...with Jeff Matthews

BY QUINN CURTIS AND LINDA GARSON

PHOTO BY DONG KIM

Jeff Matthews, owner of Expat Asia, found his passion for cooking at 12 years old, making sandwiches for his grandmother. “I really enjoyed cooking because my nanny encouraged me by saying, ‘You’re really good at this. That’s a great sandwich.’ And nobody had ever told me I did something really well. I guess because I was kind of a bad student, so it made me feel good,” he says.

After becoming the top student in his high school cooking class, and later working as a chef at Calgary’s Delta Bow Valley Hotel, Matthews received an unexpected offer — to cook for King Hussein of Jordan. So at just 22 years old, he packed his bags. “They fly me to Jordan, in the Middle East. I’m freaking out that I’m even in the Middle East. I go into this Marriott Hotel suite — top class,” he chuckles. “Met the king, met the queen, cooked for Queen Elizabeth, Saddam Hussein, Yasser Arafat, princes... all kinds of people.”

After his stint in the Middle East, Matthews returned to Calgary before heading to the Queen Elizabeth Hotel in Montreal for a year. But clearly, staying in one place wasn’t his thing… “We got an offer to work overseas in Australia for Hilton Hotels. So I went over to Hilton Hotels in the Gold Coast — a huge hotel with 3,000 rooms and 240 cooks in the kitchen. From there, I got transferred to the Jakarta Hilton, and the first night I got there, there was a banquet for 9,000 people.”

Calgary to Jordan, to Montreal, to Australia, to Jakarta… and the next stop in Matthews’ story: Bali. “I got transferred to the Bali Hilton in Indonesia. I stayed there for three years and then went on to become a chef at the Grandage, a privately owned boutique hotel in Bali. That was basically my cooking career, which spanned about 20 years,” he says.

His career then took an unexpected turn, and Matthews was asked by a friend who was starting a spa business in Bali, to help him in what became a thriving international venture. “When we sold the company, we had 85 spas in 24 countries and were doing a hundred million dollars a year,” he says.

“I retired at 59, came back, and my son Joel said, ‘Dad, the Indonesian food here sucks so bad. Let’s open a restaurant.’”

That's what brought him back to Canada, and that's how Expat Asia was born. “Dad builds a restaurant for his son and himself. We've been at Fresh and Local Market and Kitchens for six years now, and it’s been a great ride,” says Matthews. And very soon they’re opening a new restaurant “Ibu”, which means "mother" in Indonesian. It's named in honour of his late wife, the mother of his children. “It just made sense to name the restaurant after her, and all the other mothers who have passed down recipes through generations. Our recipes are a hundred years old. We modernize them, like we do at Expat, but with Ibu, it’s going to be at a much higher level.”

As for a bottle he's saving for a special moment, Matthews reminisces about road trips, driving through the US with no plans, no hotel reservations, just exploring the country. “We were in Oregon, which is a huge state, and we were driving across it. There were so many wineries. We happened upon this place called Sweet Cheeks,” says Matthews.

At Sweet Cheeks, he got chatting with the owner, who had been asked to find wine pairings for a friend’s restaurant in Washington. “He asked me to try some wines he wanted to pair with Asian food. So there we are at 10 o’clock in the morning, drinking wine that paired well with spicy food,” Matthews laughs.

“I bought one of each of the wines, and he goes, ‘This one here — this is the Sweet Cheeks Syrah. Drink it in 2028. Thank me later. Make sure you have it with a nice spicy meal.’ So, I’ve got two and a half more years to go until I open this baby up — with a nice Indonesian beef rendang,” Matthews grins.