Sash Simpson is a story which only happen in books but is real in his case.
From eating out of the garbage in a south Indian city to becoming the top chef of Toronto, Sash is living out a dream.
It was four decades ago when he was eating out of garbage bins behind restaurants in Coimbatore that he was picked up by an orphanage team at the age of 8 years.
The orphanage was run by a small Canadian non-profit organization, Families for Children. Whenever the group’s founder Sandra Simpson would come, Sash would tug at her skirt and repeat a combination of “Mummy” and “Canada.” Since nobody was there to adopt the young kid, Sandra decided to do so herself in her family.
(A young Sash with Sandra Simpson)
Sash arrived in Toronto during a snowstorm in 1979. His family had “a million kids”—his new brothers and sisters. In fact, there were 26 of them, four biological, another two fostered in the home. The rest came from countries ravaged by civil wars, natural disasters or poverty. They ranged from Ecuador to Somalia. Several were disabled. It was not a home, it was a 22-room mansion in Forest Hill, one of Toronto’s wealthiest neighbourhoods.
Sash’s first job was delivering newspapers at the age of 12. He was washing dishes at 14. He soon migrated into the kitchen. It wasn’t an unfamiliar place since most of Simpson children took shifts in cooking pancake breakfasts and roast chicken dinners for the household. Education though didn’t suit him. He dropped out in the 12th grade and went to work full-time in the kitchens of small restaurants.
In 1993, he saw an ad for a job in a high-end restaurant. Sash had never been to a place like that, let alone cooked such rich food. He wasn’t picked in first instance but he followed the method which had brought him over to Canada. Just persist and persist till the benefactor gives way. The chef allowed him to work there for three months—without pay of course.
Sash went from one kitchen to next, learning how to build a salad with colour and texture and simmer down a chicken stock overnight.
“I saw ingredients I’d never witnessed,” he said to New York Times, “I was eating steak tartare, foie gras and mushrooms I had never heard of before—porcini, chanterelle, morel.”
Sash moved up quickly. He thinks more than his culinary skills, it was his work ethic that propelled him up the ranks. He arrived early and worked late. To this day, he calls the dish room his office.
In 2003, Sash became executive chef, overseeing the kitchen and catering intimate events and galas. He gained a reputation for impeccable service. He made the city’s rich feel special—like he knew exactly how many ice cubes they liked in their scotch, how they preferred soup to salad etc.
Today he is the preferred choice of a chef for Canada’s rich, preparing chardonnay-poached lobster and $27 foie gras-smothered burgers. He opened his own restaurant last year, with all the luxury touches he couldn’t have imagined 45 years ago: valet car service, four kinds of caviar and voda served with gold-encrusted ice.
The timing though is terrible because of Coronavirus pandemic. Toronto’s restaurants he been worst hit in North America, losing about 80 percent of the reservations. They were shut for five months during the first wave of the pandemic and then after a two-month reprieve, were closed again on October 10.
The past eight months have been the most stressful of his life, he says. He has borrowed money to cover the payroll of a bare-bones staff. But once a street kid, always a street kind. He said he isn’t closing his restaurant.
Sash is married to Robin Pitcher, an event planner 11 years his junior, whom he met at a catering event in 2008. They have been married for nine years.
(This is a rewrite from a New York Times article).
