Life Of Chef Dale Mackay

Of all the ironies implied by Saskatoon’s tongue-in-cheek status as “the Paris of the Prairies,” the most obvious may be the city’s historical lack of refined cuisine. “There wasn’t such a thing as fine dining in Saskatoon when I was growing up,” says chef and restaurateur Dale MacKay, “or any place using local or seasonal products.” While the riverside city has always had one of the highest number of restaurants per capita in Canada, casual fare long dominated the scene—that is until MacKay’s homecoming.

The founding member of Grassroots Restaurant Group, MacKay owns three establishments in Saskatoon: Ayden Kitchen & Bar, which opened in 2013 and where he is chef and co-owner; Italian-inspired dining room Little Grouse on the Prairie, launched in 2016 and overseen by chef Jesse Zuber; and a pan-Asian restaurant called Sticks and Stones, new this year and helmed by chef Nathan Guggenheimer. Together, these establishments are pioneering next-generation Saskatoon dining—a polished new wave, buoyed by MacKay’s Top Chef Canada celebrity (he won the inaugural season) and the enthusiasm of a young population, while the city’s formerly lacklustre culinary reputation shrinks like a blip on the prairie horizon.

MacKay had a troubled youth. “I was dyslexic, and school to me… Walking in the building put pressure on my chest. I just felt awful all the time,” he recalls. At home, his work ethic and culinary proclivities manifested in an early obsession with baking sugar cookies, which he’d cut into rounds with his mom’s Mason jars, and his grilled cheese–making competitions with friends.

But outside the kitchen, things weren’t as under control. MacKay got kicked out of two elementary schools for bad behaviour and battled cancer as a preteen. It didn’t take long for him to want a change. “I did Grade 9 for about half a year, and then I peaced out,” he says. On his 15th birthday, MacKay landed in Vancouver, where he washed dishes and harboured fantasies of doing more. Then he watched Boiling Point, a 1999 documentary series about Gordon Ramsay’s quest to become the world’s youngest three-Michelin-starred chef and, entranced by Ramsay’s leonine force, booked a ticket to London. “The discipline [shown in the series] was just so intense, and that’s what I was looking for,” he says. Five days later, MacKay showed up at Ramsay’s restaurant and landed a job with no formal culinary training. He was 20 years old.

Eventually MacKay became an opener for Ramsay, overseeing a total of seven restaurant launches in London, Tokyo, and New York. Then, in 2007, with a stacked résumé, MacKay returned to Vancouver to become executive chef at Daniel Boulud’s bastions of French lusciousness, Lumière and DB Bistro Moderne, where he oversaw the kitchen with a Ramsay-influenced tyrannical flair. “When I was running Lumière, we were trying to be one of the best restaurants in the world, not just the country, so stakes were very high—even one little herb or one little smudge on a plate—to me at that time, that just ruined the whole fucking meal,” he recalls. When Lumière shuttered in 2011, MacKay quickly opened his own restaurant, Ensemble, and then its sister bistro, EnsembleTap. But the money wasn’t there, nor was the love he had once felt for the city. “In Vancouver, they want local, they want organic, but then they want to pay less than [what] you buy for. So from a business standpoint it’s exhausting, and it’s a fickle town.” MacKay wanted out: no more $40,000-a-month rents, no more jaded food bloggers looking for their next victim. So, when his restaurants failed, MacKay paid his suppliers, said his farewells, and, in the immortal words of the Guess Who, went runnin’ back to Saskatoon, where rents were cheap, sales were strong, and the community was happy to have him.