Chasing Sugar with Jesse Fader

We’re standing in a small clearing in the back forty of Chef Jesse Fader’s mom’s Point Petre property. It’s the site of a new sugar shack and we’re here to unofficially celebrate with our families and a few friends. Jesse is poking at the fire pit as the new flames lap at the edges of the wood. I imagine that he’s making sure the fire is the exact temperature to roast the marshmallows that our kids are now pushing onto menacingly sharp sticks.

I don’t know if Jesse is a perfectionist, but I know for certain that he doesn’t mess around when it comes to food. In September 2022, Jesse bought the Bloomfield property that would become Darlings, a self-described “pizza ranch.” It was gutted, reno’d and almost ready to roll two months later, when an extreme Christmas snowstorm decided to wreak havoc. “Pipes froze, the place flooded and the ceiling collapsed,” Jesse explains. Between the repairs and the time it took to perfect the custom-conceptualized oven to his exacting standards, the restaurant’s doors only opened to the public in April of the following year. “I was working on the pizza oven with a mason called Patrick Roloson. He was patient with my constant requests. I needed a very specific type of heat, the kind you get from the hundred-year-old brick ovens fired by coal. The oven is massive, hulking even. Like the broad side of a barn. It’s cut from county limestone and has an offset cooker below to heat the floor, and in the end, a dome built inside a dome for extreme heat retention.” He pauses. “We even had to manufacture special parts for the door as the heat was melting traditional screws.” Jesse is seriously inflexible about his pizza, and it shows.

If you’ve had the perfect char-bubbled pizza magic that comes out of that oven, swathed in house-made stracciatella and befriended by a tangy, white anchovy … or anything on the menu at all that was born and marinated in Jesse’s mind and crafted under the guidance of his exacting hands – you know just what I’m talking about. So do these kids, today, laughing together around the fire pit, perfectly roasting their marshmallows over an exactingly prepared fire.

I met Jesse’s wife Natalie first. She called me up one day and said, “I just moved here. I’m a nutritional therapist and I’d love to get a stall in the Life Au Lait Market to introduce myself to the County!” Within a year we were best friends and so were our kids.

Jesse was a harder nut to crack; not unfriendly, but cool, a little aloof, and never in a rush to respond in conversation. I wasn’t sure we were friends for a while; but then suddenly, I knew we were. I started to get Jesse – he’s one of those people whose mind is constantly buzzing with thoughts. There’s always a vision on the horizon that gets clearer and clearer and then, when he can totally see it – but before anyone else even knows anything is happening – he’s already making it real. And because he intuitively gets what people want, it’s always the right idea, executed just right.

Jesse’s proven this instinct a number of times in the past. In 2014, with decades of kitchen know-how under his belt, he turned his gaze to restaurants. The first was Bar Fancy, a late-night neighbourhood mainstay known for its serious fried chicken. A string of hits followed every few years or less: Superpoint, Paris Paris, Favorites. Jesse knows how to name the iconic hell out of a restaurant. And then when Covid hit, he stayed the course; he steered his ships to safe harbour and then took stock of where he was in his life and what he wanted. It was time to move on.

“Restaurants can be unforgiving,” Jesse says. “They mostly take, and they only give back what you put into them. I’m a perfectionist and a workaholic.” He’s seen first-hand the positive results that extreme effort can bring. But he also knows the costs. Jesse’s focus has always been fixed on his family, and Prince Edward County was a new canvas on which to paint. “I decided to come here and figure it out – ready, shoot, aim. I suppose that’s how I’ve approached everything.”

“My family is everything – nothing means more,” Jesse tells me in the woods at his mom’s place, when I ask him what success looks like these days. “There is no greater joy than being able to provide for my children, to contribute to my family, to be a good husband, a present father,” he continues. “I won’t let work get in the way, balance is everything.

“My knuckles are tattooed with the words ‘RUSH HOME.’ These words are less a reminder and more my North Star.”

