UBC Food Services have been going back to the basics, an approach that prioritizes wholesome, sustainable, local and diverse food. Executive Sous Chef of Retail, Restaurants and Catering Andy Chan tries to emulate this same value-based approach in his cooking.
“For eating, it’s not just filling your tummy. You need to fill your brain,” he said.
He traces his current role to working in his high school cafeteria and learning about “kitchen stuff” in his home economics class. After getting the top grade in that class, he received a scholarship and his passion for cooking began to grow.
“[When] I got the scholarship, I got recognized, because it's something I’m good at, so then I kept going,” he said.
Later, he enrolled in Vancouver Community College and graduated at the top of his class, winning some cooking competitions along the way. After graduating, he worked at a few hotels downtown, before his colleague introduced him to UBC. Since then, Chan has never looked back and has been serving the campus community for the last two decades.
“[UBC] care[s] for the people and their vision is what I agree on. They’re always trying to improve,” he said. “There’s other companies saying they look up to UBC. We created a standard for university food.”
One thing Chan does miss is having a more hands-on cooking role, having taken on a managerial position. “I miss that part, but I know it’s to grow.”
Chan’s day starts at 9 a.m. — he checks his emails, helps his unit in the kitchen and then goes back to his office to plan a menu for the campus, coordinating imports with many local suppliers, including A Bread Affair, Centennial Food Solutions, Cioffi’s Group and Ethical Bean Coffee.
“At home and at work — it’s the same thing … we like to buy local, buy sustainable seafood and stuff like that, because, first, it helps the local company. And then we realized the fresher the food, it gives more flavour and more nutrients,” he said.
“At home and at work — it’s the same thing … we like to buy local."
In terms of future changes, Chan mentioned the service is working on a journey with local Indigenous agricultural businesses.
“We’re trying to partner with them, learn how they grow food, how they cook," he said. "We want to learn and partner with them, and then hopefully we can introduce that into our menu in the future.”
Chan has also been part of the management team that was behind the opening of diverse food places on campus, such as Da Bao which specializes in Chinese dim sum, Harvest Market which serves sandwiches with a multicultural twist and Presto which serves Italian cuisine. He described his intention behind these openings as trying to make international students feel at home even while on campus.
Such achievements have diversified the campus food scene to make cuisines from around the world more accessible at UBC, but Chan admitted, "it's not easy starting from the beginning" of a career in the food scene.
Growth and change
Chan makes up for less opportunities to cook in his job by doing it in his free time.
“At home, I cook all the festive dinners, like the kids’ birthdays,” Chan said, highlighting mac and cheese as a recipe in his household when his kids were young. But as of late, he’s gravitating more toward hardier meals like roast beef. He mentioned he used to make his kids' birthday cakes from scratch too, but now he just decorates them with things like squishmallows or basketballs made of icing.
As his kids and their requests grow and change, so does Chan’s career. He cited the last 30 years as going by fast for him.
“People ask me, ‘Why do you stay [at] one company for so long? Don’t you get bored?’" he said. “But I find UBC is quite unique, because every year for me I get transferred or moved to different locations.”
Upon reflecting further on his journey, in a follow-up written statement to The Ubyssey, Chan wrote that, though over the years he’d been involved in several events at UBC, including the UBC President’s Dinner and banquets at the UBC Farm, catered for the 2010 Winter Olympics and won gold at the Canadian College and University Food Service Association Culinary Challenge, the most memorable event for him was the Apprentice Dinner.
“This special event provides UBC Food Services’ culinary apprentices the opportunity to showcase the skills they have developed throughout their training. I wouldn’t call it my event, as the apprentices did all the work, but the true memory comes from the journey we all take together in preparing for it,” he wrote.
"The true memory comes from the journey we all take together in preparing for [the meal.]"
For Chan, working with students and watching them grow is the most rewarding part of moving into a mentoring role.
“I get to witness their transformation, from hesitant cooks to confident chefs ready to present their work to a full dining room.”
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