Some of Ottawa’s best restaurants have lost great chefs — to the pursuit of work life balance

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Kat Ferries is an Ottawa culinary star whose path has taken an unexpected turn.

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For years, she has been a restaurant chef to watch in the city and is competing on the new season of Top Chef Canada — even though she put restaurant cooking behind her more than a year ago.

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She worked at the fine-dining destination Stofa for almost seven years, eventually becoming its chef de cuisine. She loved everything about Stofa, but moved on in 2024 to become the opening chef for Elise, the French restaurant in Westboro.

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After six months at Elise, she left. “I was coming home so drained and my priorities just weren’t right anymore,” Ferries says.

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“If you’re giving 100 per cent to your job and you have nothing when you go home, that’s not a good balance. It’s taken me a really long time in this career to understand that that’s not sustainable. You can still give 80 per cent, and have just a creative a job, and at least have something in the tank when you go home.”

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Now, Ferries is the resident chef at Around the Block and Market on Centrepointe Drive, where she ensures that everything from Cubano sandwiches to smoked meat sandwiches to almond croissants are up to her high standards.

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Ferries, who is 34, married, and has a young daughter, works more regular hours, albeit for more days each week, at the butcher shop. But that job afforded her the freedom to leave for a stretch this summer when the Top Chef reality TV series was shot in Toronto.

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She describes being on Top Chef Canada, which begins airing on Flavour Network Oct. 20 at 10 p.m., as “a mind-blowing and eye-opening experience.” It was also harder than Ferries expected — “nerve-wracking,” even.

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Ferries is far from alone in transitioning out of top Ottawa restaurant kitchens, as gratifying as that calling can be. As with some of her peers, focusing on family meant looking for respite from long, grueling hours and night shifts.

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For others, the appeal of being a restaurant chef simply wore off, even if cooking remained a joy. In one case, health issues led a leading Ottawa chef to hang up her apron.

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For Yannick La Salle, having a young family was a key factor in his decision to leave the Chelsea restaurant Les Fougères in 2022 to become the Supreme Court of Canada’s chef.

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At Les Fougères, La Salle garnered praise and accolades galore. He represented the restaurant in 2019 when he won the Canadian Culinary Championship. There were even discussions about him taking over Les Fougeres from its owners Charles and Jennifer Part.

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But he opted to compete for the Supreme Court job, and accepted it when it was offered. “I thought, ‘What will happen in the future if I don’t accept this position? Will I regret my decision?’” La Salle says.

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It was easier for him to take on the new job, he says, because Les Fougères’ owners would have taken him back if he soured on cooking for Canada’s top judges.

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He nearly did. “The first week, I went to see my boss, and I said, “I really don’t think this is for me. I wasn’t feeling good. I was anxious,” His boss told him to try to settle into the position, which he did. “Slowly, I understood the position, and felt more comfortable as time went along,” he says.

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Four years into the job, La Salle says: “You’ve got to be positive. As in restaurants, in court, there’s some good days, there’s some bad days, but overall I’m happy. It’s nice to spend time with my kids and my wife and family.” La Salle is 39 years old and his children are aged five and two.

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At the Supreme Court, La Salle works alone. He says that at the qualifying event, where he shared the kitchen of Raphaël Peruvian Cuisine with his four fellow competitors and their cooks, he really appreciated the company and the camaraderie. “It felt great to be surrounded by talent like that and see guests at the table,” La Salle says.

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Like La Salle, Katie Ardington, the former executive chef for the Beckta Restaurant Group, has changed careers and been able to spend more time with her two sons, aged 11 and six.

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“They are at the age where I feel like an Uber driver for all their activities,” says Ardington, who now lives in Brockville and works in Kingston.

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Ardington left the Beckta group in 2023, but was already easing out of restaurants, teaching part-time at Algonquin College. “While I was there I really enjoyed teaching and building foundations with new cooks entering the industry, and I felt it was the next step for me.”

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She also decided to go back to school herself, and recently graduated and received her MBA in hospitality and tourism from the University of Edinburgh.

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Earlier this year, she was hired to be the managing director of the just-created Kingston Culinary Association, promoting the city as a tourism destination for food-lovers. She liaises with and connects restaurants, brewers, farmers and other food businesses with that goal in mind.

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“I still feel very much like a chef and very connected to restaurants,” Ardington says. “The setting has changed, but the heart of it really hasn’t. It is still about hospitality, serving people and bringing people together.”

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Patricia Larkin, formerly the chef of the Black Cat Bistro on Preston Street, has not been a chef for more than a decade.

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“I loved being a chef, I loved that job,” says Larkin. “I didn’t necessarily intend to leave it, but I knew I needed to have a change. I was feeling not necessarily physically tired, but just a little tired of the repetition.”

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Since 2015, she has opened two businesses — first Buchipop, a kombucha company, and then Burrow Shop, an online store that promoted local producers and small businesses during the COVID-19 pandemic.

