TAKING A STAND IN THE CITY’S HOTTEST KITCHEN
It’s not how Glen Pereira saw his culinary career working out, but the Drop-In Centre chef serves up square meals to appreciative diners using whatever comes around.
“Are you hungry?”
It’s the first thing Glen Pereira said when I walked into the kitchen at the Calgary Drop-in Centre. For Pereira, by some measures the busiest chef in the city, the question is both a greeting and a reflex. It’s just after lunchtime, and the kitchen, despite having served over 800 people, is spotless. But Pereira was only too happy to mess it up again. “Here, I’ll get you something.”
A few hours earlier, we’d been at the Calgary Inter-faith Food Bank, where Pereira begins each workday. Most chefs peruse farmers markets for seasonal inspiration; Pereira “shops” at Food Link, a program run by the food bank to provide food and supplies to more than 200 Calgary agencies and community programs. He arrived on his scooter, greeted everyone by name, pulled his list from his pocket and gathered supplies. A driver from the Drop-In Centre meets him there to load up the day’s supplies.
We’d foraged in the living-room-sized refrigerator, pulling open cardboard boxes to reveal tubs of cream cheese. “I can use this to make fettuccine alfredo,” Pereira said, holding up packages of cheese flavoured with garlic and dill. He and the driver loaded a pallet of boxes: frozen french fries to serve with the burgers he’d received from Carmen Creek Ranch, green and yellow beans, canned kidney beans for chili, tubs of organic spring greens, grape tomatoes, and a few other ingredients he knew he could work with. The oxtail was left behind; in a previous life he might have jumped at it, but this time he left it for someone else. “You have to know your audience,” he said. “Our clientele won’t like it.”
Back at the Drop-In Centre, kitchen staff and volunteers unloaded the haul. Pereira was especially thrilled about receiving fresh produce—something he can’t afford to buy. The Drop-In Centre feeds about 800 for both breakfast and lunch and close to 1,300 people for dinner every day on a budget of $1.40 per person, which also covers 500 extra bagged lunches to go, two snacks and coffee service.
At the edge of downtown, overlooking the Bow River and 4th Avenue flyover, the Calgary Drop-In & Rehab Centre is the largest organization of its kind in North America. It offers a safe place to sleep, short-term or longer, shelter during the day, clothing, medical services, counselling, education, and warm, made-from-scratch meals. Another 140 people are housed and fed in the former Enmax building on Memorial Drive at Crowchild Trail. Shelter services are free and accessible to anyone who needs them, 365 days a year.
Food costs are a struggle for most in the restaurant industry, but for Pereira they are a daily challenge he has learned to thrive on. Rather than construct a menu based on a certain type of cuisine, or on local and seasonal ingredients, Pereira decides what the Drop-In Centre clients will eat based on what he can get. When individual meals are sponsored by oil companies, law firms, organizations like Mealshare, families and smaller community groups, he has a larger budget. This might result in fish and chips or perogies for lunch instead of a basic soup and sandwich. But corporate sponsorships have dwindled in recent years, and the Drop-In Centre is now more reliant on the Food Bank and the creative use of whatever donations show up at the loading dock at any given minute of any given day. Flats of tomatoes or end-of-life strawberries might arrive from a grocery chain, or caterers might bring surplus items after an event.
“No other place, as a cook, do you have to do the loading dock,” Pereira said. “And dishes. And organize volunteers. People are donating all the time—we have to bring the food up, assess it, figure out what we can do with it, how long it will last, how it can be stored, and we save as much as we can. Most food arrives on its last legs, so you have to move fast.”
Most often, donations work their way into an upcoming meal. The previous Monday, Pereira arrived at work to find that a mosque had donated an enormous tub of rice, and another of chicken curry the night before. The scheduled meal was supposed to be sweet-and-sour meatballs. “I looked at the cooks and I said, ‘OK, chop some vegetables,’ ” Pereira recalled. “We had a couple bins of potatoes and carrots, so we chopped them all, boiled them, added the chicken curry and made a stew out of it, which we served over the rice. It was pretty good.”
As he opened an 80-gallon kettle in which to stir a batch of ground beef, breaking it up with a stainless steel paddle big enough for a canoe, he reflected on more differences between his kitchen and those of other chefs. “Cooking in restaurant kitchens, you have to be on the ball every minute—you have different things cooking at different times, you can’t mess it up,” he said. “With stews, soups, chili, it doesn’t matter—more time just makes it better. There’s more flexibility when it comes to ingredients. But it’s all freshly made. Do you cook every meal that you eat from scratch? I don’t even do that at home.” Anyone who has ever looked in the fridge and proclaimed there to be nothing to eat could learn something from Pereira.
Pereira grew up in Mumbai, the youngest of three boys in a family of five, all living in a 600-square-foot apartment. “We didn’t have toys, we didn’t have stuff—in our house it was mostly food, good food, made by my mom,” he said. “In our culture, food is central to everything you do. You have a party, you have a wedding, you have a funeral—it’s all around food. So no matter how important your issues are, food ties everything together. And I want to be part of that.”
He attended cooking school in Mumbai, apprenticed at the Taj Mahal Palace (a five-star hotel), worked at an airline catering service, on a cruise ship and at various hotels, before arriving in Edmonton to study at NAIT. “Nobody gets up in the morning and says, ‘I want to work at the Drop-In Centre,’” he said. “Everyone wants to work at the Palliser.”
That assessment brings up an obvious question, so I asked Pereira why he chose this job and stuck it out for the last five years. “I don’t know,” he said, the laughter leaving his voice for the first time that day. “I was thinking last night about what really keeps me here, and I don’t know. I wanted to do something big—go to Africa or something radical like that. I envisioned going over to Syria and cooking in the camps, but reality is different. My son was born a few months before I took this job. You have to think—how do you give back in these circumstances?”
He credits Cindy McPhee, a fellow Drop-In Centre chef, with helping him adjust to the job. “You can’t do less because it’s not a hotel—that’s not a good way to do things. I have to be here, for (clients),” Pereira said. “I’ll do whatever it takes to get this job done. But I couldn’t do it by myself. It’s too big a beast.”
“A lot of people are intimidated by that,” he continues, gesturing toward the dining room, which is open to anyone who wants to stay during the day. It’s half full of mostly men and some women playing cards, reading, sleeping and chatting; there’s a free library, and a stage in one corner where bands and musicians perform every Friday afternoon. “I was (intimidated) during my first week, too. But you don’t know the circumstances of someone’s life. Each person here has a story. Each one has a family. We have no idea.” Many of the kitchen volunteers have opened up to Pereira and told him their adult children had died at the Drop-In Centre, or in similar places. “Three in a week,” he said, “that I know of.”
Pereira pulled out the business card of a volunteer who had offered to cover the cost of eyeglasses for a client who has needed a new pair since Christmas. “It’s the little things,” he said. “You cannot save the world—I don’t intend to. You do the best you can for the people around you. And hopefully those people will pass it on to the next, and that’s all you can do.”
The afternoon shift of volunteers—one of five shifts a day—had chopped enormous bags of bell peppers and tomatoes in preparation for dinner. Now a new crew arrived, donning hairnets and untangling aprons to cook the meal that will be served in a few hours. Volunteer co-ordinators taught some basic skills, and Pereira occasionally paused to demonstrate the finer points of chopping an onion. “I promised myself I’d never be a teacher,” he joked. But at the Drop-In Centre, that sort of instruction comes with the territory. “My job is to make the best meal I can for these guys,” Pereira said. “That’s how I earn my keep. That’s it.”