From Skills Nunavut to Savoy
Inuksuk High School graduate working as chef at London's most famous hotel
Casey Lessard
Northern News Services
Monday, April 20, 2015
LONDON, ENGLAND
London's Savoy Hotel has a history that precedes all others in Europe's largest city, having hosted celebrities attracted to the decadence and opulence of Britain's first luxury hotel.
Iqalungmiut Eliane Kanayuk-Gabriel has been a chef at London's world-famous Savoy Hotel for two years, and credits her experience with Skills Nunavut for helping her choose the career. - photo courtesy of Eliane Kanayuk-Gabriel
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And if you can find your way to the Savoy by July, you might sample food prepared by Nunavummiuq Eliane Kanayuk-Gabriel.
"I've always loved to eat," Kanayuk-Gabriel, 28, said. "That's one of the things I still love about cooking. I started in cooking doing the competitions in Skills (Nunavut), and that drove my passion in being a chef, and I've made a career out of it. Before that, I wanted to study music, and if I hadn't have gotten involved in Skills, I wouldn't have ended up here at all."
Her Skills Nunavut experience led her to culinary school in Vancouver, where she got a job with Fairmont Hotels after graduation.
"Fairmont manages the Savoy as well," she said. "One of the reasons I became a chef was to travel, and you can transfer within the company, so I ended up here."
She's been at the hotel for almost two years, and her visa expires in July. Since she specialized in pastries at school, she went to the Savoy as a pastry chef. She moved to the main kitchen to be a banqueting chef, one of a crew managing groups from four to 500 people attending events, such as weddings and conferences, just before Christmas.
"Which was our busiest time of year," she said. "We were working sometimes 14 hour days, and the longest stretch during Christmas was nine days with no day off. You're doing 1,000 covers a day, and you have to maintain a standard. We don't really have a slow period. It's kind of full-on all the time. It's very physically demanding."
She works in the larder section, and her Inuit tolerance for the cold has come in handy.
"We did a butternut squash panna cotta starter for 400 people, and I spent three days making (it)," she recalled. "I started making the panna cotta base, and the next day I had to set it, so I was literally in a fridge all day setting in glass bowls and then stacking them in the fridge. That function took seven people, and we had 20 moves - so 20 things to put on the plate. We had to figure out how much panna cotta to make so we didn't run out, where to put all the space, and how to plate it."
Another function put her skills to the test.
"(It) was an octopus carpaccio function for about the same amount of people, and we just used the tentacles so we had to roll them so that they were all even shape, and then slice them and plate them a la minute, and then keep them in the fridge like that as well."
Last year, while working in pastries, she had an item on the menu that celebrated the heritage of her chosen field. Kanayuk-Gabriel used peach melba - created by the Savoy's first chef, Auguste Escoffier - to inspire a special melting treat.
"We have a chocolate sphere on the dessert menu, and it has to have a hot sauce you pour over the sphere so that the sphere melts and reveals what's inside," she said. "It was a white chocolate sphere that we had painted to look like a peach, and it had the flavours of peach melba inside, which is vanilla ice cream, raspberry, and a poached peach."
If your mouth is watering and you're ready to book a flight, bring your pocketbook, or someone else's. A basic room starts at about $600, and a one-bedroom suite is $3,600. Guests with the cash will forego a subway trip from Heathrow airport, and ask the hotel to send their shuttle, a Rolls-Royce Phantom.
In 2011, federal cabinet minister Bev Oda was famously compelled to stay there instead of at a hotel provided by a conference. Three nights and a $16 glass of orange juice led to her retirement from politics soon after.
"A lot of people save up their whole lives to come and stay here," she said. "I will be sad to leave. It definitely brings you up a couple notches having worked here because there is a high standard they hold you to. I've learned a lot in terms of cooking, but also had a lot of opportunities to travel, as well as enjoy some of the other food that we have in London."
She plans to return to Vancouver in the summer, with hopes to continue with Fairmont or move to a small seaside lodge.
