Top Chef Canada is a pressure cooker
Jae-anthony Dougan among cooks vying for Top Chef Canada title
When Top Chef Canada reached out to him last year, Jae-anthony Dougan accepted the reality show's invitation not just for a shot at culinary glory, but to raise the profile of Black chefs and his ancestral cuisine.
“I felt like Black chefs are not really out there as much as the other cultures of chefs,” Dougan said in a recent interview. “I wanted to change what people know about Caribbean cuisine. I feel like Caribbean cuisine, nobody knows about it.”
When the ninth season of the Food Network Canada competition begins on Monday, Dougan will be the only one of its 11 “chef-testants” with operations in Ottawa.
The 34-year-old Montreal native splits his time evenly between his hometown and Ottawa, where he runs the Chef Jae-anthony Pop Up project. The pop-up, which opened in December, serves modern Caribbean fare.
In mid-march, Dougan also opened Tropikàl, a restaurant in Montreal, where his young son lives. During the early days of the pandemic last year, Dougan also opened Tingz, a Caribbean restaurant, but it closed in mid-september.
The son of a mother from Barbados and a father from Trinidad, Dougan is self-taught when it comes to cooking. That said, it runs in his family. Dougan's father is also a chef and his two grandmothers are cooks who sold food from their homes, he says.
Dougan says that on and off the TV show, he wants to promote the breadth of food from the many countries that make up the Caribbean.
“There a lot of ancestry there, a lot of heritage, and lot of culture,” he says.
While Dougan can't say just how well he did or how far he went on the elimination-based contest, he does say the show's high-pressure cooking challenges played to one of his strengths.
“I've always been someone who goes to the grocery store and picks out something and makes something that's really dope,” Dougan says. “I can make a lot of dishes out of nothing. It wasn't really difficult for me to think quickly.”
The show was filmed in September and October, with its chefs essentially in quarantine and undergoing regular COVID-19 testing, while crew members wore PPE and observed physical distancing, says Eric Abboud, showrunner for Top Chef Canada and executive producer at Insight Productions.
Last fall's pandemic situation, while not as grave as current conditions in Ontario, “added a layer of anxiety to making the show, that's for sure,” Abboud says.
“Normally, you don't worry about finishing a series. But of course COVID added to the stakes of that.”
The season reflects the reality of the pandemic as it impacted the restaurant industry, Abboud adds. “We tried to keep the show positive while trying to understand the struggles of chefs. Our show is a competition that features professional chefs, and the professional culinary industry has taken a massive hit, had a massive struggle because of COVID.”
In previous seasons, Top Chef Canada dedicated one episode to a contest called Restaurant Wars, in which teams of chefs open competing restaurants for a night and feed dining rooms filled with customers.
This season, the show pivoted to create an episode called Takeout Wars, which nonetheless featured elevated cuisine, Abboud says.
“It's a really, really cool episode,” he says. “It really embraced how things have changed.”
The show's judges, including leading Canadian chefs and restaurateurs, also acknowledge the blow the pandemic dealt restaurants. “Whether you're (celebrity chef ) Mark Mcewan or Jae-anthony, it doesn't matter,” Abboud says. “Everyone had to make a giant pivot and find ways of surviving.”
Dougan says he now has loftier goals, including running a kitchen that raises the bar for Caribbean cuisine that's lauded by Canada's 100 Best Restaurants magazine.
“Now that I've been on Top Chef, I have more to prove, certain accolades that I really want to attain,” Dougan says. “Top Chef has lit a fire on my ass.”