Escoba chef Brad O’Leary is a soft-spoken man, so he generally lets his food speak on his behalf. The quiet Nova Scotia-born O’Leary has perfected the art of creating hearty bistro dishes with a fine-dining flare, which makes Escoba a popular downtown spot for both lunch and dinner. O’Leary is a firm believer that flavour and freshness are more important than fussy plating, making the restaurant a top destination for discerning diners in search of comfort food that goes a step or two beyond the norm. O’Leary’s menu is inspired by both his training as a high-end chef and his early days as a young food enthusiast schooled in his grandmother’s Nova Scotia kitchen. “I always knew I was going to be a chef,” O’Leary says. “I’ve wanted to be a chef since I was 10 years old cooking with my grandmother. She was my inspiration a hundred percent. We did a lot of baking back then and made stews, all comfort food.“ After graduating high school O’Leary considered a business degree, but he was not able to resist the lure of the kitchen. He studied at the Culinary Institute of Canada at Holland College, Prince Edward Island, for two years before moving to Toronto to work with chef Robert Buchanan at Acqua. Hesitant to lay down roots in any one place, O’Leary spent two years in Toronto and then found himself in Australia, and spent a year working at another well-regarded restaurant. The pull of friends and family brought him back to
Canada and he took a job as a sous chef at the ultra-prestigious Rideau Club in Ottawa. Over the course of his three years at the Rideau Club, O’Leary learned the ins and outs of high-end dining and had the opportunity to feed many high-profile dignitaries. “I did do a function for Jean Cretien,” O’Leary recalls. “I was so shy that I was not able to go out and talk to him. And the next thing you know, the kitchen door flies open and it’s Cretien coming in. He grabs me and puts me in a big bear hug and kisses me on the cheek. It was awesome.” After a stint back in Nova Scotia, where O’Leary also happened to meet his wife Laurel, the couple moved west to Calgary for family reasons and in 2007 O’Leary took a job at Escoba as a sous chef. The restaurant was undergoing some renovations at the time, so not only did O’Leary cook in the kitchen, but he also took on some construction work, even helping to lay down the tile floor that is still in the restaurant’s dining room. Despite his connection to the restaurant, and the fact that Laurel had also started working in the Escoba kitchen as the daytime sous chef, O’Leary didn’t gel with the then head chef and he left for a job at the Petroleum Club to take the reins as wine cellar chef. While there, O’Leary got back into the same fine-dining groove that he had found himself in at the Rideau Club in Ottawa and also found himself growing as a chef. culinairemagazine.ca
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