Photo Courtesy: NAIT
By: Eryn Pinksen
Culinary students are working with a Vancouver celebrity chef. He is teaching students about fine dining and contemporary cuisine, featuring some of his signature dishes like his crispy duck salad.
Chef David Hawksworth has only been at NAIT briefly, but is very impressed with NAIT’s tools, instructors and students.
“NAIT’s doing great work here, they’ve got amazing equipment, some very solid instructors and it’s a finely tuned operation,” said Hawksworth.
NAIT’s Chef in Residence program invites high profile chefs to work with students and prepare a dinner for the public with students at Ernest’s.
The students have had a day-in-the life workshop with Hawksworth as they learned about his experience as a chef. He is the owner and chef of Hawksworth (which holds the title of Best Upscale Dining in Vancouver Magazine), Nightingale and Bel Café in Vancouver. He designs the business class food for Air Canada, runs a high-end restaurant lounge in the Toronto Pearson airport and has a cookbook coming out in November.
Hawksworth has never attended a chef-in-residence program like this one, but has enjoyed encouraging students to pursue their culinary dreams and ensuring they understand that their dreams really are possible.
“It was just nice to cook some food and tell some stories and hopefully inspire some young cooks and let them know that they can actually do what they want to do, they just have to put their mind to it,” said Hawksworth.
