Feeding pigs, plucking chickens and cooking outdoors are all in a day’s work for New West chef Hunter Blackburn.
When the Record last spoke with the New West native, the then-17-year-old was attending the ACE-It (accelerated credit entry to industry training) program in high school, where he was training in the culinary arts. Having worked in kitchens since the age of 12, including the Boathouse and Wild Rice restaurants in New West, goal was to graduate from the cooking program and look for a job in an upscale Vancouver restaurant or move to Europe.
Four-and-a-half years later, Blackburn recently returned home for a visit from Amsterdam, where he’s working as a chef at Restaurant As.
“It is a fine-dining restaurant. We do four- to five-course dinners,” he said. “It’s a very seasonal restaurant. Every two weeks we change the menu.”
The restaurant’s ever-changing menu features whatever plants, animals, fish or crustaceans are in season. That includes pigs that are raised in the restaurant’s backyard and vegetables delivered weekly from a man in Italy.
“They show up and drop off a boatload of random things that we don’t really know what are sometimes,” he said.
The restaurant also has hunters who go out hunting and bring back whatever they’ve managed to catch, including ducks, wild pigeons and hares.
“I just learned how to skin my first animal. They bring them to you just dead,” Blackburn said. “We process them from start to finish, take them apart, skin them, take all the guts out.”
The restaurant has provided Blackburn with experiences he’d never get at a restaurant in Vancouver.
“There’s a lot of things I haven’t ever seen in Canada that I am getting to use here in Europe, which is pretty nice. For me, it’s opening up my mind to ingredients I have never known existed and learning how to use them,” he said. “Maybe one day when I come back to Canada and open up my own restaurant, I can try to start doing some of those things here.”
Located in a heritage building, the owner couldn’t build a kitchen inside the chapel so he built an outdoor kitchen. Chefs begin their day by starting a wood fire to heat the oven.
“I am turning something that was just in the ground a day ago and now it’s on a plate in a fine dining restaurant. It’s a little bit different,” he said. “It’s not just cooking things with electricity; it’s coming down to an old way that we used to do things and show people how much that benefits in the way things taste.”
Blackburn, 22, is pondering his future plans, which could include trying to land a job at a Michelin star restaurant in Amsterdam so he can learn different cooking techniques or moving to Portugal, where he’s been offered a cooking job. It’s a long way from the Sigma program at New Westminster Secondary School, a self-paced program that Blackburn credits with helping him become a chef.
“Sometimes I worked 14 to 16 hours days most of the time, so I didn’t always have time to go to school. It was good to have self-paced for me so I could just do my math homework at 3 in the morning when I got off,” said Blackburn, who worked full-time while attending high school and the culinary program at Vancouver Community College. “For me, it made a huge impact to keep going and keep trying for this cooking thing. It definitely gave me a lot of encouragement to keep going.”
Blackburn anticipates he’ll return home in about a year, at which time he may return to school to upgrade his certification in the culinary arts, work as a chef for hire or offer pop-up restaurants.
“I have worked at this restaurant for nine months and I feel I have learned more than I have learned at any restaurant in the 10 years I have been doing this. I want to keep doing this as much as I can,” he said. “I’d like to own a restaurant one day with my own community garden, where I can grow my own vegetables and I can go out hunting every six months or something and get enough stuff to have a menu for the next months.”