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Buchipop and Burrow ran their course, and Larkin has returned to the restaurant business — but not as a chef. She is the operating partner of the Manx Hospitality Group, which owns the veteran, beloved, Elgin Street pub, The Manx, and the yet-to-open pasta restaurant Pony in Hintonburg.

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“My heart is in hospitality,” says Larkin, 45. “I’ve landed in a place that is more operational.”

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Are her days of being a chef over? “Yeah,” she says. “I would not be opposed to cooking a little one-off thing here or there. It’s fun. I still love to do it. I do it for friends, I do it at home. I love it. But as a career, I think I’ve moved.”

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Larkin says that she enjoys the constant problem-solving that’s part of being a restaurant operator. “I like how every day is a little bit different,” says Larkin. “I’m always learning something new.” With Pony, which still has no fixed opening date, Larkin feels like she’s been able to flex her creativity.

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Another former chef, Marysol Foucault, feels like her new role allows her to reciprocate, in a way, after after being given many chances and opportunities as restaurateur.

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In August, Foucault came on board as the director of La Fab, the community arts centre in Chelsea. “It really touches me and moves me to see people who are so talented,” she says. “It moves me to help them flourish. It just makes me full of joy.”

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Foucault was renowned on Ottawa’s culinary scene for two restaurants, Odile and Chez Edgar in Gatineau’s Hull sector. She competed in the 2014 Canadian Culinary Championship and she appeared on two seasons of the Flavour Network show Wall of Chefs. But she closed Chez Edgar, the last of her two businesses, in the summer of 2022, wanting to spend more time with her ailing mother and young family.

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How much does Foucault miss owning a restaurant or cooking in a restaurant? “I feel it’s part of a past life,” she says.

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“My body couldn’t keep up with the volume that we were doing,” Foucault says. “That’s one thing that really led me to change career paths. I’m going to be 50 really soon, my body wasn’t following what my mind wanted to do. Had I done it on a smaller scale, maybe I could have gone on for longer.”

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Harriet Clunie, an acclaimed chef who had her own restaurant, the Beechwood Gastropub, in the late 2010s, has left restaurants behind for health reasons. She was the chef of Das Lokal in Lowertown about five years ago when a range of symptoms grew more acute — headaches, exhaustion, intense pain in her elbow that prevented her from using her knife, brain fog and short-term memory issues,” she says.

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“I didn’t know what as happening. One day my body just decided, ‘Nope, nope, we’re done.’

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“At the time I really thought it was burnout, but as time went on, nothing got better, and some things got worse.” Clunie was diagnosed with fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue syndrome. It’s possible that COVID-19 triggered her condition, she says.

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For the last year, Clunie has been on the Ontario Disability Support Program. “It’s only $1,400 a month,” she says. “That just covers my bills. I do have a bit of family support. If I didn’t, I would be going to the food bank.”

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Clunie says of her situation: “It’s not been all doom and gloom,” although she always has to be aware of her fluctuating energy levels and “what it will cost me if I need to do something.

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“If I do something social, it will probably take me two or three days to recover.”

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Clunie says her condition has forced her to deeply contemplate who she is. “My identity for 20 years was in restaurants,” she says. “I was a chef. I was a cook. That was my life, and I don’t have that any more. So what is left?”

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She says she wants to work again, as long as accommodations could be made. “My mind is still there, and all the things that made me a good chef — solving problems and working under pressure. I’ve got notes and notes and notes about projects.”

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Despite what they do now, Ardington, La Salle and Ferries all say that if the circumstances were right, they would run a restaurant kitchen again.

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“Absolutely,” says Ardington. “Maybe when my kids are older and doing more of their own thing. Right now, I really value being able to be more present in their lives, while still doing work that keeps me connected to an industry I love.

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“What I miss most is the rush of service and the relationships you build with the people around you,” she says.

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“But I also really like the work I’m doing now and how much I’m learning. I wouldn’t say one is better than the other. They’re just different stages of my career and my life,” she says.

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“I’ll be honest with you,” La Salle says. “I really miss the restaurant life, the clientele, speaking with guests, the teamwork in the kitchen.

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He says he would consider a return to restaurants if it were “something very special.

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“I’m not locked down to the position I have now,” he says. “I see friends that own restaurants. It’s hard but they seem happy at what they’re doing.”

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More strongly than any of her peers, Ferries asserts that having her own restaurant remains her ambition.

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“I really think that’s probably the next step,” she says, even if the realist in her adds, “in this day and age, the list of reasons not to open a restaurant just keeps getting longer and longer.”

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She can’t say what kind of restaurant it will be, whether it will serve small plates or fine dining or a certain kind of cuisine.

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“I want to open a restaurant that will just make me happy,” Ferries says. “I want to come in, I want to be proud of it. I want to be happy there. I want to be doing the things and making the food that makes me happy, and hopefully others too.”

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