The Culinary Art of Calgary’s Darren MacLean

When Darren MacLean’s Eight cracked the Top 10 of the Canada’s 100 Best Restaurants list this year, those used to watching restaurants in Montreal, Vancouver, and Toronto dominate the top of the list were surprised. Despite rave reviews from those who have actually dined at Eight, which has just eight seats and is tasting-menu only—the restaurant hasn’t received as much national chatter as more bustling dining rooms in Canada’s larger cities, partly due to its location in Calgary’s somewhat underdog restaurant scene but also because of the limited number of seats. (Continuing the theme, MacLean recently launched After Eight, a parlour-style speakeasy at the same address.) Eight isn’t the kind of place big spenders can drift into while swinging through Calgary on a business trip—even locals need to plan ahead.

While Eight’s climb to number six (MacLean’s other two restaurants, Nupo and Shokunin, placed 30th and 74th respectively) may seem like a sharp rise to some, the chef felt something closer to a sense of relief after years of hard work and time spent contemplating the nature of Canadian cuisine. MacLean has been a known quantity in culinary circles—and a local celebrity in Calgary—for well over a decade. After a childhood spent in small Alberta communities, he took on low-ranking kitchen jobs when he was barely old enough to work, eventually falling in love with the kitchen. After cooking in many of Calgary’s high-end restaurants, he made his ambition to push boundaries clear with the opening of his short-lived but influential restaurant Downtownfood in the early 2010s. The closure wasn’t a retreat but a reset, a deliberate move to refocus, and what followed was a period of exploration.

Photo of After Eight by Dave and Quin Cheung for DQ Studios.

A passion for Japanese food led to multiple trips to that country to learn about its cuisine, setting the stage for Shokunin, the raucous smoke-filled izakaya restaurant he opened in Calgary’s Mission district in 2016. The chef has never needed convincing that his restaurants are among the finest in Canada, but he doesn’t deny that external validation feels good. “Any chef who says they don’t love accolades is lying,” MacLean says. “We cook with love and we want to be recognized for what we do.”

His success snowballed when, in 2018, he was cast as the sole Canadian contestant on The Final Table, a single-season international chef competition show that paired him with the former French Laundry chef de cuisine Timothy Hollingsworth to face off against an army of similarly prestigious competitors from around the world. MacLean ended up making the finals, catching the attention of the global chef community. “When The Final Table came out, it really changed things,” he says. “It showed that I refused to be limited by where I live.”

Ready to capitalize on that momentum, MacLean opened both Nupo, with a focus on fish and vegetables, and Eight (accessible through a barely marked door inside Nupo) in January 2020. The tasting menu concept at Eight and dry-aging fish chamber, premium sake list, and omakase bar at Nupo were an incredibly ambitious project, particularly in a city like Calgary, which hasn’t always been known for pushing new ideas. But just as the early accolades began to roll in, the pandemic struck, and both restaurants lost their buzz as well as the possibility of international visitors flying in for a one-on-eight experience with the outspoken chef they’d seen on TV.

But MacLean is a fighter. He turned his focus to growing produce for his restaurants in his own garden, which grew into a small farm. Once the lockdown era ended, he launched his Cultural Chef Exchange, inviting some of the world’s top chefs to Calgary to explore Alberta’s landscapes before cooking collaborative multicourse dinners at Eight and more accessible à la carte meals at Shokunin. His growing platform allowed him to speak loudly and
publicly about sustainability and Canadian food culture.

The pillars of MacLean’s food philosophy include a deep affection for Canadian ingredients and inclusive storytelling about its diverse food culture. Much of MacLean’s power rests in his ability to make a strong statement about what constitutes Canadian cuisine while refusing to be constrained by local expectations. Even if his customers weren’t familiar with Japanese omakase or binchotan charcoal yakitori, he still took the risk of highlighting both in his restaurants while injecting his own unapologetically Canadian identity into the mix.

MacLean’s culinary ideology comes together most succinctly at Eight. Japanese ingredients and techniques are given equal weight with other global influences that colour culinary life in Canada. During a typical service, MacLean presents guests with high-concept dishes recalling the cooking of an Indo-Canadian neighbour from his childhood, reimagines duck dishes from Alberta’s ubiquitous Chinese restaurants, and makes the most of corn from nearby Taber and the bounty of Canadian oceans. The dishes are prepared with a singular attention to detail, but the stories are told with earnestness, from a chef so hellbent on pushing himself toward excellence.

“I want to tell as many Canadian stories as I can,” he says. “My restaurants are all very much engaged in the story of Canadiana.”

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