The restaurateurs at Calgary’s Charcut run a bustling business, while fostering the city’s vibrant culinary community.
Imagine leafing through the phone book and calling every chef in your city to invite them to a backyard barbecue. Sound intimidating? Not to the co-chefs of Calgary’s Charcut Roast House. When Connie DeSousa and John Jackson opened their 110-seat restaurant in 2010, hosting a colossal lunch seemed a sensible way to meet the neighbours. They even invited the kids. “We’d been away from the city for a while, living and working abroad, and we wanted to reintroduce ourselves, get to know the chefs and strengthen the culinary community,” says Jackson, a Saskatchewan native who previously spent a decade working in Calgary. DeSousa was born and raised in the city.
More than 70 foodie families turned up at the event, held in DeSousa’s parents’ sprawling backyard, to feast on hot-off-the-spit rotisserie chicken — a Charcut specialty. “We want Calgary to grow as a culinary destination. It’s important for us to work together, learn from one another and have an open dialogue, rather than focus on competition,” explains Jackson. His collaborative spirit is shared amongst Charcut’s other co-owners, who include Jackson’s wife, Carrie Jackson, DeSousa and her husband, Jean Francois Beeroo.
All four were living in San Francisco for several years leading up to Charcut’s opening.
“We fell in love with the San Francisco-style approach to food,” says Jackson, former executive chef at San Fran’s posh St. Regis Hotel. “Everyone goes to the farmers’ market, they know their butcher’s name, and they know where their food is coming from. It was a different food culture from what we had experienced in other cities. When we were developing the concept for our own restaurant we knew we wanted to plant that culture back at home.” And they did just that, making pals not only with local chefs but also with producers. It became a mission that they dubbed “40 Farms in 40 Days,” and they set out across Canada to meet the farmers and artisan food makers who have become their comrades.
Today, Charcut is lively from lunchtime to late night. Located in downtown Calgary, inside the Hôtel Le Germain, the restaurant attracts a midday crowd of nine-to-fivers with just enough time to devour “Lunch All at Once:” a daily soup-and-sandwich ($15) or a salad-and-rotisserie ($25) meal served with an in-and-out-in-45-minutes guarantee and a bag of warm homemade cookies to-go. In the evening, the lights dim and the room holds a din of cheerful staff, buoyant patrons and a hopping kitchen that opens into the dining room. (Customers can even perch at Charcut’s Eating Bar and chat with the chef slicing their charcuterie.) A custom-built charbroiler and retro-modelled meat cutter in the centre of the room reveal the inspiration for the restaurant’s name (pronounced char-cut). They also supply the omnipresent and mouthwatering Cherrywood scent blessed with slow-roasted beef and chicken aromas.
DeSousa and Jackson dish up rustic fare — think whole-roasted chickens and generous cuts of prime rib and brisket, served family style on butcher blocks. Hearty nosh such as Spragg Farm’s roasted pork belly ($27) cozies up next to aged cheddar grits, arugula pistou and green beans; Swiss chard, preserved lemon and Skyhawk lemon oil complement delicate grilled whole fish ($29). As proof of their dedication to the craft, both chefs sit on the Boards for the Alberta Culinary Federation and the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology’s Culinary and Retail Meat Cutting programs. So, it makes sense that Charcut’s decked-out kitchen is a meat-lover’s playground, ideal for the restaurant’s apprentices, who learn heritage techniques, such as canning and preserving. Hospitality management students from a number of schools intern at Charcut, where service director and co-owner Beeroo lends his charisma and a wealth of high-profile international experience. “Students work in the front-of-house, serving, bartending, expediting; it’s like cross-training. And, because we are located inside Le Germain, they also have an opportunity to learn about hotel food-and-beverage operations,” says Beeroo, who was born in Mauritius — an island off the southeast coast of Africa — and speaks a handful of languages in addition to his native French. Education is fundamental for Charcut employees as well. The restaurant’s in-house training program not only provides staff with knowledge of the latest equipment and methods but also gives them resources and encouragement to grow into management roles.
Carrie Jackson’s background in corporate and commercial law, combined with her 12 years of hospitality experience, rounds out Charcut’s quartet. She heads up the restaurant’s operations, handling accounting and invoicing, ensuring policies and procedures are upheld. DeSousa describes her as “the backbone of the company.” Together, the foursome have created one of Calgary’s most notable restaurants, earning a spot on EnRoute magazine’s Top 10 Best New Restaurants list in 2010 and receiving praise in both local and national media consistently since opening — perhaps most notably when DeSousa became a finalist on the Food Network Canada’s Top Chef Canada last year. With a packed dining room day and night, it’s understandable Charcut’s sales and revenues have increased 112 per cent from 2010 to 2012, although the ownership team declined to provide exact sales figures.
Every ambitious restaurateur aims for financial success, but Charcut’s philosophy is equally about growing the Calgary food community. DeSousa and Jackson want their city in the spotlight, and it is — no doubt with help from their other venture: Alley Burger. “We loved San Francisco’s underground food scene and Calgary didn’t have one. About six months after we opened, we launched Alley Burger and started selling $5 burgers one night a week out the back door of the restaurant,” DeSousa explains. “We promoted it through social media, and it went viral.” It grew to a modest 12-person line-up the first night, blossoming within a few weeks into a crowd of more than 350. When the underground experiment became unmanageable, DeSousa and Jackson approached the mayor for permission to launch a food truck (there were none in Calgary at the time). The city’s 2011 pilot program included Alley Burger on wheels and four others. DeSousa and Jackson now sit on Calgary’s Street Food Committee, which oversees 39 mobile vendors.
The chefs’ commitment to their city hasn’t gone unnoticed. Earlier this year, Tourism Calgary and Tourism Alberta appointed the pair culinary ambassadors. In April 2012, they took Taste of Calgary to San Francisco to promote Canada to top U.S. travel and lifestyle journalists. Independently, they represent Charcut at the Canadian Chefs’ Congress (held in Halifax this year), and at events such as Savour Stratford, in Stratford, Ont. Recently, the co-chefs were invited to the renowned James Beard House in New York to take part in preparing a dinner created by Food Network Canada reality stars, such as Rob Rossi of Bestellen in Toronto and Jeremy Charles of Raymonds in St. John’s, N.L. And, Jackson and DeSousa are currently crafting a still-under-wraps celebration for Calgary’s Cultural Capital 2012 festival while simultaneously building a chefs’ collective, similar to Toronto’s Group of Seven, who will unite to shine an even brighter light on the city’s food scene.
Charcut’s unofficial motto is to make Calgary “a better place to eat through collaboration.” But the owners support many causes that make Calgary a better place, period. They participate in the Brown-Bagging-It-For-Kids program, which provides nutritious lunches for children at 60 schools throughout the city; the staff contributes its grat-uities in the Tips For Terry Fox fundraiser with the restaurant matching donations; the team supports the Diabetes and Make-a-Wish foundations, and they volunteer with Alberta Health Services to implement safer food-handling practices throughout the city. “It was harder in the beginning, when we were focused on making the business work, but now that we are where we are, we try to give back as much as we can, whenever there is an opportunity,” Jackson says. Without question, their collaborative spirit reaches far beyond the hospitality community. It’s a good thing the DeSousa family has that big backyard; one day they just might invite everyone in the phone book over for lunch.
photo courtesy of Roth & Ramberg
