Pressure cooker

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 07/04/2011 (5359 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Talk about your grand openings.

In addition to having just overseen the launch of Winnipeg’s newest downtown restaurant, Brooklynn’s Bistro, Manitoban-born chef Darryl Crumb is about to make his TV debut as contestant on Food Network’s homegrown series Top Chef Canada.

“It’s a crazy time,” says Crumb, 29, who will be hosting a private family-and-friends evening at the new Lombard Avenue eatery when Top Chef Canada premieres this Monday (8 p.m., Food Net).

“We’re going to shut down for the evening and do a private party,” he says. “We’re going to put some TV screens up, and I’m cooking a four-course meal that includes the dish that got me onto Top Chef Canada as one of the appetizers, and then the main course is the dish I did for the first episode.”

Crumb, an Anola-area product who decided to pursue a cooking career after his pro-hockey dream was cut short by injury, is one of 16 contestants in this Canuck-culinary spin on the Top Chef franchise. The series, hosted by Thea Andrews and featuring noted chef/restaurateur Mark McEwan as head judge, offers its winner a $100,000 cash prize along with professional-grade kitchen equipment worth $30,000.

Crumb says he auditioned for the show — last year, while living in Vancouver and working as executive chef at the Regional Tasting Lounge — because it appealed to his still-lingering competitive streak.

“I’m really competitive in everything I do, so I wanted to see how I stack up against the rest of Canada,” he explains. “Plus, it’s good publicity for the restaurant… and there was $100,000 up for grabs, too.

“Being in the kitchen is like being in the dressing room or on the bench in hockey — there’s a team atmosphere, you’re all working for the same goal and I’m only as good as the guys behind me.”

As a relative newcomer to the food-service industry, Crumb know he would be in tough against more experienced competitors, but he felt confident in his skills and treated the Top Chef Canada adventure as an opportunity to learn and improve.

“I wanted to win,” he says. “I thought I was pretty good in the kitchen, but I wanted to prove it to myself and to everybody else.

“But I’m fairly new to this industry — I’ve only been doing this for five years professionally, while all the other competitors had a lot more experience — so I was kind of the rookie going in. But I felt good, and it was really nice to see all the knowledge and experience that was there, and to take bits of pieces of it to advance my skills. I definitely learned some new things, and pushed myself harder under deadlines than I ever have before.”

That Crumb is succeeding at a high level in his second chosen career should come as a surprise to know one. Raised on a family farm outside Anola, he excelled at hockey early and rose through the junior ranks (with the provincial-champion OCN Blizzard) and landed a minor-league pro contract with the Long Beach Ice Dogs.

After a shoulder injury put his hockey career on ice, Crumb returned home to ponder future possibilities, working in construction and then helping out at a local restaurant after his sister’s advice pointed him in a new career direction.

“My sister was a big influence,” he explains. “I grew up with my grandma living next door, and she was Ukrainian, so she was always cooking. … I spent a lot of time in the kitchen, and I’ve always loved food. After hockey came to an end, I was working for my father in the construction business, which was totally not my thing, and my sister said, ‘Why don’t you get a job in a kitchen and see if you like it?'”

He did — enough, in fact, to leave his part-time job at the local diner and seek training at Le Cordon Bleu in Ottawa, which led to further on-the-job training at two restaurants in Paris before Crumb returned to Canada to work as an executive chef in Vancouver.

When the chance to move back to Manitoba to open Brooklynn’s Bistro arose, he was quick to accept.

“Opportunities like this don’t come along every day,” he says.

While he can’t divulge any details of the Top Chef Canada competition, which was filmed in Toronto last year, Crumb is quick to declare that this heat-of-the-kitchen contest was as challenging as anything he ever encountered on a frozen sheet of hockey ice.

“I’ve played in championship games, both winning and losing, and I can say that I’ve never been more stressed than I was at Top Chef,” he says. “You never know what’s coming next, or what challenge you’re going to have to do, and it’s so accelerated. Normally, you’d have a couple of months to plan a menu; on Top Chef, you have five minutes. It was very, very challenging.”

Beyond the TV show, of course, there are still the pressures and unknowns of opening a new restaurant in this city to be considered.

“I’ve got some family members who work in this (downtown) area, and they keep telling me there’s no good places to go for lunch,” he says. “Everything’s kind of expensive down here, and there’s no place to get a good meal at lunchtime. I think we can really appeal to the business crowd in this neighbourhood, and I feel that Winnipeg’s food-service scene is just starting to blossom, and I want to be part of that.”

brad.oswald@freepress.mb.ca