Ottawa chef Jae-Anthony Dougan vies for reality show launches April 19

by Peter Hum

April 16, 2021  

When Top Chef Canada reached out to him last year, Jae-Anthony Dougan accepted the reality show’s invitation not just for a shot at culinary glory, but to raise the profile of Black chefs and his ancestral cuisine.

“I felt like Black chefs are not really out there as much as the other cultures of chefs,” Dougan said in a recent interview. “I wanted to change what people know about Caribbean cuisine. I feel like Caribbean cuisine, nobody knows about it.”

When the ninth season of the Food Network Canada competition begins on April 19, Dougan will be the only one of its 11 “chef-testants” with operations in Ottawa. The 35-year-old Montreal native splits his time evenly between his hometown and Ottawa, where he runs the Chef Jae-Anthony Pop Up project from a space in the City Centre complex.

The pop-up, which opened in December, serves modern Caribbean fare through the major third-party food delivery services, Thursday through Sunday. In mid-March, Dougan also opened Tropikàl, a restaurant in Montreal, where his young son lives.

Source: Ottawa Citizen