Some Chefs would climb every snow-capped mountain for the reward of getting their own cooking show. Then there is Anthony Sedlak—one of Food Network Canada’s rising stars— who would climb the mountain for the sole purpose of boarding down and if he became a celebrity chef in the process then in his own words, “wicked.” It was a free snowboard pass that came with a kitchen job at Grouse Mountain Resort was all it took to convince the young powder hound to become a cafeteria busboy. From there he climbed up the culinary ladder to helm Grouse’s upscale Observatory dining room, which is where he was when he shot to fame by winning the Food Network’s 2006 Superstar Chef Challenge reality series. “I fell into it,” he explains of his culinary career. “Then the food caught my eye.”

With his devilish smile, punchy body language and penchant for tossing around slang while rockin’ a roast chicken, Sedlak still looks and sounds like the proverbial snowboarder.

And it’s precisely this laid-back attitude that was his ticket to ride on television. “Anthony has got this amazing combination of this boyish, youthful surfer dude and this great high-end knowledge of French cuisine,” Christine Cushing, one of the three judges on Superstar Chef Challenge, says of his appeal.

Today, Sedlak stars in his own primetime show, The Main, which celebrates the joy of simple, hearty meals inspired by a single ingredient. “Let’s say you go to the farmers’ market and they have beautiful beefsteak tomatoes. Wicked!” he enthuses, pumping his arms and flexing his fingers, like a basketball player about to make a pass. “But now you want to think about what you can pair with those tomatoes,” he rapidly continues. “Think pasta. Then you’ll want some cheese, maybe feta or buffalo mozzarella. And then you’ll want to get some olive oil and basil or maybe some Spanish onion. You want to think of flavours that complement those tomatoes.” With third and fourth seasons ready to roll, plus a new cookbook (The Main: Recipes published by Whitecap Books) under his belt, Sedlak is poised to be Canada’s next big celebrity chef. Yet no matter how high he soars, off a terrain park ramp or on the job, he keeps his food down to earth.

“My cooking philosophy is real food, great flavour,” he explains, sliding behind the kitchen counter of his condo in Vancouver’s trendy Yaletown to show me how to prepare Dijon-crusted pork chops with slow-braised lentils and warm apple compote. It’s a signature recipe, one he created while working as the sous-chef at La Trompette, one of London’s top brasseries. Despite his pedigreed training—he apprenticed at Vancouver Community College’s culinary school, did the high-end London gig and won a silver medal at the Hans Bueschken World Junior Chef Challenge in Auckland—Sedlak has never been a fan of haute cuisine. He even goes so far as eschewing the use of foodie staple foie gras, admitting it’s never been his thing.

Sedlak’s populist tastes and unpretentious personality are reflected in his show and cookbook, which are both chock full of practical tips. “People think cooking is a lot more complicated than it actually is,” Sedlak says, pulling a familiar red-and-white box out of the fridge. “With a few little tricks of the trade, you can really up the level of the home cook’s cuisine.” Like using store-bought beef stock? “Yes, I do make my own stock sometimes,” he laughs, pouring the liquid into his braise. “There’s nothing wrong with store bought.”

The chowders, meat pies and other classic comfort foods that Sedlak prepares on his show might be slightly less complicated than the dishes he used to make in restaurants, but he is certainly no culinary slacker. In fact, he’s a bit of a science nerd who worships Alton Brown (the Food Network’s gourmet decoder) and loves to rattle off an encyclopedic pantry of food facts. He attributes his triumph on the Superstar Chef Challenge to his inner food geek, on display today as shows me a pot of lentils that have been soaking overnight, to cut the cooking time in half. “I’m using Italian lentils,” he says, scooping a handful of dried legumes out of a plastic container and squeezing one between his fingers. “See how it pops out? The yellow, orange and red varieties have the husks removed, so they fall apart very easily. They’re a great choice for a purée or soup. But if you want to hold the shape of the lentil, you use the darker ones.” These, we braise with double-smoked bacon and dry white wine, adding some bay leaves that are cracked “to open up and bloom the flavour.”

His passion for food was not instilled by his family, he insists. “My mom favours simple cooking,” he laughs, dimples popping. “We grew up on tomato soup and grilled cheese.” But his mom did encourage him to take that first busboy position, where Sedlak was named employee of the month and was rewarded with a gift certificate for the upscale dining room he would eventually lead. He remembers that culinary epiphany, sitting there with his best friend, looking at the menu and thinking, “What the hell is this food?” When it arrived, he recalls being “pretty shocked and blown away that food could be transformed and created into something so lovely.”

Describing the seared pork chops resting on his kitchen counter, Sedlak makes a culinary metaphor: “If you cut into the meat when it’s tense, the natural juices are expelled by the pressure. But if you cook things a little bit ahead of time, the natural juices stay in the meat and it stays incredibly tender.” He could be describing his high-pressure stint in the kitchen at La Trompette, at age 20. “You don’t know what you’re doing and no one helps. You get called every name under the sun. We worked 18 hours a day, sometimes 10 days in a row.” When he returned to Vancouver the intense training gave him a harder edge, and he claims that he even had the odd tear-inducing tirade but it’s hard to imagine Sedlak as the Gordon Ramsay of Grouse Mountain, especially when he drops a pork chop on the floor and cries, “Oh, Christmas.”

He says he’ll never forget how he stormed out of the Grouse Mountain kitchen after a rip-roaring fight. Sylvain Cuerrier, his mentor and the executive chef, had some sage words of advice: “Stop!” he said. “We are cooking, we are not saving lives.” It’s a lesson that has proved valuable in his transition to television, which he says is similar in many ways to the restaurant industry. “You work very long hours, you have to work with a team and you have to take direction well. I am not a diva by any means. I like to listen and learn and listen.”

Sedlak hopes to open his own restaurant someday, one with the same comfortable, relaxed rhythm of his show. “It would be very old-world Mediterranean,” he says, describing a pressed-tin roof and checkerboard tile floors. He stirs in a spoonful of sour cream to finish the braised lentils. “The food would be simple, focused on great flavours. It would have authenticity and tradition.”

As we dig into a comforting plate of simple yet delicious lentils and pork chops, this boy-next-door wonder proclaims: “I say trends come and go, but classics are forever.”
Wicked.

All images courtesy of Whitecap. Photo by David Bagosy from The Main: Recipes by Anthony Sedlak (Whitecap 2008)