Legendary Ottawa Chef Kurt Waldele, who died in 2009, will once again be greeting the diners who come to eat at the NAC’s restaurant Le Café.
At an August fundraiser for the Ottawa Humane Society, an event originally started by Waldele and his wife Suzanne Beauchemin, the National Arts Centre’s current executive chef, John Morris, unveiled a plaque in memory of Waldelet that will soon hang at the restaurant’s entrance to greet guests.
Waldele is known throughout Ottawa’s culinary community as a great mentor of young chefs, helping to train many of Ottawa’s current elite chefs, including Louis Charest, the executive chef at Rideau Hall, the Rideau Club’s Cory Haskins and Tim Wasylko, prime ministerial meal maker at 24 Sussex Drive.
“He was a very tough chef. If he liked you he was hard on you, so he was very hard on me,” says Charest, who recalls the competitive atmosphere in the kitchen working under Waldele. But the challenging times at Le Café helped prepare Charest for actual cooking competitions.
In 1998, Charest had made it all the way to the Culinary Olympics, competing against the world’s top chefs in Luxembourg. Amazingly, Waldele was there to see him take home the gold medal.
“I don’t think that it’s right that after giving 30 years of your life and passion working in the same place, really developing it, that people could forget he was here,” says Morris “He hired and mentored all of these people. I feel he should be remembered for that and there was nothing there to show that he’d been here. I felt like something needed to be there.” Morris added that it would also be nice for the staff that worked under Waldele to see his face at work once again.
The plaque has a picture of Waldele in the kitchen on the left side, beside a bronze inscription with a brief description of the accomplishments from Waldele’s career. A career which came to an unfortunate end when waldele passed away at only 61 from lymphatic cancer.
Waldele, who was born in southern Germany, was one of the first chefs in Canada to really promote the use of domestic wine.
“He was one of the first chefs to use local Canadian ingredients. It wasn’t fashionable to do at that time – he’s really an innovator that way,” says NAC spokesman Carl Martin, who worked with Waldele for several years.
“He was doing something unique by promoting Canadian food and that made him an attraction,” adds Charest.
Waldele’s wife, Suzanne Beauchemin, says his promotion of local foods and wine, along with mentoring great chefs and his charity work at the Ottawa Humane Society, are what he would consider his greatest accomplishments.
The list of those who came to enjoy Waldele’s culinary creations at Le Café is another thing that Ottawa’s “father chef” was proud of. He served the likes of Queen Elizabeth, Princess Diana, Prince Charles, and former U.S. president Ronald Reagan, and was even the preferred chef of former prime minister BrianMulroney and his family. However, there is one guest who Waldele served that really made his mother proud: Pope John Paul II.