The term “celebrity chef” doesn’t do Mark McEwan justice. Although he’s been head judge on Top Chef Canada and the star of his own reality TV show, The Heat, on Food Network Canada, he’s more than a white coat and a famous name. He’s a culinary workhorse. As chef and owner of the McEwan Group, his Toronto-based food empire, he manages four restaurants, a catering company, and a growing family of specialty food stores. And even though he looks like a chef, he typically behaves like a CEO—and some days like a general.
“A dinner service at one of my restaurants is like orchestrated combat, only nobody dies,” says McEwan, 57, whose Toronto restaurants include ONE, North 44, Bymark, and Fabbrica. “It gets wild. Really wild.”
McEwan didn’t go to business school, but lessons learned from hundreds of harried dinner services have yielded enough knowledge to earn him a dozen MBAs. “On a great day at ONE, we will serve 800–1,000 people, each of whom has two courses and two drinks,” McEwan says. “It’s a crazy, churning monster. When it operates smoothly without any problems, it’s a thing of beauty. How can you not learn from something like that?”