Carolyn Reid
SCARAMOUCHE (2 on the Kates 100 list)
For the past 20 years, Carolyn Reid has been a mainstay in the kitchen at Scaramouche. Reid first realized her destiny was chefdom when she failed to get into vet school. She always knew it would either be one or the other. Rejection led to her first cooking gig at Kingston’s Chez Piggy before she made the move to the big city. In T.O., Reid worked with Jamie Kennedy for a couple of years, but it was Scaramouche that had her at hello.

Reid has moved from apprentice to chef de cuisine, the position she has held for half a decade. In restaurant years, this is something of an anomaly, with chefs hopscotching from juncture to juncture, escaping environments that often act as breeding grounds for tempers. At Scaramouche, however, this has never been the case.

“You get treated nicely; it’s one of the biggest things,” she notes. No 14-hour days here. “Not too many days go by that I haven’t learned something about cooking or running the business.”

 

Alida Solomon 
TUTTI MATTI (13)
Alida Solomon is the daughter of a lawyer and a teacher. Growing up, her parents expected that she’d follow in their professional footsteps. But she loved to cook and couldn’t stomach academia. So in the early ’90s, she moved as far away from Toronto as possible to follow her passion.

She ended up in a catering kitchen in South Africa. It was run by a woman “who scared the life out of me,” says Solomon, but who taught her the discipline necessary to maintain a successful culinary career.

It was an especially fortuitous mentorship, says Solomon, “because in the ’80s and ’90s in Toronto there really weren’t any female chefs.” 

She left South Africa and lived in Tuscany for seven years, learning the finer points of Italian cooking. She returned home in 2002 to launch Tutti Matti and pays forward her early mentorship by guiding many young female chefs. And eventually her parents came around.

 

Miriam Echeverria
L'UNITA (33)
As a child in Vera Cruz, Mexico, Miriam Echeverria was surrounded by family. It meant a bevy of siblings and cousins to play with but also a lot of aunts and uncles to feed during their large, monthly family gatherings. So Echeverria’s grandmother enlisted her as a sous chef to prepare 50-person-plus meals.

The passion she developed for cooking for crowds has continued into her professional life as head chef of L’Unità. The familial vibe is something she still holds dear in her kitchen.
“I want my staff to come to work happy every day,” she says, “because I want that mood to come out in the food.” To create the right atmosphere, she tries to eschew the typical rigid hierarchies. “I don’t like it when people call me chef; I think we’re all cooks.” 

The care she has for her staff extends to her ingredients. “Next year I hope we have a garden on the roof of the restaurant,” she says, so she can nurture the produce herself.

 

Chantana Srisomphan
KHAO SAN ROAD (35)
Everyone calls Chantana Srisomphan “Top.” It’s a family nickname she grew up with in Thailand, but the mantle might as well refer to her towering stature in Khao San Road’s kitchen. 

She oversees a staff of close to 40 at the extremely popular downtown lunch spot (lines often clog up the sidewalk outside). But for her, maintaining morale is part of the pleasure of her work. Her pleasant demeanour helps, as do the daily, delicious staff lunches. But one thing that Srisomphan isn’t relaxed about is the quality of her dishes. Having learned how to cook from her mom, then at a formal cooking school in Bangkok, she’s dedicated to producing nothing but high-quality, ultra-authentic Thai (no ketchup in the pad Thai here). 

“We make everything from scratch,” she says. “It’s all very fresh.” It’s that attention to quality that has kept her at the top of her game.

 

Alexandra Feswick
THE DRAKE HOTEL (56)
As chef de cuisine at the Drake Hotel, Alexandra Feswick has a leadership role in one of the city’s most buzzed about, glamorous dining rooms. It’s a long way from her first culinary job. When she was 15, she worked in a nursing home. Her boss was a rare female chef at the time, though, which helped her understand what a career in cooking would be like: in short, hard work, “even though what we were making was all puréed,” she jokes.

From there, Feswick trained at George Brown (after finishing a sociology degree at University of Guelph), then worked her way through a long list of top restaurants: Auberge du Pommier, Globe/Earth and Brockton General. What gets her through the long days and nights (“I work until 1 a.m. every weekend”), and all the stress of maintaining incredibly high culinary standards? 

“I’m stubborn.” But her tenacity shows in her polish: her take on haute comforts is a delight.

For more on the Kates 100 see our announcement post, the full listing and a recap of this year’s winners and losers.