Chef David Leeder was recruited this spring by the Thomas Keller Restaurant Group’s three-Michelin starred Per Se restaurant in New York to serve as its executive sous chef.Handout
In early September, I found myself sitting at a marble-topped table at Shelter, a dark and moody cocktail bar in the heart of Calgary’s bustling Victoria Park area.
The lounge has long been popular with food enthusiasts, thanks to the pop-ups frequently running out of its tiny kitchen, often giving young chefs a chance to impress the city’s culinary tastemakers.
On this Thursday night, the room is full of chefs, influencers and keen gourmands, all anxious to get a taste of the creations of a hometown hero.
The pop-up is a collaboration between Garrett Martin (most recently a culinary director at Calgary’s Concorde Group, now in-between restaurants) and David Leeder, a long-time fixture in the Alberta restaurant industry.
This past spring, Leeder was recruited by the Thomas Keller Restaurant Group’s three-Michelin starred Per Se restaurant in New York to serve as its executive sous chef. Back in Calgary to visit friends and family while Per Se underwent renovations, Leeder stands at the foot of the table to present fire-kissed morsels of raw fish perched atop a mound of vegetables, melon and Marcona almonds, anchored by a perfect circle of vibrantly yellow sauce.
He explains that the crudo is comprised of kinki, a sweet and fatty Japanese rockfish, rarely served in these parts. My dining companion loves the dish so much she returns for another taste the following night and Leeder whips up a new preparation – seared kinki with melon bacon bisque – just so she can try something different.
One might assume the chef picked up this trick working under Per Se chef de cuisine Chad Palagi and the legendary Keller himself, but Leeder has long had a reputation for pushing the envelope when it comes to technique, creativity and ingredients. Television shows such as The Bear have taught even casual diners about the importance of a sous chef, and at a fine-dining operation owned by the famously detail-oriented Keller, the role is especially crucial.
Leeder’s responsibilities at Per Se involve the day-to-day operation of the restaurant and collaboration with sous chefs and management team to present a daily US$390 nine-course chef tasting menu. He didn’t plan to head south of the border at this point in his career – in fact, he’s a big proponent of retaining Canadian culinary talent at home – but when the Keller Group came calling, his interest was piqued.
“I’ve done almost everything I wish I could have done as a chef and my plan was to open my own restaurant in Calgary,” he says. “But when you get this kind of offer, it’s too good to resist.”
Per Se Sweet Corn 'Agnolotti.'David Escalante/Handout
Until he left for New York, Leeder was the executive chef at Calgary’s venerable Teatro Ristorante. The chef’s tasting menus he produced there are largely responsible for the crowd clamouring for reservations at that Shelter pop-up. For many Teatro guests, Leeder had seemingly come out of nowhere, raising the question of how an Albertan-born chef rose to Michelin-level standards in a province that has no Michelin-starred restaurants.
But, like many talented chefs, Leeder grew up in a culinary-focused family. He was equally influenced by his grandmother, a trained chef in her own right, and his godfather, a politician with a strong presence in Edmonton’s Chinese community, who helped him to explore the city’s collection of Asian restaurants, indulging in Chinese classics at the Lingnan or Laos and Thai fare from Boualouang.
“My mother’s side of the family was Italian so I have that European food culture in my background,” he says. “I grew up with great food around at the table and my aunts and uncles and parents had a strong presence in the kitchen.”
Perhaps that background helped lead him to the three-starred Michelin restaurant Martin Berasategui in Spain, where he accepted an unpaid apprenticeship at age 23 and lived in the wine cellar after hours. He returned to work at Calgary’s now-defunct Muse restaurant before jetting back overseas to take an internship at Copenhagen’s Noma, later becoming chef de partie at Noma’s sister restaurant 108. After a short stint back at home he accepted the chef de cuisine job at the Michelin-starred Frenchie in Paris.
Martin, his co-chef at that Calgary pop-up and a long-time friend, says he’s not surprised by Leeder’s ascent.
“He was always incredibly passionate, ever since I worked with him 10 years ago at Muse. But it is his drive that made him who he is now,” Martin says. “He pushed himself harder than anybody else I know to accomplish great things.”
Leeder’s old boss, Matthew Batey, the chief operating officer and director of culinary at the Teatro Group, concurs. “What David brought to Teatro was incredibly high-level, technique-driven cooking and a real knowledge of the food he was making,” he says, citing Leeder’s deep understanding of regional Italian food and why ingredients are traditionally paired with each other. “David loves food. He’s almost like a food historian in that regard.”
Of course, the public discourse around fine dining has shifted since Leeder spent his nights sleeping in a Spanish wine cellar. He’s quick to note that the Thomas Keller Restaurant Group pays staff not only fairly but well and that those unpaid apprenticeships have fallen out of favour and are illegal in many places, including New York.
“I have definitely done the 16-hour days and 20-hour days elsewhere,” he says. “But the company I work for now has a very high standard of professionalism. Our turnover is low. We were just closed for two months for renovations, but our whole team came back.”
Ultimately, for Leeder, it’s about the food. When he speaks about the act of collectively planning and executing a Per Se tasting menu, he sounds like a conductor plotting out the movements of a symphony: “We have what we call the ‘aha moment’ with food,” he says. “A tasting menu can be really daunting because you can’t have an aha moment for every course, but you need to have those crescendos and those buildups and a consistency. You want to plan the journey for the guest.”