Interview with Peter Jackson from Jack’s Grill
Considered a veteran in the industry, Peter Jackson is frequently referenced in a tone of admiration by other restaurant owners. Before he showed up and opened “Jack’s Grill” in 1989, people in Edmonton thought of the “Skillet Grill” at Zeller’s when they heard the word “grill.” Though the term “grill” now frequents many restaurants around town, Jackson was the first to introduce the term to the Edmonton scene.
1. When were you first interested in the restaurant business?
I guess in college. It was a good reason to have a job in those days. I like people so it fit well with my likes. I didn’t know anything about it at the time. Growing up, my mom was a good cook. She doesn’t think she is, but she was a solid cook. Both my sister and I have an interest in cooking and I used to cook a lot at home so I became one of those decent young cooks as a young guy. At one point I hated my daytime job so I thought I’d give the restaurant business a chance. It started when I went out West from Nova Scotia in 1980 and I had to find a place to live. I ended up working at the Banff Springs hotel because it was easy to find accommodations and I ended up working in the kitchen. Kind of didn’t mind it. Kind of started to like it. So I ended up going and taking a job in Nova Scotia in a good kitchen as the lowest person on the ladder.
2. What interested you about this particular kind of restaurant?
The style of restaurant I have here came out of the experience of working in San Francisco. California style is basically regional ingredients cooked in almost a kind of Mediterranean style. Casual restaurant, hip place you can go and wear your jeans or you Armani suit and feel comfortable. It doesn’t matter what you wear as long as you’re coming here because you want to have a great meal and some great wine in a casual but professional atmosphere.
“As an owner of a restaurant and as a chef, I have a real pet peeve when I go to restaurants who list something on the menu that isn’t what they serve. For example if they say it is organic and it isn’t, or they say it is wild salmon, but I know you can’t get wild salmon. That ticks me off. In France it’s different. A couple years ago a Southern French restaurateur claimed on his menu that he was using French asparagus, when really it was Algerian Asparagus. An inspector found out that it was not French asparagus and they put him in jail. I don’t know for how long, but I thought it was great!”
- Peter Jackson
3. Who have been some of the instrumental people who have really encouraged and supported you through the starting and maintaining of your own restaurant?
I was a bit of a rebel so there weren’t a lot of people who were supporting me and helping me along. I came out here and opened this restaurant out of left field; people didn’t know what I was doing. My employees mainly are the ones who really drove this restauranta€”a bunch of people who had like minded ideas in the beginning. I had a partner who was in the wine trade so that really helped the front end style of the business in terms of fairly good quality winesa€”well chosen and decently priced. And I had wonderful staff who were seriously interested in the business.
4. What makes your restaurant interesting or unique to other restaurants? Chain restaurants in particular?
The food is what differentiates us from most restaurants. Also, the service and the food here is not cookie-cutter. We don’t tell our employees how to stand, how to look, and the questions they must ask. That is what chain restaurants have to do because they hire people and then mold them to what they want them to be. Whereas in my restaurant I like to have my front staff and my cooks have a personality and let their personality show through. It can’t be always the same. It never is. If somebody cooks you a meal and a week later somebody else cooks you the same meal, it won’t be the same in this restaurant. In a Moxie’s or Earl’s it might be the same, because they have their package of this, package of that, two grams of this, two grams of that, you add them together and you serve it. A very exact science. Here, there is variety, and the service staff will treat you as they think you need to be treated. They don’t treat everybody exactly the same.
5. What are the most significant joys and struggles of being an independent restaurant owner?
Over the years, making people happy. Seeing people leave the restaurant happy. That’s always been what keeps me going.
As for the struggles, in Alberta we have a supply chain dilemma here where we just don’t get the quality of ingredients that you get elsewhere in the world. It’s not been a culture in Edmonton of fine foods. You don’t have a vast selection of people who are interested in cooking fine foods. Whereas in California where I came from, literally there is so many people who are really interested in doing great food. When you put out an ad for a chef you have choice. You have all these different people who have worked at different places and you just decide who fits your style the best. Here, I’ve had to train everybody over the years to do what I do. Because what I do is not what they see on a regular basis. That’s been a real struggle. It’s been a constant training program for 18 years.
6. Do you have a family? Are they involved in the restaurant?
I do, yes. They are always involved in the restaurant, family is always involved whether they like it or not. They’ve all worked here at some period in time. My wife worked here as a cook in the kitchen. My wife likes to cook. She was likely the one who inspired me. She’s been supportive all along and has kept me going in this crazy field. She’s worked in all parts of the restaurant over the years. It’s not her profession, she’s a nurse, but she’s done it when I’ve needed her. Both my children have worked in the kitchen. They don’t right now, although my son does from time to time.
I met my wife in my previous life, in a different business. At the time, my office was next door to her house. I kept seeing her walk her dog past my office. It was a small little town in Nova Scotia and I kept seeing her in different places.