“Tell me something, Jesse,” I ask as we stand together by the fire pit. Jesse has roughly cut thick slices of sourdough and is placing them carefully onto a grill over the low fire. “You launched Sofia’s Fresh cheese shop and gave us your burrata, and suddenly we were buying it like addicts for our private stashes and ordering it at all our favourite restaurants. Then you decided to open a pizza restaurant in the middle of a place that has so many pizza providers you could trip over seven between my house and yours – and within months of opening, you were rated in the top ten best new restaurants in Canada by enRoute.

“As much as anything else that I do, I start with just an idea and then it stays with me until I make it a reality.” JESSE FADER

So, here’s my actual question…” Jesse is chuckling. “Why did you build this sugar shack? What are you blowing up now?”

“Well, I guess I like to work,” he explains. “The sugar shack was a means to an end to a beginning. The work itself – building it with friends – allowed me to scratch a couple of itches simultaneously. It’s now a space that will require work, but it’s the kind I can drag my kids to, along with my family, my friends…”

There’s a huge wheel of brie perched on the corner of the grill, just off the hottest heat. Jesse flips the slightly charred toast with his bare hands and looks at me – “it’s supposed to be like that,” he grins. “I know, Jesse,” I laugh. “I’ve eaten in your restaurant, I know you love the perfect char.”

Slicing the ever-so-slightly oozing brie, he places it onto the toast and drips an un-shy amount of amber syrup over the pair. It’s so simple. It actually gleams in the early spring sunlight. “How do you make food so delicious, Jesse?” I need to know. Whether it’s fresh thick-sliced tomatoes in a shallow pool of some insanely yummy oil that you can’t help but save as a dip for your pizza crusts, or the best take on mac ’n’ cheese or beefaroni – Jesse nails every dish.

“I think it’s just everyone’s nostalgia from their youth. People tell our servers that it reminds them of when they’d skip school and had to fend for themselves. They’d throw some Chef Boyardee in the microwave and watch The Price is Right or reruns of Leave it to Beaver. Sure, we make it fresh with good ingredients – my job is to make a thing that tastes good – but all of those things penetrate the brain to make it go further, taste even better, and feel more special.”

“Nah,” I say, nibbling on a chunk of brie that tastes amazing – like smoke and a whisper of sweetness. “Your food is just actually delicious.”

“Tell me more about the sugar shack,” I ask Jesse, admiring the effort that went into building this thing. “I called it Peg’s,” he says. “After my mom’s partner. She loved maple syrup and building. Putting a name to something creates a new energy. I immediately loved the space and what it means to my family.”

“So what’s your plan?” I ask. “Do you have a lot of experience with this sort of thing?”

“Well, I never made maple syrup, but I’m determined by nature, I go all in on anything. I’m going to figure it out, it’s going to be fantastic. I remember getting dragged to the various cabanes à sucre in Quebec as a child. Now I think of long tables and pancakes and links on paper plates; the production facility is pretty idyllic and picturesque, and every time I drive by one in the County, I’m like, one of those will be fun. As much as anything else that I do, I start with just an idea and then it stays with me until I make it reality,” he laughs.

”Okay, fair enough,” I say. “But, what will it look like to us, the public? Will you host dinners? Events?” “Part of me keeps imagining this single light bulb hanging from a tree,” he says. “And people walk through the trees towards that light bulb and they get here and there’s this huge tomahawk, something extreme on the grill and they sit at a long table with wine and just enjoy.”

“That sounds pretty awesome,” I laugh. “And what will it look like more immediately?”

“Well, I should have 59 bottles of amber-gold by April,” he says, laughing, and I’m convinced.

The fire burns low and we start to feel the cold, so we gather our things, and I head inside the new structure to say goodbye to my besties, who are karaoke’ing their hearts out, wrapped up in blankets like little burritos on the sofa. This is a joyful place, I think, and as I pass the threshold on my way out, Jesse hands me a pencil and I sign my name on the door. LONELLE WAS HERE IN ’24 I write, pressing hard.