Rocking the kitchen

MOST of us cry each time we cut onions. For Canadian chef Chuck Hughes, the first time he cut an onion in cooking school, he fell in love.

“Cutting onions! It’s one of the most basic things ... everyone does it. But the first day at cooking school, when they showed us how to cut an onion, it was like magic! I felt a spark ... something happened and I just fell in love (with cooking) and knew that this is what I wanted to be doing,” said Hughes in a telephone interview from his home in Montreal.

The 35-year-old star of Chuck’s Day Off (airing on the Asian Food Channel) is as friendly and charming on the phone as he appears to be on his show and it doesn’t take any coaxing to get him to talk about himself, his love for food and passion for cooking or the many tattoos that adorn his body (more on this later).

“I got into cooking really early. My mum got me involved in the kitchen when I was a very young boy,” says Hughes.

When he says young, he means really young. In an interview with Canada’s The Globe And Mail recently, Hughes shared that the first dish he ever made himself was an apple pie when he was – get this – five or six years old.

“I was allowed to cook but not (to) use the stove. So I got up very, very early and started the recipe so that my mum could put it in the oven when she woke up. I had seen her make it before but I really wanted to surprise her. She was astounded by the fact that it really was an apple pie. We ate it and it was really good,” he said.

Boy wonder? Perhaps. It helped that Hughes loved (and still does) eating and was constantly surrounded by good food – particularly good seafood – when he was growing up.

“My mum is from a place called New Brunswick in Canada which is very well-known for seafood. A big part of my upbringing revolved around food. We’d have these big family parties ... lobster parties ... all the time. Those were some great memories,” he says, trailing off.

Hughes’ love for seafood is evident in Chuck’s Day Off, his first TV show that is set inside his restaurant, Garde Manger (located in the heart of Montreal), which he opened with his two best friends, Tim Rozon and Kyle Marshall, in 2006. Garde Manger has been dubbed the “vintage crab shackcum-underground club” and the menu is replete with lobster, shrimp and fish dishes.

In Chuck’s Day Off (which first premiered in May 2010), Hughes shows audiences how he spends his days off – cooking! He invites his friends and the many people he deals with in the course of running his restaurants – his butcher, fish monger, the guy who cleans his linen, the guy who delivers his knives (he doesn’t own knives but rents fresh, sharp knives weekly), the policemen who are on duty around his restaurant, the farmers who grow the produce he uses ... you get the picture.

“I wanted the show to reflect the reality of working in a restaurant and I wanted to invite everyone who makes all this happen everyday come and actually see what I do,” explains Hughes.

At first, some of his guests were a little sceptical.

“They didn’t really get it. I remember the very first episode of the first season, I’d invited my vegetable supplier to the restaurant and his boss was perplexed. He asked me: ‘What do you mean? You want him to go and stay in your restaurant for four hours? Why?’” he says with a laugh.

“That was in the beginning. Now, everyone is excited about the show and wants to be invited for lunch.”

Hughes’ winsome personality – he’s easy-going and has a great sense of humour – coupled with his good looks (let’s not neglect to mention the obvious) has ensured Chuck’s Day Off’s success right off the bat – it garnered three Canadian Gemini nominations (by the Academy of Canadian Cinema & Television) last year and Hughes won the Best Host Award from the original Factual Entertainment Awards in Santa Monica, California (for top international entertainment programming), in 2010. The series is currently in its third season (in the United States) and airs in more than 20 countries worldwide.

What does he think about his talents on TV?

“I never watch myself! No! I cannot do it!” he shouts in mock horror, before going on to talk more about the show.

“I can’t remember whose idea it was actually. I opened the res- taurant and people kept telling me to do a show. I didn’t think much about it until more and more people started urging me to do it. So, I thought, maybe there was something to it.

“Three years after opening the restaurant ... when I had a little more time and the team was getting better, I shot a reel and the rest is history,” he shares.

Hughes wanted his show to reflect his style of cooking.

“I wanted it to be real and to show the reality of working in the restaurant – good food, good music and good people,” he says.

(Here’s a little known fact about Hughes: he wanted to be a rock star when he was younger but realised that his talent was rocking it in the kitchen and not on stage).

One of the biggest influences in his life, particularly his life as a chef, was his mother, Francine. It was she who encouraged him to pursue his passion for cooking – had she not pushed him to enrol in the Institut de tourisme et d’hôtellerie du Québec when he was 23, Hughes might have ended up as an advertising executive in a suit and tie. Yes, really.

Though he loved cooking (he even enrolled in cooking classes as a teen), Hughes didn’t think of being a professional chef or opening a restaurant because he watched his mother’s restaurant fail when he was about 12 years old.

In an interview with toronto.com, Hughes shares, “It (the restaurant) was a huge disaster. The chef was this alcoholic who was always filthy. I could always smell the dirty grease in the kitchen. To this day, I walk into a restaurant and if I smell that smell, it brings back that sad time of failure to me.

“When I’d get aptitude tests, they were always telling me I should be a cook and I’d say ‘F**k, no! I don’t want to be like that idiot who lost my mother’s money’.”

Instead, Hughes went to college and ended up working in advertising until his mother talked some sense into him (and he couldn’t take it anymore) and he left to work as a busboy and trained to be a chef.

“My mother is my biggest inspiration. She is also my biggest critic and my biggest fan. I learnt a lot from her ... techniques, family recipes and traditions. These days, I am inspired a lot by travel and by people who cook in restaurants. And with the Internet, food books and magazines ... inspiration comes from everywhere. There is almost too much (inspiration) and I really just try to stay true to myself and focus on what I want to do and where I want to go with my food,” he says.

Hughes’ food philosophy revolves around simple, well-cooked food.

“My style is simple, honest food ... rustic and hopefully authentic cooking. Nothing too complicated. I want to focus on the ingredients rather than the transformation of the ingredients, you know? I believe that if we let the ingredients speak for themselves, the work is already done,” explains Hughes who recently won the Food Network’s popular Iron Chef America challenge (season nine, episode four) where he beat critically acclaimed American chef/restauranteur Bobby Flay using his secret ingredient – Canadian lobster!

Lobster is Hughes’ all-time favourite ingredient so much so he has a lobster tattooed on one of his arms, along with a shrimp, bacon, an oyster ... and a lemon meringue pie, to name a few.

“I was fascinated by tattoos as a kid so when it came time to get one, it made sense to put down things that I really love. All the food that I have inked on my arms are things that I really love. But the first tattoo I got was of my mum,” he says.

Hughes is now in Kuala Lumpur for the American Express and Asian Food Channel’s Celebrity Chef Series aimed at giving culinary enthusiasts in South-east Asia a chance to meet some of the channel’s top rated chefs and sample their food. This is his maiden trip to the region. n Chuck Hughes is here till tomorrow as part of the the American Express and Asian Food Channel’s Celebrity Chef Series.

Chuck’sdayoff airs on the Asian Food Channel (Astro ch 703) on Wednesdays at 9pm.