An Entrepreneurial Fighter
Ottawa’s latest Top Chef contestant has been cooking his whole life, following in the footsteps of his father, who is a chef on tanker ships, and his grandparents, who loved to cook traditional dishes from their native Barbados and Trinidad and Tobago.
Asked to prepare a dish that represents himself and his way of cooking on a plate, Jae-Anthony Dougan produced jerk chicken and mac ’n’ cheese, the latter a cheese- and cream-heavy dish with unique spicing that makes it wholly his own; the former, the dish that’s put him on the map — or in newspapers, magazines and on blogs. He has 20,000 Instagram followers and, as he puts it, after all that publicity, Top Chef is really “the cherry on top.”
“The Caribbean is vast — it’s 22 countries,” he says of the area from which he takes culinary inspiration. “It’s a humungous food culture. It goes back to slavery times.”
The 35-year-old chef remembers being teased as a kid in school because his food smelled strongly of spice, not like the bland food the other kids preferred. When he decided to “take a leap of faith” and start cooking for a living, he knew he had to figure out how to make Caribbean food more appealing to Canadians in his native Montreal, where he started out.
“I feel like our food is so untapped,” he says.
He came up with jerk chicken poutine. He also does mac ’n’ cheese with jerk chicken, mac ’n’ cheese with oxtail. He’s even done jerk lobster. Dosas and fried chicken also figure into his repertoire, and a meal might end with plantain donuts.
Humble beginnings
It was while he was working as a stylist at Holt Renfrew that he started asking his clients if they knew Caribbean food. Most of them didn’t. He decided there was an untapped niche in bringing this food to Canada. That discovery seemed to quell his earlier hesitancy about cooking professionally, which he imagined was hard work and unrewarding financially.
He started out catering from his parents’ home and called himself “Mobile Delivery.” He would take orders all week and then wake up at 4 a.m. and start cooking.
“I would grill all my chickens outside — winter or summer — and then I’d deliver the food across Montreal,” he says. The delivery business ran Thursday to Sunday, and at the end of the week, he’d also host “Seasoned Sundays” where he’d cook a bunch of food, rent a space, get a liquor licence, show football on TV and host a party.
His first bricks and mortar business was called Seasoned Dreams.
The building was zoned commercial, but he had a regular kitchen with no industrial ventilation so he only did takeout from there.
“I used to sleep downstairs and cook upstairs,” he says.
After two years, he sold that business, which is still going strong in Montreal, now with a dine-in option. Dougan then decided to open a restaurant in Ottawa. Sadly, he opened his wildly popular ByWard Market restaurant Tingz Restaurant + Bar in a pandemic. That didn’t seem to slow its success, however. Dougan was used to making food that travelled well and when patio and dine-in options opened up, the restaurant was always packed.
A dispute with his Ottawa partner eventually resulted in the restaurant closing just six months after its March 15, 2020 opening. Dougan and his former partner are now in legal proceedings, trying to come up with a solution to a contract clause that, at the moment, makes it impossible for him to open a new place in Ottawa.
That’s why he’s running a ghost kitchen from a City Centre location that features five different kitchens. Dougan himself has two restaurant “concepts” there. Chef Jae-Anthony Popup features his signature poutine dishes (poutine with jerk chicken, oxtail and salt and pepper shrimp), his Caribbean-style mac ’n’ cheese, jerk chicken, chicken wings, rice, peas, salad, three kinds of roti and sides such as plantain and sauces. Side Dish offers southern and Caribbean dishes, including fried chicken in many forms, ribs, popcorn shrimp, cornbread and coleslaw.
Because he can’t open a bricks and mortar restaurant in Ottawa at the moment, he decided to open an upscale pan-Caribbean restaurant in Montreal called Tropikàl. He divides his time between the two cities anyway so he can spend time with his two-year-old son. His chef de cuisine, Panamanian J.P. Moreno, holds the reins at the Montreal restaurant and Dougan's father sometimes works in the kitchen there as well.
