FAST COMPANY
FROM APRIL 2020 ISSUE OF WEST END PHOENIX
Chuck Ortiz, founder of the chef’s exercise group Food Runners
Even before restaurants across the city closed their doors, the food industry was a tough one for workers. That’s why Chuck Ortiz started a Wednesday run club for chefs and kitchen staff, to help them deal with stress
It’s 9 a.m. on a Wednesday – Feb. 12 – at Kinton Ramen on Queen Street. It isn’t yet open for business, but 25 guests in sweats and sneakers are sitting in front of bowls of steaming pork broth piled high with shirataki noodles, sliced pork, nori and a seasoned egg. They sip Japanese tea and warm their faces in the fragrant ramen steam.
These aren’t ordinary diners. They’re chefs and restaurant workers from across the city. And what’s weirder than the fact that they’re up this early is that they’ve all just been out for a run.
Food Runners, as the group calls itself, is the brainchild of Chuck Ortiz, who has spent a long time thinking about the depravity of professional kitchens. He has his own experience to draw on – he’s worked in restaurants since high school – but it was reading Anthony Bourdain’s seminal memoir, Kitchen Confidential, that really drew him in. Like a teenager discovering Bukowski, Ortiz was romanced by the underbelly.
And it inspired him. Not to snort coke or make a pâté en croûte, but to get chefs healthy.
Masato Ueki readies the post-run meal at Kinton Ramen
He considered basketball, but for that he’d need to find a court, and not everyone’s a player. He kept coming up with sports and crossing them off the list. Finally he hit on running. “It’s the easiest thing that someone can do to get into shape,” Ortiz says. “If you can walk, then you’re on your way to being a runner.”
So, in 2014, he reached out to his chef friends – from Buca, Bar Isabel and Dai Lo – and convinced a handful of them to put down their brewskies, butt out their smokes and come for a run. “I wanted to change the industry for the better,” he explains. Six years later, the Food Runners are still meeting every Wednesday morning. “We have bartenders, baristas, bakers. It’s still geared to the food industry but it’s grown to be so much more than just chefs. There are food writers, photographers, managers, servers.”
Enticing these types to go running together sounds easy enough as a novelty one-off perhaps, but how do you keep a bunch of indulgent nighthawks motivated? You hook them with food, Ortiz says.
Every run begins with an early-morning meeting at a host restaurant – either one of the runners’ own establishments or places that want to host because they like the idea of supporting their industry peers. Start time is 8:15 a.m. The runners drop off their gear and get a quick debrief on the day’s route from their Nike run coach, Inge Boerma, then they’re off for a 40-minute run.
Geoff Martin, of Osteria Rialto, and Sean Mallia running down the sidewalk on Queen St. W.
One of the members having breakfast at Kinton Ramen today is Hans Vogels, executive chef at Momofuku Noodle Bar. He joined two years ago after he injured his back and a doctor advised him to get some exercise. “I was starting to feel those beers after work,” he laughs. “Bourdain describes the renegades and delinquents, the camaraderie of working in the kitchen – you find comfort there,” he says, citing the same memoir, considered an industry bible, that inspired Ortiz. “So going out and running with people like that, who are just like me, is a big part of it. I don’t really get along with people who don’t work in restaurants.” Vogels also loves that the refuel is not a “fucking smoothie and a kale salad.”
As everyone goes to town on the ramen, Ortiz recites a list of past dishes they’ve shared: “Risotto, corned beef, chicken katsu sandwiches, tartang tolang [charred eggplant omelette], potato rösti.”
“Nothing like going for a 5k and then eating a fucking pizza,” Vogels interjects, recalling a favourite refuel from Big Trouble Pizza, adding, “I don’t like to miss a Wednesday.”
Geoff Martin, of Osteria Rialto, and Sean Mallia sit down to eat after setting out on the day’s run
The food is how Ortiz got Nike on board. He wanted proper gear for his runners, so they could train for marathons and run in all types of weather. “Nike has never done anything like this, from a food angle, but food and sports go hand in hand.” Nike supplies the run coach, training and, occasionally, gear. The restaurants comp the food. Membership doesn’t cost the runners anything except gratuities. (If there’s a demographic that doesn’t need to be reminded to tip the waiter, it’s this one.)
