Chef
Fine dining across the Rockies
Luxury train Rocky Mountaineer traverses Western Canada’s cliff sides, mountain passes and river-filled valleys. Steve Hartridge talks to sous chef Laura Sage Miller about the challenges of creating an extravaganza for the taste buds in a small rail galley
OBH: What were you doing before you joined Rocky Mountaineer as a soux chef? LSM: I co-owned a fine dining restaurant in Crescent Beach, which is a few miles south of Vancouver. I’ve been a pastry chef and, in the most recent off-season from Rocky Mountaineer, I was a personal chef on yachts, cruising in the Caribbean, Mexico and the Mediterranean. I will probably set up my own catering business at some point.
How big is the Rocky Mountaineer culinary team? Around 100,000 guests travel on the Rocky Mountaineer each season and to accommodate them we have a culinary team of 85 employees, including eight sous chefs and two executive sous chefs.
Are the menus developed in Rocky Mountaineer’s head office in Vancouver? Yes, we have four executive chefs who, as a team, develop menus for the year. Frederic Couton – who trained at Michelin-star restaurants in Paris and Geneva - Joseph Lassaga, Jean Pierre Guerin and Raoul Prigent bring an international flair direct from top kitchens in Europe.
Describe the staff make up in the galleys on this two-day ‘Journey through the Clouds’ trip from Jasper to Vancouver? The number of staff we have working depends on the number of coaches we have on the train. This train splits in Kamloops: one section goes to Jasper and the other goes on to Calgary. We follow a general rule that if there are more than five dome cars for GoldLeaf passengers we have two sous chefs. Each GoldLeaf car has a three- strong crew: a first cook, a second cook and a dishwasher, just as in a regular restaurant.
Describe your working day? It’s a long day! We are on-board early to set up for breakfast.
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We do our orders at night and every day food gets loaded, so our first task is to ensure that everything we need for the day has been loaded because once we depart from Kamloops we can’t stop along the way. Then we start getting ready for breakfast. We have two sittings for breakfast, two for lunch and, depending on the number of passengers on-board, two for dinner. Then we clean up and offload all of our food for the night..
How much is pre-prepared and how much is done on-board? We simply don’t have the space on the train to prepare everything from scratch, so our central kitchen in Kamloops does most of our sauces, stocks and dressings and measures pastas and sugars. This also helps to ensure that we manage to keep everything consistent. But nearly everything else is prepared fresh on-board.
What are the main challenges involved with providing fine dining and a five-star
experience on a train? (Laughs). Well, the kitchens are custom-made stainless steel cars and very well designed, but it’s still a bit of a squeeze down there. There are four of us and it gets to be a bit of a ‘dance’ at times. The same crew is often together for four days so we keep teams together who work well with each other. But probably the constant movement the train is the biggest challenge, although you do get used to it. Hot ovens and boiling pans can present their own dangers when you are rocking and rolling over the tracks.
How does five-star dining differ on a train from a hotel? (Pauses) For a chef the challenges are the same, because it is about meeting and surpassing people’s high expectations. We do our very best to deliver what we can. The numbers are obviously smaller on the rocky Mountaineer, with a maximum of 70 guests in each car.
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