D.I.C.E.D is nothing fancy. The humble, indoor-outdoor eatery minutes away from Vancouver’s Jericho Beach features a rustic grass enclosure where hungry diners feast at weather-beaten picnic tables. Inside, you’ll find conventional booths and cheerful, young servers delivering generous portions of familiar crowd-pleasing comfort food at budget prices. All the classics are on tap: burgers, fries, nachos and soups. And there are surprises, too. Breakfast pizza topped with bacon, sausage and two poached eggs is a Sunday brunch favourite at this unpretentious oasis.
“It’s a calming environment, just the way I like it,” says owner and chef Don Guthro, a 40-year veteran of multiple high-end dining establishments both here and abroad.
D.I.C.E.D. is not only the name of the restaurant, but also a movement — short for Diverse Innovation in Culinary Educational Development — Don’s overall vision for revolutionizing the food service industry from within.
He uses profits from the restaurant, and other food-related endeavours, like his food truck, his catering business, and his line of high-end kitchen knives to fund a culinary school for disadvantaged youth. His aim is to help those who may want to pursue a culinary career but feel stymied or, as he says, “stuck” because of costs or missed opportunities. His low tuition fees make it possible for hopefuls to chase the dream.
“We know what happens to people when they get stuck,” says Don. “Sometimes, the younger population doesn’t get those opportunities and that’s why I started the program.”
Don speaks from experience. He remembers growing up as the middle child in a family of five in St Mary’s, Ontario, a farming community 20 kilometres southwest of Stratford. It was a challenging time for his siblings and his single mother.
“We didn’t have a lot,” he recalls. “You had to make the best of what you had.”
Times were tough but Don has pleasant memories, too.
“We’d go hunting, we’d go fishing. Living in the country and having those things accessible to us was a lot more simplistic. It really taught me to appreciate what we have around us, the acceptance of what you have and where you are in life.”
He was an athletic kid back then, part of the high school track team, so perhaps it wasn’t a surprise that he was asked to dance in the school play Guys and Dolls. He complied, mostly out of curiosity, he says, when suddenly, the National Ballet of Canada came knocking.
“Someone from the National saw me dance,” he says. “They offered me a scholarship and I left. I’m a kid from the country. What do I know about ballet?”
Not much, he says. Not that it mattered.
“I think that farm kid, that athletic kid side of me helped,” he confesses. He moved to Toronto but, ever practical, pursued ballet in the day while taking cooking lessons at a technical school at night.
“As an athlete, I knew the body starts to shut down around 36, 38 years old, and you need something else that’s going to be working for you. I was still a kid, but I knew this wasn’t going to be long term.”
He was right. A horrific knee injury he sustained during rehearsal three years later ended his dance career.
“I was doing a jump. My quadricep locked and when I came down my knee buckled the wrong way and that was it. It was, ‘okay, what can I do next?’ I just had to figure out what it was that I truly wanted to do.”
“Being a chef is artistic, as well, so why not get involved in that? I went home to St. Mary’s for about a week and then I took off overseas to London and worked at the Savoy Hotel right away,” he says.
The kid from the farm travelled the world, working his way through Austria, Germany, Malaysia, Italy and India, learning the trade and refining his skills. He returned to Canada as an executive chef, landing in BC in the late 1990s because “I just decided this is where I want to be.” One of his positions took him to Lookout, a North Vancouver shelter feeding the homeless and running a small cooking school from its kitchen.
“We fed the homeless within the shelter from the food we were creating from the lesson plans, but I realized that as we expanded, we needed to make more revenue to actually expand the program.”
It was a eureka moment, the realization that marrying art with commerce was the way to go. It was a simple game plan: drive people to your restaurant with good quality food and low prices and use that money to build a self-supporting cooking school.
Make no mistake, D.I.C.E.D is a business and students pay a fee, albeit a low one, to learn from the master. Don remembers another Vancouver restaurant tried to do the same thing decades ago, but it failed, he says, because as a non-profit it was dependent on government funding, and it couldn’t support itself.
“Non-profits don’t look at it like a business model. They don’t look at longevity. They just look at ‘where can I get the money from?’ When you focus on funding and that money goes away, you run into a problem and that’s pretty much what happened to them.”
“We’ve been running our programs for almost 15 years, and we’ve never taken any outside funding whatsoever. We’re not chasing the money; we’re looking at what we can do with the money we generate. For me, it’s about how we can make an impact around us, either in the community or in education.”
Don moved from North Vancouver to his present beach location in 2009. Originally, he trained future cooks himself in the D.I.C.E.D. kitchen. Today, the program is delivered online as an interactive 44-week course consisting of lectures, demonstrations and “homework” – dishes the student prepares at their location wherever they are. Their work is filmed, evaluated by onsite mentors and sent to Don and his team for evaluation.
