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By Diego Romero
It all started with his grandma’s cooking, as it often does. The kind of home cooking that brings the family together. But in Edgar Gutierrez’s case, the chef and co-owner of Edmonton’s critically acclaimed Mexican restaurants Tres Carnales and Rostizado, cooking and eating was more than just family time. From an early age, he knew that he wanted to be a chef. “I was always one of those kids that was always around food,” Gutierrez said. The first thing Gutierrez did when he came to Canada from the Philippines at the age of 13, was get a job in the kitchen of a Holiday Inn in Vancouver. Gutierrez paid his dues before coming into his current success, but someone as creative, talented and versatile as Gutierrez was always going to succeed. Gutierrez had never cooked Mexican food until he was in his late twenties. It says a lot of his cooking capabilities that he decided to take such a drastic turn in the middle of his career and go the Mexican cuisine route. Mexican food changed Gutierrez’s life, the way fine dining opened up his eyes when he moved to Edmonton – the city that allowed him to blossom into the chef he is, with the help of local farms and ingredients and other chefs he met along the way. Gutierrez’s expertise comes from a wide array of cultures – he was born in the Philippines but became an important chef in Edmonton by cooking Mexican food.
Gutierrez moved to Edmonton when he was 19 years old. His process of becoming a chef took a major step when he enrolled in NAIT’s Culinary Arts Apprentice Program, where he worked at a restaurant called Normands. “Not until I moved to Edmonton [I] had my eyes opened with fine dining … the nicer things, the French style of cooking,” Gutierrez said. Gutierrez worked his way up at Normands, and also worked at Joeys, Glenora Bistro, Hotel MacDonald, Ric’s Grill, and Safeway, where he learned baking. Refining his cooking skills became more and more important to him, as did his creativity. “Let’s say I’d make a demi …The traditional way of doing it is, roast the bones, add tomato paste, flower, and then you roast that. And then you put in a pot with some water and red wine, herbs and all that stuff for 12 hours,” Gutierrez said. “What I ended up doing was just putting all the bones in. Instead of the traditional cuts, I started using tail, ears, and the feet, and instead of roasting it, I just left it all in the pot for four days … And I ended up with an even more refined product and it was gluten free.”
(l to r) The Tres Carnales: Chris Sills, Daniel Braun, and Edgar Gutierrez. Photo credit: Immedia
Gutierrez’s creativity caught the eye of Chris Sills, one of Gutierrez’s business partners. Sills got in touch with Daniel Braun, the third business partner, and told him about Gutierrez. The three of them decided to open up a Taquería in Edmonton. Gutierrez had never cooked Mexican food, so he went down to Leon, Mexico, where Braun grew up. “Edgar is a natural in the kitchen. His sense of flavour is his biggest asset and this skill helped him learn about Mexican flavour profiles in very little time,” Braun explained. “We worked and ate at my favourite eating spots in Mexico for a month and this laid the foundation for him to create our menu. I helped at the beginning, but now, there is not much I have to do for the food to be on point; Edgar does it all.” Mexican food opened up a whole new world for Gutierrez. “Dig a little deeper, and you start finding. There are chilies, tomatillos, chocolate, and all kind of leaves that you can use,” Gutierrez said. “Dried chilies, fresh chilies … That’s what turned me on [to Mexican food].”
Mexican food and Tres Carnales solidified Gutierrez’s chef career. Gutierrez was making $14 an hour until he was about 30 years old. “You just got to hang on,” Gutierrez said. Refinement and creativity in the kitchen allowed Gutierrez to feel comfortable and confident enough to take on the challenge of learning an entire food culture later in his career. It was not a simple process, but Gutierrez believes that doing things the simple way may be even harder. For example, Gutierrez takes issue with the appearance that making tacos is easy. “It’s harder to make it simple,” Gutierrez explained. “Our [tacos] al pastor have like 15 ingredients in it. You got to take the chilies, toast it, soak it, deseed it, and all that stuff. And then you blend it, and then you add all your seasonings in it, like some pineapple that we blend up, some orange juice that we squeeze out.”
The process of his meals are similar to how his career took shape. Everything that Gutierrez did before opening up Tres Carnales led him to that moment, and when his restaurant was featured in Maclean’s Top 50 restaurants in Canada, he could not believe it. But Gutierrez did not let success get to his head. Instead, he is focused on his new restaurant – Rostizado – where he is working full-time to make sure it succeeds the way Tres Carnales has. Gutierrez is happy where he is at now; just working hard in the kitchen with a staff he cares so deeply about. “I love the rush. I have an option, like I can be in the daytime doing all the paperwork and stuff, but no, I’d rather be in the trenches, to be honest,” Gutierrez said. “I’d rather be with these guys slinging it out and there’s a busy night and buzz in the room … To me that’s more satisfying. That’s really what I really love. That’s why I keep waking up in the morning, for the rush, and the buildup. You prep everything and then you get to a certain point and then it all happens.” Similar to the way he worked hard throughout his career, until he met Sills and Braun, and then it all happened: Gutierrez took his sense of flavour to Mexican food and opened up two restaurants in Edmonton.
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