Celebrity chef spends life savings on ‘dream’ school. Then COVID-19 hit
Murray Zehr is thinking outside the box to stay afloat amid the pandemic
AYR — Murray Zehr sold his eight restaurants, moved out of his four-bedroom house, traded in his BMW for a Kia, and spent two years building the 1909 Culinary Academy out of an abandoned schoolhouse in Ayr.
He opened in February. Three weeks later, COVID-19 shut him down.
“It was a good three weeks,” Zehr — best known for his work with the Food Network and its show “Chopped Canada” — said with a drawn-out laugh. “By week two we were at capacity, booking months in advance. And as quickly as we opened, we were closed.”
In one fell swoop, Zehr’s entire revenue stream for the school and restaurant died away.
During the daytime, the schoolhouse is designed to operate as a chef school, with students working in 15-week blocks, four hours a day. The course is split between the classroom, kitchen and garden, with students learning things like hydroponics, aquaponics, vertical growing and square
foot gardening. The first class was originally set to start on May 6.
On Tuesdays, Zehr had started running community classes, open to the public, with a new theme every week.
And from Thursday to Sunday night, the school morphed into a 30-seat restaurant, with an ever-changing fourcourse menu. Visitors could choose between three different protocols: local meats and vegetables, vegetarian, or a vegan/gluten-free option. Everyone gets a chef’s table, and the first course is always with Zehr at the head of the kitchen.
After COVID-19, the school’s opening has been delayed, the community classes are cancelled and the restaurant is closed.
“What keeps me up at night?” Zehr, thinking on all he’s sacrificed over the last two years, wondered out loud. “It’s that I’m not going to have enough revenue to keep my dream alive.”
When he bought the property two years ago, the old schoolhouse had no running water and a dirt floor in the basement. Almost everything needed to be gutted, and Zehr was only able to salvage the original chalkboards, the main flooring, the brickwork and the tin ceiling. Everything else had to be brought up to code, custom designed to his vision. The property is about an acre in size, and everything is grown and taught on-site.
“Financially, obviously you worry,” Zehr said about the temporary closure. “I’ve put every last penny of my life savings into building my dream. We opened it up, it was glorious, and all the sudden it’s shut down. But I look at it as safety first. We’re not in the business of hurting people.”
In the absence of students and patrons, Zehr has needed to get creative about how to stay afloat.
He’s about to launch his Community Supported Agriculture program, where families can buy memberships to grab fresh vegetables out of the garden. Depending on the size of their share, they can take between 6-15 items each week, up to 24 weeks.
He’s building a wood-burning pizza oven to offer visitors fresh pizza as they come through. And he’s expanding his pantry full of preserves, jams and jellies, frozen soups and chilies.
But he also knows he needs to think bigger, so he’s developing nutrition fact tables for his products so he can legally sell them in others stores. Every day is a new brainstorming session on what he can do to make it through.
“There has to be a paradigm shift, and there has to be outside-of-the-box thinking because we don’t know how long this is going to last, and we don’t know what’s going to happen with the next wave.”
Zehr, the former chief education officer overseeing the School Food and Beverage Policy at the Ontario Ministry of Education, has done his homework on the Spanish flu, where the virus mutated to a deadlier form, killing millions around the globe during its second wave.
“We have to be prepared for everything to open up and then we get hit with a second wave,” he said. “Once this [first wave] is over, we have to ask the key question: ‘is it really over?’ And if it’s not, what can we do?”
For Zehr, it all comes back to food security, and the principle of educating people on how to ensure they have enough food to make it through worst-case scenarios.
It’s an overlooked problem, he said, and it requires learning a basic skillset that’s been lost in modernity.
“I can’t wait until this is over, so I can teach more people how to grow their own fruits and vegetables and preserve all their own foods.”