Time abroad helps hone top chef's kitchen skills

A young David Hawksworth may have been questioned for his sartorial acumen by wearing a tan-coloured suit to a dreary winter’s day interview with one of the top chef’s in Europe, but there was no denying his culinary passion, determination and skill.

Hawksworth, who was around 19 at the time, founbd himself at a restaurant named The canteen in London to see its chef, Marco Pierre White, who had emerged as the UK’s first chef worthy of wearing the culinary celebrity tag. Uncompromising and often gruff and blunt, White looked over the youngster from Vancouver and later declared, “Well, you’re from Canada, you can go work on the fish.’”

“I really didn’t know what to expect,” said Hawksworth, who is one of Vancouver’s four leading chefs headlining the From the Kitchen to the Boardroom 2.0 event hosted by the Richmond Chamber of Commerce and Richmond News on Jan. 12 at the River Rock Casino Resort. “It was a bit intimidating to walk into The Canteen, which had just opened up a couple of days before I showed up. It was (White’s) first, big foray into the business.”

But Hawksworth knew that if he was going to pursue his dream of becoming an accomplished chef, he had to, “get his hands dirty.”

And that meant learning from some of the best in the business, a quest that started back home in Vancouver, where he graduated from part-time work in restaurants during high school to getting on the front lines at the Beach House restaurant in Stanley Park.

“I didn’t go to culinary school, so I had to lean on the staff there,” Hawksworth said, adding he displayed a knack for producing in the kitchen and had a habit of asking plenty of questions.

“I soon realized there was so much to learn,” he said.

As he continued to soak up as much as he could, the youngster started to realize that many of the people he looked up to in the various kitchens he spent time in, were from Europe. And if he wanted to continue to rise up the ranks, that’s where he needed to be.

“I loved Vancouver and Canada, but I decided to go to Europe for a couple of years, which quickly became 10, ”Hawksworth said.

But where was he going to start?

Hawksworth’s stepfather told him to send a resume to White — who mentored the likes of current celebrity chefs Gordon Ramsay and Curtis Stone — and Raymond Blanc, both of whom had at the time recently published books and were building reputations as top chefs in Europe.

“I’m going to be landing on Tuesday, and I’ll be at this hostel, and here’s the phone number,” Hawksworth said, recalling his letter accompanying his resume. “I sent it a week before I went and when I got to the hostel, I had a message from Marco to give him a call.”

And that led to the meeting with the tan suit.

”But it all worked out,” Hawksworth said with a laugh, although being responsible for The Canteen’s seafood offerings pretty much threw him into the deep end.

“I was way out of my element. I knew salmon and halibut.”

But when they told him to go get other types of fish in the kitchen, he was lost.

“I didn’t have a clue of what they were talking about,” he said.

Hawksworth managed to overcome that, plus the demanding work schedule.

“The hours were just incredibly brutal,” he said, “It was from 6 a.m. to 1 a.m., six days a week. But I was learning so much that if I had come back to Vancouver, there was nowhere I’d get the same education.

“I thought I’d just tough this out. And after four months in The Canteen I wanted to go somewhere I could start at the bottom and learn.”

That led to a solid decade of working with White and Blanc in a number of Michelin star rated restaurants in the UK before moving back to Vancouver in 2000 to be the chef at Ouest restaurant.

But the desire to have his own place still burned brightly and Hawksworth made it a reality in 2011 at the Rosewood Hotel Georgia with Hawksworth Restaurant. Since then, he has opened Nightingale on West Hastings and Bel Café, also in the Rosewood Hotel Georgia.

“I wanted to have my own, world-class restaurant and it would be meaningless if I’d done that somewhere else,” he said. “I could have done it in the UK, but I love skiing and fishing. I love the space that we have here — it’s a hard existence in the UK.

In addition to Hawksworth, From the Kitchen to the Boardroom 2.0 at the River Rock Casino Resort on Jan. 12 will feature Angus An of Maenam, Longtail Kitchen and Fat Mao Noodles; Lucais Syme from Cinara, and Franck Point of Faubourg.

Tickets are $250 plus GST, or $225 for chamber members, and includes a forum on food, business and entrepreneurship in the culinary industry with the chefs who will also produce a five-course meal.

To purchase tickets, visit the Richmond Chamber of Commerce website at RichmondChamber.ca or call 604-278-2822.