...with Jay Ashton

BY LINDA GARSON

PHOTO BY DONG KIM

"I’ve been called Hospitality Coach, Canada's restaurant guy, and then recently a chef called me the Howard Stern of the restaurant industry,” laughs Jay Ashton. “And I'm taking that as a compliment because Howard is all about promoting others, and that’s what I've been doing for the last four years. I have an absolute addiction now of sharing stories; I find them all inspiring.”

Ashton’s connection with food and beverage goes back a very long way – his grandma ran a Chinese restaurant in Moose Jaw and his grandpa was a rum runner with Al Capone. “The restaurant was right above the tunnels, and Al Capone was in the basement,” he explains. “She fed them and always told stories about this crazy world of gangsters, money, cars, and late-night gambling.”

Ashton worked at KFC through high school in Swift Current, and on graduating, moved to Alberta, working in restaurants and pubs in Medicine Hat, through university in Lethbridge, and in Grande Prairie too. “I ended up in Red Deer and opened a high-end martini lounge; we were the hottest place.” he says. “We broke every rule there was, but that's when I really learned, because in three years we ran it into the ground. We went from doing massive sales to making hardly any money. And I learned everything to not do - with the menu, your staff, the beverage program...”

From there, in 2004, Ashton moved to Calgary to work as a sales rep for Sysco, only to return to Red Deer a few months later to work with rural restaurants east of the city. “Man, they make you tough,” he laughs. “I won't forget some of them until I die.” Wanting to add more value for his customers, he started to build menu programs for them, until a promotion meant a move back to Calgary, and he built menus for hundreds of restaurants across Southern Alberta. More promotions followed, working with Sysco in Toronto and Stettler, but when Covid arrived, his whole department was furloughed.

“At the time our department was doing amazing, and then I had to figure out what to do with my experience in the industry and of working with thousands of restaurants and chains across the country,”

Ashton says. “So I said, let's try this podcast thing, I can reach a thousand people. We didn't know what a podcast really was, and didn't know the right equipment and the right things to do, we just interviewed people.”

In that first year, the highlight was helping Taste of Edmonton by interviewing restaurants that were closed, and it’s grown hugely from there. “Today I have three of the top 10 restaurant industry podcasts in Canada, and I'm a part of a group in the States that supports each other to promote our industry.” Ashton also hosts the weekly ‘Voice of the Industry’ for Restaurants Canada.

“It's been the most bizarre 34 years,” he adds. “I'm blown away and grateful like you wouldn't believe to meet so many people still today - 1,500 shows later. I want to do more interviews with restaurateurs because they need the platform, and if we don't catalog them, they're going to be lost forever. I swear there's a million stories to be told in each restaurant.”

So what is the bottle that Ashton hasn’t opened?

The bottle of Domaine de Cibadiès Chardonnay 2000 has been in the family for 23 years. “Since I've known my wife, Kim,” he says. “She’d finished university and was in Paris for a couple months, and brought it back with her. It pulls me back into a time where things were so simple; it was just me and her - today it's way more complicated. We’ve dragged that bottle all around everywhere, back and forth between Red Deer, Calgary, Regina, and Edmonton, and it hasn’t broken! Yet we’ve broken so many other things.”

“I think there will be a time we will open it, but we feel like we haven't hit our peak; I remember a couple times we've come close, but we haven't had that moment where we sit back and go, ‘yeah, we've done it.’ We're not there yet.”