Beausejour’s souperstar

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This article was published 18/12/2021 (1697 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

BEAUSEJOUR — Roger Wilton learned many moons ago it’s almost never a good sign to be summoned to the boss’s office, and then told to close the door behind you.

That turned out to be the situation in October 2020, when Wilton was the executive chef for Centerplate, the company responsible for almost every morsel of food served at Canada Life Centre.

Normally around that time of year Wilton, who’d held his position since 2004, would have been spending his days dutifully planning menus for the downtown arena, not just for hockey fans and concert-goers, but for professional athletes and touring music acts. With seemingly every form of live entertainment shelved owing to COVID, however, he was informed his services were no longer required, and that he was being laid off, effective immediately.

The married father of six didn’t have much time to pout. The second he broke the news to his wife Cindy, she reminded him that she had volunteered his services — “more like volun-told,” he says with a wink, seated in a coffee shop in Beausejour, where the couple resides — for a charity fundraiser she was involved with, which would require him to whip up a meal for a pre-event brainstorming session scheduled for later that week.

One of the dishes he served was cream of asparagus soup. An attendee declared it the best soup she’d ever tasted, and asked if he could make a few litres more for her to enjoy at home.

Wilton filled the order, as requested, which led to that person sharing it with family and friends, each of whom, in turn, wanted to know how to get their hands on some. Ditto when they offered others a slurp.

“It was actually a pretty quick turnaround — a little over two weeks — from me losing my job to getting all this going,” Wilton says, “all this” being Chef in the House, a gourmet soup biz 45 years and thousands of kilometres in the making.

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Wilton, 62, was born and raised in Montreal. Referring to the teenage version of himself as “by no means an angel,” he says he left home at age 16, and caught on as a cook at McDonald’s in order to afford the rent at the downtown apartment he was staying at.

“No, it wasn’t like I had some burning interest in restaurants or anything,” he responds, when asked if he applied at the Golden Arches with a dream of becoming a chef one day. “It was more a case of me thinking I should probably get a job at a place that served food, so maybe I could get a free meal once in a while.”

He turned out to be a quick study; a few months after he’d been promoted to crew chief, he landed a full-time gig at Chateau Champlain (now Montreal Marriott Chateau Champlain), one of the city’s toniest hotels. He spent a year there working as an entremetier, the person responsible for making soups and hot appetizers, before packing his bags and moving to Edmonton with a buddy, simply because he was 19, “so why the heck not?”

A year in Edmonton was followed by six months in Calgary, all the while toiling at a succession of dining spots. One morning, a few weeks before his 21st birthday, he decided what he really wanted to do was live in Banff, so he headed there — on a bicycle, no less — resumé in-hand.

“I ended up working for a family that owned three restaurants in Banff, and I became their main guy, doing the prep for all three,” he says. “They eventually opened a nightclub, and got me to run it, too. I ended up doing that for 10 years, and that was where I met Cindy, who was originally from Beausejour.”

The couple got married in 1992, the same year they relocated to Atlin, a village in northwestern B.C. billed online as the “most beautiful place on Earth.” They ran a fishing lodge for six years, in and around a slew of other projects. (Ask Wilton about the time he was flown by chopper to the side of a mountain, to barbecue steak and boil lobster for a group of heli-skiers, on their way down the hill.)

The Wiltons loved Atlin to bits but, given they had started a family, they were hearing the same thing over and over from Cindy’s mom and dad: how were they ever going to get to know their grandchildren, what with the two of them living so far away?

“It’s almost a given in this industry that you’re going to move around a lot. Staying in one position or place for more than five or six years can feel like a major accomplishment, so no, I wasn’t too concerned about finding work, after we moved to Beausejour in 1998,” Wilton says.

Following an 18-month stint as a banquet chef at the International Inn (now Victoria Inn) and a year or so at Lombard Avenue icon Bailey’s, Wilton, by then a certified, Red Seal chef, was approached by the manager of the Marlborough Inn to take on the role of executive chef. During his tenure there, he often spent his coffee break on the nine-story hotel’s rooftop. He was up there one morning in 2004, glancing out toward where a new, downtown rink was going up on the former Eaton’s site, when he thought to himself, “Jeez, wouldn’t that be a great place to work?”

Wilton, who won the Centerplate job over 11 other applicants, managed a 140-person staff during his 16 years with the company. Former Jets defenceman Dustin Byfuglien was a “teddy bear,” he says, who would happily gobble down anything dropped in front of him, while others were fussier come meal time, such as a current winger who is pescatarian. (Wilton is still peeved at American rapper 50 Cent, who didn’t touch a lick of his post-concert meal, despite having provided a rider with explicit instructions how it was to be prepared, right down to the amount of seasoning on the fried chicken.)

Like he mentioned earlier, he founded Chef in the House, a tag suggested to him by his wife, shortly after being let go from his job with Centerplate. He launched on Facebook with eight varieties of soup; classics such as chicken noodle, beef-and-barley and cream of mushroom, alongside more original concoctions such as a so-called hangover soup, which contains ground beef, onion, carrot, celery, tomato and elbow macaroni.

What began as a hobby business turning out roughly 30 litres of soup per week has grown into a full-blown operation that not only produces 15 times that amount for individual orders, but also stocks retail stores as far east as Pinawa and Lac du Bonnet, and as far west as Virden and Melita.

Additionally, Wilton, who prepares everything in a commercial kitchen situated just outside of Beausejour, advertises limited-edition specials on a weekly basis. For instance, ahead of the holidays he introduced a seafood-stuffing soup, a take on an offering he’s been bringing to family pot-luck dinners for eons.

“The beautiful thing about soup is you can turn anything into a soup, pretty much,” he says, mentioning Jet Dog Soup, named for the perogy-laden hotdog he conjured for Jets fans as another creative potage that shows up from time to time.

“It was scary at first, going from a guaranteed paycheque every two weeks to who knows what, but if there’s one thing I’ve learned in the past year is that’s all it was, a paycheque,” he continues, noting next on the agenda is Mom’s Pantry-style fundraising, which will allow hockey teams, theatre troupes or whatever to keep a portion of sales for themselves.

“When I was with True North, I was mainly responsible for scheduling, and I kind of got away from cooking, so much so that I used to say if you ever saw me in the kitchen, you knew we were in trouble. But now that I’m cooking all the time again, it really feels like my creative juices have returned.”

For more information, go to www.facebook.com/chefrogerinthehouse15

david.sanderson@freepress.mb.ca