Celebrity chef with long resume opens Southwestern Ontario eatery

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An award-winning chef who has appeared on television and once catered to the elite at a Michelin-starred restaurant in London, England, is cooking up his specialties in what some might think is the unlikeliest of places.

Shane Straiko recently opened Straiko’s by the Lake in Port Burwell on the north shore of Lake Erie. The community with a winter population of 1,000 is about 70 kilometres southeast of London.

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Straiko, 47, got his start while attending high school in Tillsonburg when he took on a job as a dish washer at Tillsonburg Golf Course. The job paid $10 an hour, nearly double minimum wage at the time.

“It was a classic old-school kitchen with some angry chefs and a wall of dirty pots and pans from the entire week it seemed,” he said. “I washed dishes until one in the morning.”

Straiko said he watched the chefs prepare food.

After a few weeks, the chef went on the vacation and with the sous-chef absent, the restaurant was on the verge of cancelling its dinner service when Straiko,16, stepped in to save the day.

“I said I would do it. I said, ‘I’ve been watching the chefs’” he said. “There were 72 people reserved that night and I did the dinner service and apparently it was really good.”

After washing dishes until 3 a.m., he slept in the laundry room and got up to cook breakfast the next day. Later that day the head chef returned.

“He said: ‘Thank you, you saved my business’ and he said: ‘Do you want to become a chef?’” Straiko recalled.

He agreed and became the apprentice of fellow chef Rick Harris, who signed off on all his apprenticeship papers.

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“He was a natural. He took right to it,” said Harris, who retired five years ago. “There was no stopping him. Any direction he wanted to go, he excelled.”

After a stint at the “super busy” Elmhurst Inn in Ingersoll and another as head chef at Rocky Crest, near Parry Sound, Straiko decided he wanted to find out more about international cuisine.

With Pacific Rim cuisine all the rage, he headed to “the furthest place he could find on the map.”

In New Zealand, he worked at the world famous Mudbrick restaurant on Waiheke Island where the chef was one of Gordon Ramsay’s proteges.

“It was beautiful, paradise, a lot of work, and very intense,” Straiko said.

After leaving New Zealand, he went on to work in Australia, Bali, Vancouver and Costa Rica before becoming executive sous-chef at Toronto’s Delta Chelsea and being sent by its new owner to work at the ultra-luxe Savoy in London, England.

“I am one of the only people in the world paid to live at the Savoy,” he said.

The restaurant was on the verge of being renovated in 2007 when Straiko worked in a kitchen he described as “a working museum.”

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Once overseen by culinary titan Auguste Escoffier, the kitchen had cast iron tables 15 metres long and was so hot it was “like a steam room,” he said.

“I got to use all the same stuff Escoffier used, which was amazing,” Straiko said.

Returning to Toronto, Straiko became head chef at both the Pantages and Cosmopolitan hotels in Toronto at the same time.

That is when he appeared regularly on Breakfast Television, found his way into magazines and won the prestigious Alsace and Rhone chef competition.

Iron chef Masaharu Morimoto referred to Straiko as one of the “the most up-and-coming chefs in Toronto.”

Fleeing Canadian winters, Straiko went on to explore the world as head chef on Celebrity Cruises for seven years.

Then COVID hit.

After working odd jobs here and there, when the opportunity to open his first restaurant with his girlfriend Sharon Sommers came up, on the site of the popular Craiger’s Cove restaurant in Port Burwell, he couldn’t resist.

“When I saw everything was closed and for sale (in Port Burwell) I thought, ‘We can fix that,’” he said.

The eatery has large indoor and outdoor eating spaces with a view of a five-storey high Cold War submarine that is open for tours.

“I love the beach and I think Port Burwell has some of the best beaches in the area,” he said. “I think it’s the last undeveloped beach town on the entire lake. It has so much potential.”

hrivers@postmedia.com

@HeatheratLFP

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