Cooking for a crowd: How a beloved restaurant feeds its own | Canada Voices

On this rainy Thursday night in downtown Dartmouth, 65 diners have booked reservations at The Canteen, a beloved neighbourhood restaurant. Before the kitchen plates a single order of the seared scallop risotto or the servers carry out the first bowl of steamed mussels, chef-owner Renée Lavallée will prepare an even more important meal, one that will be consumed before the doors open to the public.

Staff meal, also known as family meal, is a long-observed tradition (and, if done well, a perk) at some, but not all, restaurants. Renowned pastry chef Christina Tosi’s most famous dessert, the Milk Bar Pie, was created when she was in charge of staff meal at the New York restaurant wd~50. In The French Laundry Cookbook, the celebrated chef Thomas Keller credits time spent preparing staff meal at a Rhode Island restaurant early in his career for teaching him the fundamentals of cooking and the art of “using scraps to make something tasty, eye-appealing, and satisfying.”

At The Canteen, kitchen staff take turns preparing it and it’s served between lunch and dinner service. It’s a way to fuel cooks, servers, hosts and dishwashers before a busy night on their feet. It’s a way to creatively use up ingredients that might otherwise go to waste. And it’s a way to build camaraderie among staff, if even for just a few minutes.

Lavallée’s quest for inspiration starts where it usually does: the walk-in fridge.

The Canteen’s walk-in houses two floor-to-ceiling shelves loaded up with neatly-stacked containers and trays of ingredients: fuschia-coloured rings of pickled onions bobbing in brine, plump steaks resting on a wire rack-lined sheet pan, frilly-edged trumpets of fresh campanelle pasta.

The deep metal vessel filled with rice cooked the previous day calls out to her. After a night in the fridge, it has dried out and its starches have recrystallized, making it ideal to use in fried rice. When she’s on staff meal, she’ll often rotate between that, lasagna, enchiladas and pizza – all proven crowd-pleasers.

Lavallée is avoiding the main kitchen today, because staff are performing the weekly deep clean and she can’t access a stove. She’s working in the side kitchen, the one she does her baking in, which staff lovingly call “Renée’s Office.”

After she heats a massive stainless steel rondeau pan in the commercial convection oven, she lifts the lid off the pan and pours in a glug of sesame oil.

She turns back to her work station – a long butcher block – and tackles the delicate work of peeling and chopping small nubs of ginger with her large chef’s knife, teasingly nicknamed “The Spoon” by staff because of how dull it is. With that same knife, she reduces a basketball-sized savoy cabbage into a mound of pale green ribbons.

Lavallée has worked at restaurants where staff meals were composed from the leftovers that were otherwise going in the trash, or frozen things that were quickly heated up for staff to scarf down. In 2017, when she opened The Canteen, she knew she wanted to provide more than that: a healthy, filling meal to ensure staff could get through their shift.

She opens the rondeau and the nutty fragrance of the toasted sesame oil fills the room. In go the ginger, cabbage and a tray of shiitake mushrooms, which had been sliced up to use in the vermicelli beef hot bowl offered at lunch. She tops it all with a few generous sprinkles of kosher salt.

Just through the doorway in the main kitchen, Dave Smith, along with the other two line cooks on duty, is pulling appliances away from the wall, removing the burners from the stove, and using palette knives to scrape off the grease that’s built up since last week’s cleaning.

When Smith first started at The Canteen in 2022, staff meal duty was deeply stressful. He’d overthink the assignment, spending the whole week brainstorming ideas and then, desperate to please everyone, make beef, fish, rice and pasta.

Relax and do less, the veterans told him. It changed his perspective.

“It’s fun to just go through the fridge for five minutes and make up a recipe in your head. You get to have fun. Play with it,” he said.

Saturday, when the restaurant serves brunch, is the only day when chorizo is on the menu and Smith has found endless ways to use it. Sometimes it’s sautéed with roasted potatoes and other vegetables in a hash and drizzled with aioli. Last weekend, it was the protein in a hearty pasta dish made with scoobi doo noodles, roasted tomatoes, spinach, pickled red onion and feta.

The previous day, Lavallée was cutting up striploin and, knowing she was in charge of the next staff meal, packed the trim – the fatty but tasty off-cuts – away in the fridge. After briefly cooking the meat in the pan, she fishes a piece out to taste.

