At Les Incompetents, Chef-Restaurateur Zach Smith of Fat Rabbit Fame Dons a New Hat to Cook Up His Most Mature Effort to Date

Zach Smith wears many hats, but the toque he chose for a cold day in December just isn’t sitting right. Calling from his car, the Niagara chef removes and replaces his headwear time and again throughout our interview. Parked halfway between his debut restaurant Fat Rabbit and the recently opened Les Incompetents, Smith, also wearing a flannel shirt and frequently lifting a Tim Hortons cup, looks the part of the chef-proprietor whose life revolves around fires literal and metaphorical, including at his younger venture where a hot water tank gave out mere hours before service. Like Macaulay Culkin’s Kevin McCallister in Home Alone—the movie containing the line from which Les Incompetents draws its name and to which there are subtle references throughout its Westgrove-designed space—Smith is up to the task of keeping guests entertained.

In many ways, Les Incompetents is the result of a chef who has come of age, and whose self-assuredness not only gives him the confidence to strive for greatness in the kitchen but also the humility to know when to cede control. “I wanted this place to feel like a natural evolution of somebody who’s maturing as a restaurant owner. I brought in more expertise,” Smith says. “Partners who have amazing bar experience.” Those partners—Adam D’Intino, Bee Lim, Geoff Dillon, and Owen Walker—have nearly half a century of combined experience in the Toronto and Niagara hospitality and liquor industries, meaning that maturity also means an elevated cocktail menu, something Fat Rabbit has heretofore gone without. “Fat Rabbit doesn’t have a bar,” he quips.

While the bar program at Fat Rabbit may be bare-bones, its food is anything but. Smith made a name for himself by cooking unapologetically carnivorous food following a nose-to-tail approach and using locally sourced ingredients. From house-made charcuterie and foie gras to hulking cuts of pork and beef, the menu is a master class in butchery that pays respect to the animal. At Les Incompetents, Smith has taken the menu in a radically different direction, focusing on seafood and paring back the portion size. At Fat Rabbit, “everything is large, like really large. Everything’s loud in regards to the food, like really in your face,” says the 37-year-old chef. “And with [Les Incompetents], I wanted it to be just a little more clean and delicate but still hitting those bold flavours.”

Growing up in Vancouver, Smith fostered passions for both music and food. After graduating from high school, he studied music at Langara College before moving to Toronto to pursue a career in the industry. As is often the case with those of an artistic temperament, he worked in restaurants to pay the bills. And like many chefs, his first passion gave way to the kitchen, and somewhere along the line, he decided to devote himself to cooking. What followed was stints at everything from sandwich shops and taquerias to 350-seat hot spots like Byblos. But it was at Bar Raval, Grant van Gameren’s heralded College Street pinxto bar, where Smith made his name by cooking a menu featuring seafood and vegetable dishes.

What Smith built there came crashing down when COVID struck and he, along with most of the staff in van Gameren’s empire, was laid off. Facing burnout, isolation, and first-time fatherhood all at once, Smith, along with his wife, decided to leave Toronto for Niagara, where she had family and he could decompress from 16-hour days at the restaurant. At first, he didn’t know if he would ever return to the kitchen, and he pondered delivering a resumé to the grocery store across the street from his house in St. Catherines. It was only when another Toronto culinary kingmaker called that Smith once again foresaw a future as a chef. Matty Matheson, not yet then propelled to stratospheric fame by FX’s The Bear, was planning Meat + Three, a pop-up barbecue venture to create jobs for laid-off restaurant workers, and he needed a pit master. Eventually, Matheson was able to convince Smith to join his team, and it was during his two years there that the latter began to conceptualize Fat Rabbit.

Located down the street from its older sibling, Les Incompetents is meant “to complement Fat Rabbit,” according to Smith. Alongside the expansive drinks program and raw bar, Smith’s lithe, “French-ish” menu at Les Incompetents is made for sharing and is divided into three categories: non cuit (non-cooked-ish), grignoter (to nibble), and pour le festin (for the feast). The non cuit dishes all feature seafood prepared simply and accented with Latin American and Asian spices and sauces. The grignoter dishes are where the French influence on Les Incompetents is most visible but also where Smith’s playful side is most evident. The jambon beurre for example is a deconstruction of the classic French sandwich in which the bread is replaced with carta di musica (flatbreads) layered with slices of ham, St. Brigid’s butter, and herbes de Provence and eaten like nachos. Lastly, the pour le festin dishes offer cooked proteins alongside expertly crafted sauces, including brochettes that exemplify the breadth of Smith’s talent, with options including mackerel, langoustine, beef, and cabbage, depending on availability.

A dinner at Les Incompetents bears the hallmarks of a chef who has come into his own, cooking food whose delicious je ne sais quoi is evident regardless of protein or portion. But in its whimsy, whether references to Home Alone or nacho-like jambon beurre, it also feels like the product of an almost childlike wonder—something that appeared as a fanciful dream in Smith’s Vancouver youth. “I would return pop bottles and sell all my family’s old belongings at garage sales,” he says. “And I would pinch pennies away to inevitably, one day, open up a restaurant.”

If it was Les Incompetents that Smith had in his mind’s eye, well, that was money well saved.

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