7. How are you involved in the community around you? Do you support any charities? Local and larger?
I have a soft spot for the food bank and so I try to do a fair amount for them if I can. I think it’s a natural thing, we run a restaurant where we serve very expensive, very sophisticated, fine food but we still live in a city where people are starving and can’t get a plate of rice. Some people say that we’re hypocritical for giving to them, but I think that’s what being successful in life all is about. If you’re not successful you have a hard time supporting causes. Some people think that if you’re rich then it doesn’t count by supporting a cause. Well I’m not rich, but I’ve been successful in this business and so I think that giving back is important.
8. Where do the ideas for your food come from?
Traveling, eating and for me it’s a natural progression. Its things we’ve done before. I always try to improve things. I tell everybody in my kitchen, if you do something, every time you do it you try to make it better. Even if it’s cooking a plain steak. Every time you cook that steak you should be trying to achieve perfection. If you do that your food will be constantly evolving. You always find something to do that’s just a little bit better or a little bit different. Food here comes from that sort of strategy and also the fact that I let everybody in the kitchen be involved in the creative process. Everyone throws their ideas in. There’s no new food. That’s the reality. That’s the basis I go on. I’m not going to invent anything. I may re-invent it, or change it, but everything that I do has been done before.
In my kind of cuisine, of course there’s this new molecular gastronomy now, which is actually inventing things that haven’t been done before using technology. But we haven’t gone there yet. That’s the new style, new food, that I don’t know if I’m going to live long enough to experience. It’s very expensive. It involves very sophisticated apparatus and cooking utensils to do it with. The person who started it is a person in Spain. In a restaurant that I think was open six months a year, and the other six months in a year they have a laboratory in Barcelona where they create their ideas. It’s literally a laboratory. They have scientists who work with them. They have broken food down to its basic structure.
That’s the problem. There is no new food. This is a dilemma that all cooks find. In this day and age you’re not inventing anything. You’re basically re-inventing or re-doing old ideas. Some cooks find that doesn’t cut it for them. They want to be creators. So with molecular gastronomy all of a sudden if you can take it down to the molecular level and take pig gelatin that is only firm when cold, and figure out a way to make it still firm when it’s hot and you’ve got something completely new. For example, warm noodles made of gelatin that defy that natural laws we’re used to.
9. How large a role do ethics play in your choice of products? Do you buy locally, organically or fair trade?
I try to buy humanely raised. Really though, I’m driven by flavor. I do think that things that are raised locally and are organic tend to usually taste better. There are a couple of “ifs” there. They have to taste better. I do not buy organic just because it’s organic. In Alberta, most things are pretty organic. We don’t have three seasons to grow vegetables so we can’t inundate our land with huge amounts of chemicals like California does. For me organic has to be about flavor, and it has to look good too. If organic means going to the store to get a battered up old piece of food, that doesn’t cut it. Now you can grow organic that tastes great and looks great. Its work, so you have to have people interested doing it for the goal instead of the profit. So I support those people. I support local because I believe in the local economy.
10. Where does the restaurant’s name come from?
It’s also the name of a restaurant in San Francisco that’s been around since the 1800’s, so I like the longevity of it, and the simplicity of it. And how it relates to my name. The ego part of me liked that. Peter’s or Jackson’s just didn’t sound right. Jack’s seemed to roll off the tongue. The Grill was a weird choice of words. I think Grill for me was a natural thing, after having worked in the States for a number of years. Grill was quite a common name. When I did open here I guess I didn’t quite realize that nobody would have any idea of what I was doing. This was 1989, and trust me, when I opened there was no other grills in town except the Skillet Grill at Zeller’s. Grill to that generation was like the little coffee shops in Eaton’s or Zeller’s. So I started out with a grill. Now there are a thousand grills in the city.
11. What life experience has strengthened/inspired you the most?
Mostly people have inspired me. I guess though, maybe falling out of a tree when I was 12 and surviving. It was a pretty serious deal, it was a big tree. I fell out of it and fell on my back. I don’t know how far I fell. Maybe 25-30 feet. I fell in the middle of the forest amongst sticks and stones and everything else and landed on maybe the only soft carpeted with needles area of the forest. There was nobody around. I landed and it knocked the wind out of me and I thought I was going to die. Then I got up and I had no ill effects whatsoever.
Certainly, people inspired me. A defining moment in my career happened with the person I worked for in my first job. I went back to Nova Scotia and went into the hotel business. I had a Frenchman from France on my first day on the job take me aside over a drink and say, “You, have no idea what you’re doing. But I like your style, so I will teach you.” I became his personal student for one year. He was my inspiration. He was and is the best sauce maker I have ever had the chance of working with. He taught me more in one summer season then I’ve ever learned since.
I remember my wife who I hadn’t yet married at the time. I came back to Halifax after the resort season was over and cooked a first meal for us, and she was like, “What happened to you this summer! You gotta do this!”
