Jenni Lessard brings diverse experience to Wanuskewin
by Angela Hill, The Star Phoenix"I get excited about ingredients that come from the land."
She’s run a restaurant, been a caterer and has created experiential dining opportunities across Saskatchewan for years. Now Jenni Lessard is the executive chef at Wanuskewin Heritage Park, and was recently called one of Canada’s next top chefs.
“Apparently I am up and coming. I’m like, ‘If you can be up and coming at 45, this is an awesome world we live in,’ ” Lessard says, sitting in her office at the park and laughing.
“All the cooking and local food and relationship experiences that I’ve had since working in the food world in Saskatchewan have culminated here.”
Lessard first donned a chef’s cap for a Halloween costume when she was four — a loaner from an uncle who cooked at El Greco in Melfort. She walked up to a house toting a small cast iron frying pan, flipped a pancake and said “trick or treat.”
That was just the beginning. Lessard says her understanding of how food can create community began while her family was living at the Prince Albert Pulp and Paper camp at Besnard Lake, where people came for homemade doughnuts and steak nights at the camp kitchen.
Her first attempt at catering was making and serving fried pepperoni for a visiting family friend when she was about seven or eight years old.
“It was probably not the most appealing thing to eat, but he loved it and raved over it and I think food makes people happy when you cook for them,” she said.
Soon after, Lessard realized the entrepreneurial side to cooking. The summer before she entered Grade 9, she and a couple of friends launched Flight Delight, a snack stand at the La Ronge airport, where her family had moved.
They sold chips, pop, and “tiny little hamburgers, which would now be called sliders, I think, but back then they were just really tiny hamburgers,” she says.
It was a move to the Rockies, where Lessard finished high school, that set her on the path to becoming the chef she is now. She had a job as a nanny cooking for a family of five, worked at an uncle’s fruit stand, and “spent every penny of (her) money eating at restaurants and looking at what they were doing, reading the menus, drinking the wine.”
At the fruit stand, Lessard learned the value of talking to people about their food. Her uncle wasn’t just hawking the fruit he brought in from the Okanagan region of B.C., “he was weaving the magical story of the peaches and the cherries and drawing people in,” she says.
This was the reminder of how much she appreciated the local food she grew up with; it shaped how she prepares food now.
“I get excited about ingredients that come from the land,” she says. “Growing up in the north, blueberries were out our back door, lowbush cranberries and wild mint (were) down by the lake. And I just though it was super cool we could use all that.”
Lessard’s father, Mick, reads aloud a poem his daughter wrote on the back of a paper bag that now hangs on the wall in his house. It reads, in part, “Ancient gathering spot with healing powers, ringed by Labrador tea and wild mint … as I stand, arms raised high, face to the grace, drenched in thankfulness for this place.”
“That, in essence, is what created Jenni,” he says.
Lessard’s first restaurant was the New Ground Cafe in Birch Hills, a small farming town southeast of Prince Albert. It had 14 seats and was located in the town’s mini mall — next to the Sears appliance repair shop, a dog groomer and a hair salon.
She served two types of soup, bannock, cheesecake, date-oatmeal cookies and Red River cinnamon buns, a nod to her Métis heritage.
After a little more than a year, she had grown the restaurant to a point where it could move into a building down the street. She reopened with a focus on art, music and food. In the six years the New Ground Cafe was there, the art on the walls rotated quarterly and the restaurant hosted 76 live music events.
Now, as executive chef at Wanuskewin Heritage Park, what she misses most are her customers from Birch Hills, Lessard says.
“They believed in me.”
The night of the grand reopening of New Ground Cafe, 96 people showed up. The space had room for 42.
“They wouldn’t take no for an answer when I said we were full,” she recalls. “They were like, ‘Well, we’ll just sit, there’s just two of us.’ ”
The professional growth did put some strain on her young family.
“The restaurant business is very, very difficult, it’s very hard on families. I’ve been divorced twice in this career,” she says. “I’m not going to blame the food world for my relationship problems, but it’s a very, very difficult career to choose if you are fully in it, which I am.
“You can’t turn off. You take a notebook to the beach, you take your Bon Appétit magazine to bed. There are long hours away.”
One of her goals for the staff at Wanuskewin is to ensure they have the balance she is starting to understand for herself, she says.
“I find when I get overwhelmed and stressed, I just need to step out on the land and be filled up again. When I go out on the land, when I harvest, when I listen to the land and close my eyes, I can almost hear women laughing and talking together as they process food.”
That connection to the land is one of the things that caught the eye of Darlene Brander, CEO of Wanuskewin. Lessard had been working with the park as a guest chef, leading the Han Wi Moon dinners, an experiential dining event in the park, and Brander wanted to work further with her.
Lessard joined the staff in August and soon after, took the female staff out foraging on the site, Brander says.
“We were foraging rose hips. For some of us it was the very first time foraging.”
Lessard showed them what rose hips look like, and everyone tasted them.
“To be able to do something that has been done for thousands and thousands of years, to be able to time travel via food, is a phenomenal experience,” Brander says.
Lessard is the first female executive chef at Wanuskewin and wants to support others to follow in her path. While growing up, her grandmother didn’t want anything to do with being Métis because she felt afraid, she says.
“There was still that fear and shame.”
But things are changing.
“Now it’s being celebrated.”
Lessard says it’s important to her to elevate female chefs, “especially Indigenous female chefs, to a place of being able to talk about food and to reinterpret Indigenous food, and to shine.”
She is quick to stop anyone who calls her an expert in Indigenous food.
“I’m a student of Indigenous food and I am interested in learning as much as I can, but I am definitely not an expert, because you would have to live thousands of years to be an expert.”