Chuck Hughes: 20 Years of Starting Garde Manger Over

The morning after June 1, 2006, Chuck Hughes opened his eyes with one thought in his head: “Oh my God, we have to do it all over again.” The night before, he’d launched Garde Manger. He’d given everything to that first service — so much that he’d missed the obvious. “I hadn’t realized you had to start over, day after day after day,” he says, still amused by his own naïveté. Twenty years and some 7,000 wake-ups later, he’s still doing it. And he still can’t explain how quickly it all went by. “It feels like I never saw the time pass. That must be a good sign.”

The Busboy Who Wasn’t Supposed to Cook

The bug caught him early, somewhere between a job as a ski instructor and a post as a busboy at the Banff Springs Hotel in Alberta, at 16. Except that back then, wanting to cook for a living wasn’t a common ambition. “I didn’t have a single friend heading into this field. Everyone was becoming an architect, an accountant, a lawyer… so-called ‘real jobs.'” Every aptitude test in high school brought him back to the same verdict: cook, chef, artist. It almost got him down. “I’d think: come on, can’t I be more than a cook on my profile?” Cooking school gave him the terms, the techniques, a diploma. What really won him over was the freedom the trade offered — the freedom to leave. “I never thought of it as a career, more as a job I loved.”

The Lesson That Stuck: Discipline

The most stubborn lesson, Chuck owes to his cooking teacher, Denis Paquin — an old-school French purist, the opposite of the young cook who dreamed only of breaking the rules. Two opposite temperaments, one thing passed down: discipline. “Cooking is lived every single day, it starts over every single day,” Chuck repeats like a mantra, a direct echo of what he learned behind his teacher’s stoves. There were other masters, including Fred Morin of Joe Beef, alongside whom he cooked for a long time; and his business partners, who taught him the numbers and the management, “everything that matters in a restaurant, but where chefs are often weaker.” What remains is a conviction that looks a lot like faith: nobody is ever done learning. “A Michelin-starred authority will teach you as much as a dishwasher. That’s the beauty of cooking.”

Getting to Know His Own Country

About fifteen years ago, television widened his playing field: cooking shows, travel shows, competitions. Then came a realization, nearly nine years ago. Chuck was crisscrossing the planet when it hit him that he knew next to nothing about the Indigenous communities living twenty minutes from his home. From that came Chuck and the First Peoples’ Kitchen, on APTN: seven seasons, eight years of foraging, hunting and cooking in communities across Quebec, Canada and beyond. He counts more than 80 visited, out of the country’s 600-some, and comes back to the figure that struck him: “more than 650 Indigenous languages spoken here.” “In Quebec we’re often told we’re losing our language. But those languages have existed for millennia.”

The Cobbler’s Kids Went Barefoot

Becoming a father settled a question he’d seen poorly resolved around him. “Being the world’s number-one chef and the world’s number-one dad at the same time — that doesn’t exist.” He’d watched almost every chef he worked for make compromises on their family life; for him, the choice was easy. The surprising part: before his sons, this man who fed Montreal for twenty years had barely ever cooked at home. “The cobbler’s kids go barefoot. I ate takeout, pizza, at restaurants.” Today, Chuck Hughes cooks at home, a lot, for a demanding audience: “I’ve got two customers who complain a lot and don’t pay well, but customers all the same.” His role at Garde Manger has shifted, without ever fully pulling him out of the action. He still swings by the tables, finishes a dessert, runs downstairs for the chives that ran out, pulls on gloves to haul away a garbage bag a tourist abandoned at the door… “In a restaurant, there’s always something to do.”

Montreal Against the World

As he nears 50, Chuck Hughes reckons Garde Manger has reached its peak: “we’ve never been this good — it took 20 years, but we’re there.” Little by little, he’s handing the keys to a next generation he watches grow. He talks about the Montreal scene without any sour rivalry: “It’ll always be Montreal against the rest of the world. It’s healthy competition.” At heart, his message after twenty years fits in a single line: “Food is made to bring people together, not to divide them.”

Written by Jean-Philippe Tastet
Photography by @malavoie