiz.

But a restaurant of his own creation and design was still in the cards. L’Autochtone (A French term for Indigenous) quickly became popular and garnered positive reviews from critics and customers alike. It pulled people together, Brandon said at the time.

“Night after night, the conversations aren't strictly across the table,” he said. “It's so common to see people suddenly break into a conversation with a table beside them.” Groups who didn’t arrive at the restaurant would pull their tables together to continue conversations—even when some patrons spoke different languages.

But during the pandemic, when gathering in large groups became a health risk, a restaurant that prided itself on bringing people and cultures together for a meal was hit hard. So was Brandon himself.

After several bouts of COVID-19, the energy he had once commanded had dissipated. So had his sense of smell, seemingly for good—a disaster for a chef.

“I couldn't seem to recover after a night in the kitchen,” Brandon said. Brain fog and memory lapses lingered post-infection and followed him through long nights at the restaurant. Eventually, something had to change.

“[My wife and I] realized I didn't have the stamina to continue working night after night in a restaurant. And we're not young, we're in our 60s,” Brandon said.

They decided to close the restaurant. And as they were considering where—and what—to do next, a new idea emerged.

A friend in Chilliwack at Sqwah First Nation was opening a new school. She asked Brandon if he had thought about returning to teach in the Fraser Valley.

“I went, ‘You know, I hadn’t really thought about it,’” Brandon said. “Maybe this is fortuitous, or kismet.”

The Program

The new school is an Adult Education Centre run in partnership with Chilliwack School District and Sqwah First Nation. Up to 80 students this year will be working towards their adult Adult Dogwood diplomas (BC’s high school education equivalent). Courses will be available to both Indigenous and non-Indigenous students, and many will include trades or job training. Most programs will be free to those seeking their diploma.

Vocational training will include courses in building maintenance, carpentry, office administration, and training for education assistants. And, of course, Brandon’s Indigenous Entrepreneurial Cook course. While Brandon has taught culinary courses at Seabird Island College in Agassiz and Chilliwack previously, this new program will look a little different.

Brandon is cooking up the program from scratch. It will be flexible, he says. It will need to be, for the first few years. While few things are set in stone, even now in mid-September, there will be seats for about 20 students. But the vision he describes is not a business school, nor a Red Seal chef qualification.

Students in the program will learn about traditional Indigenous food and food systems. (And traditional food might be different from what students expect, Brandon said. Bannock, for example, isn’t usually included.)

While BC Indigenous communities have different traditional foods than the Anishinaabe whom Brandon hails from, the chef isn’t too worried. He’s planning to pull from a wider understanding of Indigenous food, just as he did in the menu of L’Autochtone: instead of a hyper-local, or even Canadian, spotlight he hopes the entirety of the Americas come into focus for students, from South America to the Arctic circle.

Students will also learn business techniques important for running a restaurant or food truck. They’ll develop menus, plan strategy, and learn grant writing, among other things. If a student is less interested in food and more in graphic design or marketing, Brandon said, they’ll have a place in the program too.

Learning about food and cooking is bigger than the business opportunities it can create, Brandon said, especially for Indigenous students. Many Indigenous kids in Canada—including Brandon, who was adopted as a baby—didn’t grow up with an understanding of the transformational, relational aspects of food that he hopes to emphasize. Government policies that emphasized assimilation and removed children from Indigenous families stole that from them.

“You have generations of young people that didn't spend time with parents or grandparents who knew how to cook from scratch,” Brandon said, “And so now you have tremendous health issues and mental health issues, and trauma-related issues that could have possibly been resolved with being able to grow up in a kitchen with your mother or your grandmother, cooking and helping them and understanding where your food comes from.”

But Brandon says he is also an example of how students can overcome personal struggles and find success later in life.

“As a teenager, I was a drug addict and homeless. I lived on the streets of Toronto. I spent time in jail, but I have a business degree, a culinary degree, a planning degree, and a teaching degree,” he said. “And I go, if I'm a big dummy and I can do this, certainly, you could do this as well.

At the same time, he said it’s OK if students leave the course without a desire to work in the restaurant industry, but with a better understanding of good, whole, and nutritious food—and how important it is to a good life.

“That's what I want to inspire people to do. And if I can do that, I've really done something right in my life. And that's what makes me happy.”