The program takes in about 200 students a year. There are no caveats save one: potential students must already be working in an established restaurant, in any capacity, to prove they have an understanding of the business. He fears too many wannabees are unaware of the long hours and the low starting wages and are easily misled by the celebrity status of TV chefs like Jamie Oliver and Gordon Ramsey.
“We set up contracts between the employer and our school and between the student and the school. It’s like a co-op,” says Don. “The school is training the employee to a higher standard, and the employer gets the benefit of having a trained employee because everyone’s struggling to get trained staff right now.”
Students start with the fundamentals, health regulations and equipment, and progress into cooking vegetables, proteins and seafood. There are lessons on making sausages, elemental baking and pastry and, finally, plating and presentation. They end up with Level 1 and 2 certifications, which prepares them for the ultimate in culinary proficiency, the Red Seal, should they decide to pursue advancement on their own.
Students pay around $1,000 for the course, compared to $17,000 to $47,000 charged elsewhere.
“We’re trying to keep it under $1,000, so it’s affordable for everyone,” says Don. He fears the more expensive schools discourage people entering the profession because students, especially the disadvantaged, can’t afford to pay back their loans. The starting wages aren’t high enough.
D.I.C.E.D. graduates, on the other hand, are already employed and can move up the ladder or move elsewhere into salaried positions in hotels, bistros and restaurants.
“Almost everything I know right now in the kitchen, all my skills, came from the program,” says 27-year-old Jeremy Javier, now employed full-time in the D.I.C.E.D. kitchen. Jeremy was already working as a baker at a Vancouver donut shop when he joined the program five years ago.
“I remember honing my knife skills,” says Jeremy, “We cut carrots for a day,” he laughs. He did well. Jeremy’s going to manage Don’s second D.I.C.E.D. location in downtown Vancouver this winter. Seemingly oblivious to the hazards of expansion, Don admits it’s a risky proposition.
“The economy is not the best, but I’m always the guy looking at opportunities and things you normally wouldn’t look at.”
Ergo, his other culinary enterprises, the food truck, his catering business, and especially his knife manufacturing business. He imports the steel from Germany, cuts it and adds artisanal handles in a metal fabrication and woodworking warehouse in suburban Coquitlam.
“I can build you a car if you want,” he says, but right now, it’s knives.
They’re works of art, and expensive, which benefits his game plan since 40 per cent of the net from all his enterprises goes back into offsetting the culinary school’s operating costs.
It’s an exhausting job, which demands his attention seven days a week, 365 days a year. Others have called him a workaholic; Don says he’s just doing his job. His day starts at five in the morning when he reads emails and his to-do list.
“I get two-and-a-half hours of just my time to focus on the things I need to focus on,” he says. “It’s almost like meditation but it’s paperwork.”
The day starts slowly before he kicks into overdrive.
“I try not to work past six or seven o-clock, and I turn everything off at eight. I don’t focus on very many things after eight o-clock. I try not to take it home.”
He admits his schedule makes it hard to maintain relationships, and he spends whatever personal time he has painting and drawing.
“I do a lot of sketching. I’ve got a book at home that I pick up if I see something and I’ll just sketch it. For me, it’s trying to balance everything without being stressed out. I try to be at peace. That’s what’s important for me – simplicity. There’s no spinning of wheels. I try to avoid that.”
Driven and deliberate, he’s clear on future steps. He’d like to build brick-and-mortar kitchen hubs throughout the country to make it easier for his students to film their dishes. He’d also love to partner with corporations like the Compass Group, Canada’s largest food service and hospitality company, to help them train future chefs in-house.
“I want to see our industry develop individuals from within,” he says, to make it easier and more affordable for youth or anyone else to enter the profession.
“That’s my job, to reach out to at least three different organizations or people every day about what we do. I have a mission and I want to complete it and it’s going to take some time. I’m using my own funds, my own revenue, so it does take a little bit longer than normal. I’m driven to make change and support the industry. That’s the focus and will always be the focus.”
SPOTLIGHT
If you were to meet your 20-year-old self, what advice would you give him?
“Be patient. Enjoy what’s around you and be patient. Everything has its own path. If I hadn’t started the school, something else would have happened. Another door would have opened. Be patient and enjoy the ride.”
Who or what influenced you the most? And why?
“I think it would be my mother. She was a single mom and she dealt with all of us trying to survive. She made me aware that it doesn’t matter how difficult it is, there will always be an opportunity or a positive from it.”
What are you grateful for?
“I’m grateful for being able to do the things I do. I’m grateful that I can make a living, support the people around me and support others around the country.”
What does success mean to you?
“For me, success is seeing the success people are achieving through the program. Having this is just a tool to be able to do that. I mean monetary stuff doesn’t have the same connection for me as with other people.”
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