Katie Hayes, it’s clear, is a chef who does things more for love than money. Take the gigantic wood-fired stove in which her pizzas are made: “That will never pay for itself!” she cheerfully admits. Or the bread, which is absolutely extraordinary. “That’s hard, very labour-intensive, so it’s not a money-maker. But it gets people in the door, and it’s our trademark.”
By the time I visit the Bonavista Social Club, named after the beautiful Bonavista peninsula of Newfoundland and Labrador on the eastern edge of Canada, it’s nearly the end of the season. Her fabled moose burgers, recently voted among the top five burgers in Canada, are no longer on the menu – in fact they proved so popular that they haven’t been since August. “We tailor-make the menu every day according to what’s available,” says Hayes. But the pizzas are great, and the dessert of partridgeberry bread pudding and ice-cream is to die for. “I keep trying to take it off the menu,” says Hayes, “because I’m bored of it, but whenever I do there’s total uproar.”
And if it’s a surprise to find such great cooking in such a little space – the café used to be her dad’s carpentry workshop – that’s because Hayes used to work for St John’s super-chef Jeremy Charles. “I learned a lot from him, about how to make simple food taste really good.”
Hayes takes the farm-to-plate movement, which has taken off in such a big way in Canada, even more seriously than most chefs: she grows all her own produce herself. She even tried to grow wheat for the bread but says they only got about three loaves’ worth, so the bread they bring in, along with olives, lemons and Italian mozzarella. She’ll soon be making her own honey, however, as they’ve kept bees for the last three years. Their effect on crops has been spectacular: “There’s fruit on the trees now every year instead of every three years.”
It’s a hard life, running a restaurant, especially when you have kids – “I thought it was a lot to work 14 hours a day for Jeremy, but really it’s more like 16-18 hours for your own place” – but Hayes loves it, just as she loves this special place by the Atlantic Ocean. “The people here are amazing. Everyone helps everyone. When I was 18, I told myself I would never come back. But you just don’t get the same feel of community anywhere else. So here I am again.”
