Adam Ryan still remembers the childhood ritual: arriving at a restaurant and being handed a bowl of warm lemon water to rinse his hands. “It was my first fine dining memory,” he recalls. Today, similar refinements define his own Michelin-recommended restaurant, Azura, where each dinner guest is greeted with a warm towel scented with bergamot oil. And where did he learn such craft?
Swiss Chalet, in Mississauga.
Ryan is just one of many chefs who own or run upscale Toronto restaurants and who, it turns out, have a secret obsession with the rotisserie-chicken chain, born right here in Toronto. (The first location opened in 1954 at Bloor and Bedford). Cory Vitiello and Rob Rossi have proclaimed their love for it in previous installments of the Star’s Where Chefs Eat, and many others clamoured to share their love of it.
“Swiss Chalet was one of the few places I can remember us sitting in a restaurant dining room and eating together, so it was always a treat,” Ryan says. “I think it was one of the fanciest places I would go to as a child, and my sisters and I loved dipping all of our food — the fries, the chicken, the dinner roll — in the Chalet sauce.” His family would always order an extra sauce. Today, he freezes any precious leftovers to ladle over future meals. The child ordered white meat; the man, dark.
Other chefs recall similar family rituals: ordinary meals elevated by routine, reward and the ever-present sauce. Once a month, after school on a Friday, Taline and Giragi chef Seb Yacoubian’s parents would take him and his brothers to Swiss Chalet in Toronto as a reward for doing well at school. “It’s comfort food done the same way for as long as I can remember. That consistency is what makes a restaurant great,” Yacoubian says.
Sunday-night dinners were the go-to for Constantine chef Adam Lafleur during his Oakville childhood, or fuelling up on messy chicken sandwiches and mashed potatoes with extra gravy after hockey games. “I used to be glued to the glass watching the glistening chickens on the rotisserie while we waited for our table,” he says. “Swiss Chalet has definitely solidified itself as a Canadian icon.” He is not immune to the charms of the iconic sauce either: he confessed he has created a dupe in his own kitchen.
Coulson Armstrong, who runs Matty Matheson’s culinary empire, has brought his own Chalet cravings into his kitchen, and career. He’s declared mid-dinner, at least three times this year, “Make it taste like Chalet sauce!” He’ll never forget his gap year after high school when he worked in landscape construction with his buddies. “Every payday, we’d all order a whole load of those messy chicken sandwiches with extra Chalet sauce,” he says. Years later, his collaboration with Matheson began over a Swiss Chalet table. “When I first started working with Matty Matheson six years ago, we went to Swiss Chalet for his birthday. We must have ordered the whole menu that day,” he says. “That lunch was the stepping stone that built the backbone of our entire company.”
Out west in Medicine Hat, Alta., Ayla chef Kevin Shawcross would feast with his grandfather, “just me and him.” His grandpa would never let a single drop of Chalet sauce go to waste; Shawcross followed suit. “What’s in that secret sauce?” he wonders to this day. “But,” he says, “taking something as humble as a roast chicken can be a beautiful thing — and a comfort on dinner tables the world over.”
The chain’s various seasonal specials are especially beloved by many. “Canadians wait all year for these two meals,” according to Beatrice Robertson, Swiss Chalet’s vice-president, marketing, who always chose Swiss Chalet for her birthday meal as a kid, thanks to the Shirley Temples and the treasure chest filled with free toys…and still eats it every Friday with her husband. “Our Festive Special has marked the beginning of the Canadian holiday season for almost 40 years, with our famous Quarter Chicken Dinner, stuffing, cranberry (sauce) and chocolate truffles,” she says. “In the last decade, we introduced our Thanksgiving Feast for the fall, swapping the chocolates for a slice of pumpkin pie.”
Patois chef Craig Wong remembers the Festive Special from back in the ‘80s, when his first job was working weekends at his aunt’s bakery. At eight years old, it was the first time he ever earned money, and the Scarborough native used his earnings to buy himself a Festive Special because it came with a white rectangular Tupperware container. “I wanted to give it to my mom so she could bring her lunch to work,” Wong says. “That meant a lot to me because I’d noticed she didn’t have anything to pack her lunch in.”
Decades later, he still loves the perfectly crisp chicken skin, the delicious sauce. “It doesn’t feel like fast food to me. When I eat Swiss Chalet, I’m actually eating real protein, a whole chicken,” he says. “It feels like a better choice than traditional takeout.”
To-go is chef Anthony Walsh’s jam these days, too: “When I get a craving for the bird, it’s always delivery. My go-to is double leg, extra sauce.” As the corporate executive chef at the head of the Oliver & Bonacini Hospitality group, he attributes the franchise’s continuing success to two things. It’s unpretentious. And it’s consistently good. “No fuss, no BS,” he says.
For many of these chefs, it’s not just about the food. It’s about where they came from — and where they still find comfort.
As Wong puts it, “good food is good food.” But, Wong says, the fact that it’s Toronto-born? “That makes it even better.”
Walsh agrees: “I’m proud it’s ours.”
