2. Chef Eduardo Jaber

 

2. Chef Eduardo Jaber

Eduardo grew up in the small town of Campeche, Mexico. This is where his love of food and family began. He was raised by a single mother, who worked tirelessly to support him and his siblings. Like many Latino families, family was very important, so when Eduardo’s mother and father separated, his grandmother offered to stay with them and support by cooking.

“My grandma used to be cooking all the time, and she was an amazing cook. She did this to allow my mom to go to work to support the family.

When my mom would come back home, she’d be very excited about the food, and she’d compliment my grandma’s cooking.

She would always tell her, “You should open a restaurant”. When my mom said this, it made a noise in my head growing up, a very good noise. I would say to myself, “Maybe I want to open a restaurant, too.

This “noise” pushed Eduardo to follow his grandmother and learn from her in the kitchen. She unfortunately passed away when Eduardo was 13, leaving a void in his life and in the kitchen while his mother worked. With this news, Eduardo’s uncle took it upon himself to support his family.

“My uncle started to take care of the kitchen. He was and still is a very good cook. This allowed me to see a male role model cooking really good food. I was very interested in cooking and enjoyed it while I was helping my grandmother, but this is where I really developed my passion for it. My uncle was a bit of a rough kind of leader, but he was also very loving. He recognized my love for food early and pushed me to pursue it. He was very authoritarian about it but thinking back on it, I can see why. It led me to learn the fundamentals of the kitchen that I carry with me to this day.”

During this time, and throughout Eduardo’s childhood, his mother would say, “whenever you look for a job, look for something that you don’t have to be paid for. You’re going to love it and make it work, no matter what the money is. If you truly have a passion for it, you will probably be so good at it that the money will be good too.”

With this in mind, in 2011, Eduardo moved to Toronto to learn English and expand his culinary knowledge in hopes of returning to Mexico to open a restaurant. To do this, he studied kitchen management at Centennial College and began working in fine dining restaurants, where he ended up in charge of three kitchens. The first two he led were Italian and French cuisines, but the third is what made the biggest impact.

“After my Italian and French experiences, I worked at a Mexican fine dining restaurant. This is where I learned, hey, we can have our own food in fine dining. I realized you don’t have to make burritos and hard-shell tacos to please the people in Canada. So, that changed my mind and planted the idea in my head that I could bring my culture to the kitchen here”.

He later worked in a retirement home kitchen, where Eduardo had complete freedom of the menu. He mentioned this experience is what pushed him to open his own restaurant. He loved the freedom to be creative and add his own experiences to the food.

Eduardo also met his wife during the English school in Toronto, where they studied together, her originally from Venezuela. Eduardo asked her to marry him only a short time after they met and joined her on her dreams of becoming Canadian. After she accepted a job in Halifax, he left his position in dreams of opening a restaurant on the East Coast.

When a space became available, he jumped at the opportunity, and Verano Purveyors was born.

“Verano means summer. And we wanted to bring that to our customers. We thought, people up here, they look at South America or Latin America as this sunny land at the beach, so, we wanted to bring that, but still keep the Latin American authenticity alive in the space and in our food.”

Verano truly encompasses everything in Eduardo’s life, from his and his wife’s Latin American roots incorporated into the menu, to the fresh food he prepares every day like he did as a child with his grandmother and uncle, to his love of family: having his mother- and father-in-law with him running the restaurant together, with hopes of growing the business to allow his wife to work alongside him too.

“I have to say that cooking is innate to me, it’s my nature. I see my family at work and cook with them, and then I go home, and I cook for my wife and daughter. I do it almost every day. I just love cooking… I just love it”.