One of Canada's top chefs is eyeing Surrey as a potential food and restaurant hotbed as the city continues its exponential growth.
Matt Stowe, who recently won Food Network Canada’s Top Chef Canada competition in 2013, was lured away from Cactus Club where he was product development chef and a Gold Medal Plates competition winner. Stowe is joining the Joseph Richard Group, a company that originated in Surrey and now has multiple restaurants, pubs and liquor stores across the Fraser Valley, Vancouver and Alberta.
Stowe, who grew up in Cloverdale, said watching Surrey’s transformation since childhood was one of the main factors that persuaded him to join Joseph Richard Group.
“I remember driving to school and seeing just farmland,” he said. “And we still have lots of farmland, but there are also hundred-unit townhouses and all these densely populated areas, which for us in the hospitality industry just means more customers.”
Stowe becomes the director of culinary operations for the Surrey-based company looking to capitalize on the city’s upswing and business development governance model. Some estimates have Surrey surpassing Vancouver in population within 10 to 12 years. The city also has one of the highest immigrant populations, with more than 43% of its residents having a first language other than English. Surrey’s population is expected to add 300,000 people over the next three decades, which would mean by 2041 one out of every four Metro Vancouver residents would call it home.
Yet the city’s restaurant scene is relatively in its infancy, with a lack of upscale outlets. Vikram Vij recently opened My Shanti in South Surrey, but Tourism Surrey lists only eight restaurants under fine dining on its website.
Joseph Richard Group, which started in 2011, has 27 establishments across the Fraser Valley and has slated a spring 2017 opening date for the Sudo Asian Kitchen in Langley. The company has also recently expanded into Alberta and has four restaurants in various stages of planning and development. In the past five years it has opened 18 new pubs and restaurants.
Ryan Moreno and company co-founder André Bourque launched their first bar together in 2002. Moreno, who grew up in Surrey and first started working as a busboy, said he’s watched the culinary industry morph from a net exporter of chefs to a hotbed of homegrown skill.
“From when I started to what the restaurant scene is now in Vancouver and Canada as a whole,” he added, “Vancouver and Toronto weren’t necessarily recognized as a place for talent. Not to say there weren’t great chefs here, but a lot of our chefs here would move abroad. But now we’re producing Canadian chefs, and our Canadian concepts are doing well.”
Stowe left Canada in 2001 when he was 18 to study at New York’s Culinary Institute of America, and then worked at Lutèce French restaurant in Manhattan before returning to British Columbia in 2004 where he became the executive chef of Sonora Resort. He said the idea is to have the next generation of Canadian chefs feel like they have the option of staying home while still becoming well-established players in the industry.
In April, Advanced Education Minister Andrew Wilkinson announced chefs, cooks and bakers had been added to the B.C. access grant for labour market priorities, noting that culinary arts graduates were “in demand” and “underserved,” especially in rural communities or outside of the Lower Mainland.
“It’s cool to be able to cook in Canada now,” Stowe said. “Because when you look at other parts of the world you’re kind of pigeonholed as a chef in terms of the flavour profile that you have to draw from, say France or Italy or Spain. But here in Canada we’re so diverse and multicultural, what makes true Canadian cuisine is you can draw from all those flavour profiles because we have them all within our borders. But you’re also using Canadian product.”
Stowe noted the agricultural land base of the Fraser Valley could help the region lend a sense of seasonality to fine dining.
“Out in the Fraser Valley we’ve been supplying restaurants across the country for years. But I don’t think anyone’s really taken the bull by the horns and really done something to celebrate the work of the farmers and look at what we’re producing in our own backyard.” •
