Former celebrity chef now feeds more than 27,000 people a week
From serving the Princess Royal and her entourage to seeing that 27,000 people in Metro Vancouver get food each week, David Long ’s journey from County Down to recently named CEO of the Greater Vancouver Food Bank has been an adventure.
“My claim to fame is that Rory McIlroy and I are from the same little town, Holywood in Northern Ireland, and went to the same school,” Long said.
“He was far smarter than I am because I played rugby and he played golf.”
Before he transitioned to the boardroom, Long was a globetrotting chef who worked in Switzerland, London, Dublin and Melbourne, long before the celebrity chef thing took off.
“I knew at a pretty early age I wanted to be a chef,” the 54-yearold said. “When I was 16, 17, that’s what I wanted to be. My dad was an architect and I think that was the biggest argument we had all those years ago: He wanted me to be an architect, I said, ‘No, no, no. This is something I really want to do.’
“I think I was vindicated about 10 or 15 years later, when all of a sudden, chefs became sort of rock stars.”
By age 22, Long had returned home, where he led the Irish team that won a coveted Hotelympia gold medal at the hotel and restaurant industry ’s massive annual expo in London.
It was good practice for being under the microscope as a future CEO.
The five-member cook teams had to make lunch for 120 to 140 people as an a la carte service — appetizer, main course, dessert — with judges looking over their shoulders the entire time.
“It was a lot of fun, we had a great team, we went there on a shoestring budget and we won a gold medal. We were so excited.”
Excitement, fun. Long seems to spread them like contagions everywhere he has been.
If there’s a theme linking his varied job postings — running an exclusive club, a waste-management startup, a private winter club, a security firm — it’s leadership.
The Vancouver odyssey began when Long, who was on vacation, met the Pan Pacific’s Ernst Dorfler, renowned chef to royalty of both the European and Hollywood kind. Dorfler, now owner of Five Sails with his wife Gerry Sayers, told Long that his executive sous chef was leaving and offered him the job.
“I went back to Ireland, sold my house and car, and moved to Canada,” Long said. “I’ve been here ever since.”
It was while Long was executive chef at the Terminal City Club that he made the crossover from the kitchen to the boardroom. After five years of working as executive chef, Long decided to throw his toque blanche into the ring with the other 80 or so hats of people applying to be the new CEO.
He survived to the list of 15 finalists. He chuckled at that. Then he made the cut for the final four.
“Reality kind of set in. I’m like, ‘Oh my god, what am I going to do if they actually choose me?’”
He spent the next five years guiding Terminal City through a $6-million renovation, negotiating with the provincial and federal governments ahead of the 2010 Olympics, then hosting all sorts of VIPs during the Games such as Princess Anne.
After 10 fond years at Terminal City, Long set out on a new adventure, co-founding Daedal Energy. It was a great idea, to recycle waste cooking oil into biofuel. A great idea, that is, when oil was US$100 a barrel, not so great when the price fell to $50.
He took over as general manager at the North Shore Winter Club, where he has more fond memories, and then, for something completely different, he became vice-president of operations at Securiguard Services, before being hired by the food bank in May 2018.
He has arrived at the food bank at an interesting time. It moves this summer from its cramped quarters in Strathcona to almost 40,000 square feet of space in Burnaby, with double the refrigeration capacity.
“We’re no longer handing out plastic bags with Kraft Dinner and a bent can of peas or beans in it,” he said. “The quality of what we’re distributing is amazing, and I see the results of those things on a daily basis. I can see first-hand the difference we’re already making.”