Chef's Bistro Café is No Ordinary Lunch Box

JOSH HANSEN
MONCTON, NEW BRUNSWICK

Wayne Chase has always had an eye for detail, but it’s his love for food that helped the former professional photographer stumble, as he puts it, into a career as a fine dining chef. “I couldn’t just retire. I’d go crazy,” he says with a chuckle from across the white clothed table. Wayne is about 60, has short grey hair, a slightly rounded belly and the energy of someone half his age. He’s a bookworm for everything cooking.

	Food for thought: Chef's Café Bistro is open 8:30am-4:30pm Monday to Friday

Here’s the twist: Wayne is self-taught. His restaurant, The Chef’s Bistro Café, is in Moncton’s Industrial Park specializes in elegant casual lunch and is open on weekends only by special appointment. If Wayne sees a recipe he wants to try, he’ll read up on how someone, like world-renowned culinary artist Julia Child, might have done it, then he adds his own twist to appeal to the local crowd.

“Cooking is an art to me,” says Wayne. “So I like to treat it as an art.”

Like any artist, Wayne constantly experiments with new recipes. So far, about 50 signature dishes rotate on the menu two at a time as the daily specials. It takes about two months for the cycle to repeat itself. The element of surprise, says Wayne, keeps people coming back. Even if you do return though, you’re not guaranteed the same thing. “You may have the best chicken risotto ever one day, but that doesn’t mean it’ll be around the next time,” he says. “It could be a mushroom risotto or something totally different.”

Change is apparently working. But the jump from the dark room to the kitchen didn’t happen overnight. At the beckoning of his friends, Wayne began selling homemade breads and pâtés at the local market. He was an instant hit. His business expanded to private, by appointment only, five-course dinners at his cottage on the weekend. Eventually it grew into a lunch version of affordable fine dining for everyone, from blue-collar workers to the elderly who drop by each Thursday for "high tea". Wayne is also working to introduce world-class wines to further compliment his extensive selection.

But the amount of care Wayne puts into each dish is clear long before the plate lands on your table. Look to the bistro’s walls, where some of Wayne’s award-winning photos and drawings hang. One in particular is of an ordinary park bench. At least that’s what it was before Wayne brushed the edges and printed the photo in black and white. Now, it’s the focal point of the park, much like The Chef's Bistro Café.

To get to Chef’s Bistro Café, head west on Saint George Boulevard and into Moncton’s Industrial Park. The café is in the lower level of building 1133 on the right-hand side.