The former executive chef at a major North Bay hotel has returned to bring upscale French cuisine to the Gateway City.
The 38-year old Glenn Sheridan is moving his Orillia catering business to North Bay, where he was executive chef at the Clarion Resort Pinewood Park from 2004 to 2006.
"I've come back to give Northerners the food that they would get in Toronto without having to drive down there."
Sheridan has worked in five-star restaurants and resort hotels across Canada and in the United Kingdom, including the SaVoy in London.
In coming back to a town populated by steak restaurants, Sheridan knows from his three-year run at the Clarion that there is a receptive appetite for his kind of authentic French cooking.
Sheridan Catering is a one-man operation offering private in-home cooking services, weddings and banquets, and corporate gatherings as large as 300 attendees.
"I do a lot of private chef work and a lot of private parties at homes, which is really taking off."
The George Brown College culinary graduate began cooking at age 14. His dish-washing job at an Oshawa golf club turned into a career when a classically trained French chef took him under his wing.
"I was struck at how a raw product could come in the back door and in a matter of hours you have this beautiful dish."
Sheridan offers a variety of menus, which can be customized for clients, but his specialty is French cuisine.
Everything is made from scratch and he changes up the menu every three months.
"I don't believe in specials. If it's so special, why isn't it on the menu all the time?"
Sheridan said it was North Bay's slower pace of life and lakeside setting that always held an attraction for him.
He also came back at the urging of his best friend, Corbeil native Jacques Lacourse, a former office manager at the Clarion. "He was very upset the day I left and he's been wanting me to come back."
"I was up every weekend anyway so I thought why not come back?"
So far, most of his booking have been weddings.
"I'm still new here and still trying to get the word out."
Sheridan hopes catering will generate some word-of-mouth advertising to fill up the reservation book of his new downtown restaurant this fall. Le Bon Marche will feature French cuisine and will be decidedly high-end.
He is lining up staff and is aiming for an October opening date.
Catering will continue on the side.
Sheridan said running both a restaurant and catering business is no different than running a restaurant and hotel banquet facility.
"It's all about organization and hiring people you can trust."
At the award-winning Clarion, he ran the kitchen under the leadership of Tom Mason.
"When I came up there, I wanted to do fine dining food – foie gras, black linguini – but everyone told me it wouldn't fly and it did. Now I've come back to do the same thing.
He and Mason opened the Explore Your Senses restaurant at the hotel and marketed it as a stand-alone entity.
"Tom let me do my own thing. He said, 'You have to do what I want you to do in banqueting,' but he basically gave me free reign to the restaurant. That's when we came up with Explore Your Senses.
"We did gangbusters there. We did 50 to 60 covers a night when I left. It was busy and we got great compliments on the food."
One of his biggest compliments was when former Monkees front man Davy Jones, who was playing North Bay's Heritage Festival, pulled him out of kitchen to praise him on his foie gras.
"That's what I want. I want experiences when you come to my restaurant."