“That’s just pure fat,” she says approvingly.

Fat is an important component in staff meal, she says. “It makes people happy.” Here, it not only adds protein to the meal, but as the fat is rendered, it coats and flavours the vegetables and once rice is added, it will help crisp up the layer that lines the bottom of the pan.

One member of the team tonight is vegetarian so Lavallée has prepared a separate meat-free batch for her, loaded with seared cubes of tofu.

Lavallée makes several more trips to the walk-in, always bringing back a few more things to add. The rice, some wilted bok choy, a bunch of scallions, bottles of soy and fish sauce.

When all the flavours have had a chance to mingle and develop, she cracks eggs on top of the rice before returning the cooking vessels back to the oven.

“That smells so good!” a voice calls out from the kitchen.

The deep clean is complete and the line cooks have now switched over to completing prep for the night at each of their stations.

Smith ladles the creamy base of the restaurant’s famous chowder into deli containers. Steven Viner, in the back corner, is cutting neat portions of haddock for one of the entrées. Wesley Isnor, whose station is directly in front of the circular window that allows diners to peek into the kitchen, arranges thin slices of crostini in a container with mathematical precision.

Lavallée, in search of something crunchy and herby to top the fried rice, sidles up to Isnor’s station. She helps herself to a container of freshly chopped scallions and a short tub of toasted sesame seeds that are used in the restaurant’s chocolate tahini brownies.

“There’s no more cilantro. I’ve got some coming in tomorrow, but there’s not much now,” she offers as way of apology for pilfering from his prep.

A great staff meal is the balance of improvisation, waste reduction and a bit of thievery.

Back at the butcher block, she drizzles a few generous spoonfuls of chili oil – which chef de cuisine Rachel Lewis made – on top of the fried rice and sprinkles the toasted sesame and scallions. She eats a spoonful and shrugs, with an expression that suggests she’s pleasantly surprised by how good it is.

She lifts the rondeau, which weighs as much as a one-month-old baby, and makes her way to the main kitchen, setting it down in front of Smith’s prep station. Toasted sesame oil, beef fat and sweet soy sauce perfume the air.

The full service team is here now, and they, along with the cooks, mill around the kitchen, stealing glances at the contents of the pan.

Lauren Skinner, a server, approaches first and fills a small bowl. Ansel Pereira, the lead bartender, follows suit, topping his with extra chili oil.

Doug Townsend, Lavallée’s husband and The Canteen’s co-owner, scans the crowded kitchen to see who hasn’t queued up yet.

“Dave, are you eating?” he asks, noticing Smith hasn’t taken a bowl.

“I’m gonna wait till after preservice,” he replies, “just so I’m actually able to eat it.”

“Scorpion?” he asks, using a nickname for Viner, who is manning a few pots on the stove.

“I’m okay,” he replies.

Viner never eats staff meal – “I feel sluggish afterwards,” he explains – but Townsend and Lavallée, ever the mom and dad, still make a point of offering it to him.

“We’re a family and I want to feed my family,” Lavallée says.

Pereira describes The Canteen’s staff meal as a major morale booster. He’d worked at hotel restaurants where staff meal was boiled pasta served with tomato sauce.

“They would make the meal at noon and then expect people at 6 p.m. to eat that,” he says, twisting his face in disgust.

To work a shift on an empty stomach was torture: From behind his perch at the bar, he’d watch servers deliver wagyu steak or duck confit to guests, wishing he could have a bite.

Ten minutes before The Canteen opens its doors, all staff gather in the dining room, where tables have been set and tealights are burning. Smith is leading preservice today, which is a hybrid of the sort of motivational speech a football coach might offer in the locker room and a useful summary of the day’s specials and how many reservations are on the books. This is also the window when everyone has a chance to eat their meal.

After staff disperse, Skinner stands by the bar, scraping the last bits of rice from her bowl. “It’s so good!” she says.

When Smith is in charge of staff dinner, one of his favourite things to see is colleagues packing up deli containers of the leftovers to take home as a late-night snack or lunch for the next day.

Pereira wanders back into the kitchen to serve himself another bowl of fried rice, and Smith’s eyes follow him.

“Look, Ansel just went back for seconds!” Smith gushes, even though this meal isn’t his own creation. “That always makes me so happy.”

One in a regular series of stories. To read more, visit our Inspired Dining section.