SECRETS OF THE PM’S CHEFS
Kitchen master passes the spatula
What happens at Justin Trudeau’s family dinner table?
It’s all a bit hush-hush — information that’s known, but closely guarded, by those who run the kitchen.
Such savoury secrets have now become the purview of a new chef: Wakefield’s Che Chartrand has taken over the role at Rideau Cottage, which currently serves as the home to the prime minister and his family.
Chartrand, who’s an alumnus of Ottawa’s Beckta restaurant empire, has been handed the spatula by friend and colleague Katie Ardington, who had been the Trudeaus’ chef since February 2017.
Perhaps worried about a reporter discovering the Trudeaus only eat home-churned butter, the Prime Minister’s Office told the National Post the new chef was “not available” for an interview.
Reached at Rideau Cottage, though, Chartrand said no one had mentioned the request to him and seemed happy to discuss his new role.
“Let’s just say that they support local, and healthy living,” Chartrand said of the Trudeaus.
Everything, the chef said, is handmade. For weekends, meals are ready to go in the fridge. Snacks, desserts and fresh breads are on hand.
“We prepare our own yogurt, we make our own butter, we make our own bacon,” Chartrand said.
“It’s a great way to be able to control what’s in it, and still have beautiful flavour, but buying locally and hopefully organic as much as possible.”
Asked whether that’s normal practice at the residence or a special request from the family, he said he’d do some of those things anyway — but “they ’re just not the kind of run-of-the-mill, meat-andpotatoes family. They enjoy food, they enjoy my food, they ’re excited about different flavours. And even the kids, they have great palates, they’re not afraid to try stuff.”
Hiring a new chef can be an opaque process, based on connections and word of mouth within Ottawa’s cosy restaurant scene. As Trudeau’s recently-departed chef told us, “You can’t really post it on Kijiji.”
Like her replacement, whom she helped hire, Ardington honed her skills at Stephen Beckta’s restaurants, well-known to the city’s foodies. She had spent a decade working for him before taking the Rideau Cottage position. He has now hired her back.
“We said, ‘All right, it’s time to come back home and be part of our family,’ ” when an executive chef position opened in January, Beckta said.
Chartrand worked with Beckta, then went on to be chef at the Wakefield Mill Hotel’s restaurant, and more recently worked for Transparent Kitchen, an Ottawa tech startup focused on promoting restaurants online. This year, he was a sous-chef at Canada Olympic House for the Pyeongchang Olympic Winter Games, and executive chef for the Paralympic Games.
It was while he was overseas that Chartrand said Ardington called him about a new gig. He was appointed April 3 at a salary range of $68,468 to $79,234, according to an order-in-council — slightly higher than the range Ardington was offered.
Speaking to the Post, Ardington was careful not to violate the Trudeaus’ privacy — “I’m not really supposed to tell.” But she described a day-to-day focused on cooking family-friendly meals for the Trudeaus and their kids Xavier, age 10, Ella-Grace, 9, and Hadrien, 4.
“They sit down at dinner with their young kids so a lot of the meals were meals that they would enjoy,” she said. “The PM and Sophie themselves, they love a variety of foods. He loves Asian cuisine. They love Thai food.” When the family wasn’t there, she would clean, plan meals, talk to food suppliers and the like.
Such details of the Trudeau’s dinner table have apparently been of interest to opposition politicians.
Conservative MP John Barlow tried finding out with a written question to the government last November, asking for itemized lists of meals broken down by food group, foods’ countries of origin and cost per meal. He asked for the residence’s policy on food waste and its annual budget.
The only reply, signed by the PM’s parliamentary secretary Peter Schiefke, was this: “Meals prepared at the prime minister’s residence are not tracked. The Prime Minister and family strive to eat healthy balanced meals.”