...with Peter Keith

BY QUINN CURTIS AND LINDA GARSON

PHOTO BY DONG KIM

If you were to ask Peter Keith who he was a year ago, he would have told you that he was a chef. But if you were to ask him now, he would tell you that he fancies himself more of an entrepreneur, and while “chef” is still one of the many hats Keith wears, his path has led him to become much more.

“I love to create, I love to build things, and at one point that looked like designing dishes, or menus, or thinking purely about food. And I think it's expanded a lot more now to thinking about creating projects, initiatives and things for the community, things for people around me. And food is a big part of that, but I think I've expanded my world view,” says Keith.

Growing up in St. Albert, he drew much of his inspiration from his parents: his mother, a wiz in the kitchen, and his father, a carpenter who Keith says could “make everything out of anything.” And by age ten, he had already decided he wanted to be a chef.

Working as a dishwasher at Boston Pizza at the young age of 14, Keith worked his way up through the ranks in the kitchen, eventually landing a job at River House Grill in St. Albert, owned by chef Willie White. “I was 16 or 17, and I had all this experience working in franchises, and he said, ‘alright, now let me teach you how to cook and teach you what food is really about.’ And he loves to say, you're going to learn by making mistakes. That's part of the journey.”

And Keith’s path in hospitality branched off in many ways.

“I started doing my culinary apprenticeship at NAIT in Edmonton, working in fine dining restaurants, but actually got the opportunity to compete around the world. So I was part of the youngest ever culinary team from Alberta who, in 2012, went to the World Culinary Olympics in Germany, and got a gold medal,” says Keith.

After a series of culinary adventures and personal realizations, Keith knew it was time to strike out on his own. Conversations with his future business partner led to a space — and from there, Meuwly’s was born.

“Meuwly's began with the goal of producing small batch, high-quality charcuterie products for Alberta. Made with local Alberta pork and beef and using old-world techniques, hand cuts, good quality spices, no fillers, all of that stuff. And we started building that company in 2016. We opened our storefront in 2018, and as the months went on, I really started to understand that what Meuwly's should be was not just a place to sell pure meats, but a place to be a little hub for the local food maker community,” he says.

But an all-too-familiar roadblock in 2020 forced Keith and his business partners to transition their business model, with more recent shifts taking shape last January. Keith made the decision to close the retail space entirely and instead focus on catering. “We decided to dedicate most of our kitchen space to incubating other food brands. So we have seven or eight different companies who rent space from us. They can use all the equipment, they can put stuff in our fridges, we try to introduce them to our partners and business relationships, whether that's suppliers or retailers or restaurants,” he explains.

Now, he has turned his focus to helping other restaurants and food entrepreneurs thrive. His latest venture, a new restaurant incubator called The Hub, recently opened its doors on Whyte Avenue. After countless hours of preparation, Keith marked the occasion by finally cracking open the bottle he’d been saving for just the right moment: a gin from Strathcona Spirits, distilled in Edmonton and infused with botanicals foraged from the city’s own river valley.

“I know they had a devastating fire at their distillery last year. And so I thought, I want to grab that and hold on to it because we might go a long time before there's more of that around. It's a really beautiful gin.”

So congratulations to Keith on cracking open that bottle to celebrate the opening of The Hub!