As soon as he can do so again, he’ll open another restaurant in Ottawa, likely called Tropikàl as well. He hopes that can happen by May, and then he’ll launch a sauce and spice rub company this summer, before opening his next restaurant, this time in Toronto, in 2022.
Diversity in the biz
In his culinary journey, Dougan has felt the systemic racism that Black Lives Matter has illuminated so clearly. He says he’s one of the few black chefs in Canada who has any kind of public profile.
“I would love to see more [black chefs getting acknowledged],” he says. “And, I would love to see that when you go to culinary school, you don't only learn French technique. When you go on these culinary shows you discover your [palate is very different from others’ palates.] They might be used to ranch, cream, butter-based milk stuff. And I'm used to green seasoning, like coriander.”
Growing up, none of the chefs he saw on television really inspired him.
“I didn’t have anyone to look at on TV,” he says. “Most of the people I saw had a different colour skin — except Marcus Samuelsson.”
His own TV experience was cut short in episode two of Top Chef for a tartare the judges didn't like, but he took the loss in stride, saying, "You're only as good as your last dish on Top Chef."
Inpiration from deep roots and tradition
Asked what goes through his mind when he’s trying to come up with dishes, Dougan says his goal is always to be original. And then, he makes sure to include long marinating processes, different textures and beautiful colours.
“That, to me, signifies what the Caribbean embodies,” he says. “When you think of the Caribbean, you think of fresh beautiful ingredients, beautiful fish. I'm trying to portray that on a canvas in North America, even though we can’t get things like Caribbean lobsters and water from fresh-grown coconuts.”
The chef’s mentors are few, given that he never went to culinary school and mostly only worked for himself. But his father, whose family roots are in Trinidad and Tobago, definitely played a role in his choice of careers.
“He’s cooked my whole life,” Dougan says.
And his mother’s native Barbados played a role, too.
“I used to hunt sea urchin in Barbados,” he says. “But I had no idea what it was. It’s crazy how much you learn from nostalgia. I learned how to grill fish in Barbados. Barbados has a traditional fish Friday. There’d be 30 vendors, all selling fried fish, usually mahi mahi or swordfish. It was all 100-per-cent wild caught. They’d serve it with so many assortments — macaroni pie, rice and peas. There’d also be fishcakes, flying fish or coocoo [a Caribbean cornmeal.]”
He also learned from his grandparents, all of whom cook.
“My dad's mother passed away about six years ago of cancer, but she taught me a lot in terms of breadmaking and my grandmother on my mom's side is still alive and she's like my second mother — we’re very close,” he says. “I live [in the unit above] my grandmother [in Montreal.] She owns a triplex.”
The driven entrepreneur may get his cooking chops from his dad, but he says he gets his work ethic from his mom.
“She’s on another level,” he says, of the woman who is a nurse and also teaches nursing at McGill.
The Future
Asked how he’s going to manage having a third restaurant in a third city, a five-hour drive from where his son lives, he’s sanguine.
“I have no clue yet,” he says, with a laugh. “You know what they say: You can’t manage it until you do it and then you have to. You can’t wait for it to happen.”
Running the ghost kitchen in Ottawa has been challenging, given that there’s no foot traffic where he is at the back of the City Centre. But he’s getting enough takeout business to keep it going, even with the challenges of also running a dine-in restaurant in Montreal and dealing with rotating shut downs due to the pandemic. He’s not sure whether he’ll keep the ghost kitchen going once he opens a new Ottawa restaurant.
“I'm so passionate,” he says. “I want to make Canada’s 100 best [restaurants]. I think that's my biggest goal for this year, so because of that, I’ll probably focus more on the restaurants in Montreal and Ottawa.”
For the Ottawa restaurant, he expects to go into business with two best friends from high school — Jamaal Gittens and Kevin Selman — under the name The Three Brothers Group.
“We’re going to open multiple locations and empower black community,” Dougan says.
Chef Jae-Anthony Pop-Up
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