The pairing is actually less obvious than it seems. If you look at food in the sports world, you find a lot of egg-white omelettes, protein bars and caffeine gel shots. “We’re running so we can eat the things we love,” says Ortiz, “and the fact that we’re bringing in chefs to create the food for refuel, that’s the game changer.”
Ortiz grew up in Scarborough with a large extended family. “It was always hardcore Filipino food,” he says of the dinner scene at home. “I’ve been having tripe since I was a baby. A lot of gizzards and off-cuts. The kind of stuff I wasn’t proud to bring to school for lunch.”
Ortiz sharing the post-run high
That inspired him to start cooking for his family. He was in grade three when he began to help in the kitchen. Soon he was trying to recreate the dishes he saw on his favourite cooking shows – Urban Peasant, Yan Can Cook. “Not that I didn’t care about my Filipino heritage, but I didn’t want to eat that way anymore. I wanted to cook spaghetti.”
His parents encouraged him to pursue cooking as a career. He asked his co-op instructor in high school for a placement with Mark McEwan. “I knew McEwan was the guy. Every kid wanted to work at North 44.”
Instead he got placed at Vivo on Mount Pleasant, which turned out to be a perfect starter kitchen. “The owner would show me how to make sauces and soups and pizza dough. I was a sponge, I wanted to learn so much.” He kept cooking, eventually working for the Rubino brothers at Rain and Luce. Around the same time he picked up a camera and started shooting photos from the kitchen – a chit spike stabbed with orders after a busy night, a cook taking a smoke break in the alley – that he posted on a new site called Tumblr. This at a time when the majority of food photography was heavily stylized and recipe-focused.
His gritty back-of-house shots gained an international following. “There was Saveur, and Food & Wine, there were a lot of mom blogs, but there wasn’t anyone documenting the food culture that I loved.”
The refuel meal: this day, pork broth with shirataki noodles, pork, nori and seasoned egg
In 2007, he launched Acquired Taste, a magazine about Toronto restaurant kitchens, with Jen Agg and Grant van Gameren as his first cover models. The issue sold out and suddenly he was in the print business. “Around the fourth issue, restaurants were hitting us up, saying, ‘Can you do our photography? Our socials?’” he recalls. Acquired Taste is now part of his company, Back of House, a media content studio. And Ortiz finally got to work with McEwan. He comes into McEwan’s kitchens not to cook, but to shoot. “It’s crazy how things come full circle.”
And while Ortiz is as steeped in the city’s food scene as one can be, the Food Runners aren’t hard-asses about who gets to join – you don’t have to be in the restaurant biz to run with them. That said, he’s found that the members who seem to return are those who understand food, not the caffeine-gel-popping, Camelbak-wearing crowd.
The goal of the Food Runners isn’t to lose weight or win gold medals. Their motto is “Will Run For Food,” and that’s what they do. When Momofuku hosted the refuel, Vogels made wagyu beef tartare and deep-fried it. It was basically a deep-fried hamburger. Says Vogels, “Whatever a kale smoothie is, this was the opposite.” Chuck nods. “It was about as far from a kale smoothie as you can get.”
The club is suspended for now, but Ortiz is confident that, on the other side of physical distancing, Food Runners will run again.
TThe Food Runners take their spots: (from left) Brittany Moran (Nike Coach), Hans Vogels (Momofuku Noodle Bar), Meghan Young (writer), Anna Bediones (blogger), Fabio Azevedo (media firm Back of House), Stacey Munroe (news producer), Michelle Culligan (flight attendant), Tara Lee (Eastbound Brewing Company) and Carly Spears (The Chew Review)
Eating on the run
Chuck Ortiz’s favourite restaurants for post-run dining
Kinton Ramen
402 Queen St. W.
Big Trouble Pizza
235 Spadina Ave.
Eastside Brewing Company
700 Queen St. E.
Bar Buca
75 Portland St.
Sugo
1281 Bloor St. W.
BB’s Diner
76 Lippincott St.
Momofuku Noodle Bar
190 University Ave.
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