“It seems like sort of serendipity when I look back at it,” Dan Vorstermans says about his first kitchen job. “I cooked by myself, so I was prepping and executing every dish that went out.” This is a man that likes a small kitchen. After a stint at Chives where he managed some time on […]
Halifax Chefs
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Jessi Gillis
“I fell in love with food when I was 12,” says Gillis. “When all the other girls were reading Cosmo at 13 I was collecting food and wine magazines.” By the time she was 14 she knew she wanted to be a chef. She studied French and Italian culinary arts and at 19 she left […]
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Luther Shaver
“When I turned 11 or 12 my parents said, ‘You know what, you can cook your own meals.’ I was tripping in the kitchen and falling over sauces and dishes, but you learn your way.” Luther Shavers’ early lessons in food kickstarted a steady stream of them, taking early inspiration from his father’s natural talents […]
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Beth Muise
“For me cooking is about trying new things and trying to get other people to do the same,” says Beth Muise. “The feeling you get when you go and talk to a table and they tell you how amazing everything was is such a great feeling.” As a kid she thought she’d end up a […]
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Robert Reynolds
Robert Reynolds is holding down the kitchen at EDNA on Gottingen Street, perhaps a natural progression from his work as sous-chef at jane’s on the common where he worked under one of Halifax’s most unsung talents, Chef Paolo Colbertaldo. He trained in the UK at Thames Valley University, apprenticing at the Berkeley Hotel in London […]
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Lauren Marshall
Lauren Marshall can remember the exact moment she knew she wanted to be a chef. “I remember one Christmas when I was very small, my grandfather lit a plum pudding on fire,” she says. “He let me blow it out. That was the day I wanted to grow up and do what he did: Grandad […]
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Virgil Muir
“I’m a self-taught cook,” says Virgil Muir, who handles chef duties at The Food Wolf with Eric Gunnells. “I’m musician and am trained as a massage therapist; I use my senses to do everything I do. The food that I cook is made with particular attention to how it tastes, smells, looks and feels.” Muir grew […]
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Andrew Farrell
Andrew Farrell wears a uniform. It starts with a folded bandana wrapped around his forehead, replacing the stodgy pleats of a traditional chef’s toque. He wears a black chef’s coat over a pair of faded black jeans. A Moleskine notebook is tucked into a back pocket. And he almost always has a mug of coffee […]
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Brenan Madill
Brenan Madill likes a challenge. Inspired by his family and a stint as a dishwasher-cum-line cook—“It was like an amusement park where you never get off a ride or wait in line, just go go go”—-he enrolled in NSCC’s Culinary Arts post-high school. But after balancing first year with a cooking gig at the Hilton […]
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Frédéric Tandy
Frédéric Tandy has let the seasons be his guide since the beginning of his career in the kitchen. A native of Limoges, France, he grew up eating well and taking inspiration from his grandparents’ home cooking, garden-growing and pâté-making. So, his decision to go to culinary school was a natural one. “I didn’t want to […]