SAIT opens new multi-million dollar National Centre for Culinary Arts

One of Canada’s oldest publicly funded culinary schools just served the next course on the future of their legacy in the food and hospitality sector, with SAIT the unveiling of the National Centre of Culinary Arts in the John Ware Building on Wednesday.

Upgrades to building, exterior and renovations have taken place since 2017, supported primarily through a $41 million investment in 2022 to complete their revitalization, said SAIT president and CEO Dr. David Ross at a lunch hour media event.

They’ve been cooking up this project for the last 75 years, he said.

“Today, the home of our School of Culinary and Tourism, truly has been transformed, and I encourage everybody to see where we are,” Ross said. “This is the state of the art of culinary education globally (and) not just in Canada.”

The renovations cover the main, second and third floors of the John Ware building’s east and west wings, said SAIT’s School of Hospitality and Tourism dean James Overall.

It includes 11 new labs, with four dedicated to a state-of-the-art competition kitchen and bakeries, three tied to the re-imagined student-run Highwood Kitchen and Bar and another six labs on the main level.

SAIT uses ingredients sourced from their other student programs like meat provided by their butchery program, honey made fresh off the roof of their building and even new steps to grow their own produce.

“(It’s) a research project with one of our faculty, a local, Calgary supplier of hydroponics, and actually a researcher at a university in Ireland,” Overall said. “What they’re working on is a unit that’s growing leafy lettuce, but we’re trying to make the technology work so you can actually work it very easily into a restaurant operation.”

The new Highwood Kitchen and Bar will seat up to 200 guests and is planned to open by Nov. 20, as they wait for more furniture to come in.

Their new competition-style kitchens were created for budding chefs to demonstrate their individual capabilities during their capstone projects.

It was also intentionally designed for SAIT to host culinary competitions from their own facilities, similar to programs found on The Food Network, Overall said.

“In a couple of years’ time . . . we’re looking to create our own competition and invite the best culinary schools in the world to come here to compete,” he said.

These facilities have also worked with SAIT’s media school to allow them to film and broadcast their competitions.

Intentional decisions like having magnetic T-bar roofs for pop-up magnetic studio lighting, alongside extra data and power were all intentionally built in, Overall said.

All of these improvements put SAIT on the same level as schools like the Culinary Institute of America, Cordon Bleu and Culinary Arts Academy Switzerland, he said.

“We’ve got world-class faculty, world-class programs and now a world class facility,” Overall said. “We fully anticipate being able to attract some of the best talent here to come and learn, because we think we actually have a very compelling, learning experience for them.”

It’s a lovely place with new equipment, more spaces for bigger classes and larger stations to work at, said baking and pastry arts instructor Joshua Grieman.

As a former alum of SAIT, the new facilities will push his students to raise the bar of Alberta’s culinary industry.

“We’ve seen in the last decade the inspiration and desire for people to come into this space . . . but definitely there is a huge push that this industry is just expanding and expanding,” Grieman said. “The ability to take on a larger capacity of students is just going to make everything better.”

Alberta has the ambitious goal of reaching a $25 billion dollar tourism industry by the year 2035 and one way to do that is through the stomachs of tourists, said Tourism Industry of Alberta president and CEO Darren Reeder.

Culinary experiences are becoming intentional parts of everyone’s trip planning cycle and this program will help augment that decision for more people to visit Alberta, he said.

“I see that we’ve created a platform here between the quality of instructional staff, government commitments and facilities we’re seeing here today that will be one of the top, if not the top place in the world, for producing tomorrow’s generation of Michelin star chefs,” Reeder said.

Having access to the National Centre for Culinary arts changes everything for students, said second year culinary arts student Saxon Daniels.

“It expands our learning, exposes us to modern tools and new techniques, and gives us the confidence to step into any top kitchen in the world,” Daniels said.

Seeing the large kitchens on her first day of classes was an amazing experience, alongside the new Highwood, said Georgia Sera who just finished her first year.

“I quite literally first thought when I saw this that it kind of looks like it’s from a movie,” Sera said. “Just from how nice and, and clean everything is to just the overall experience of being able to work and use the equipment, it’s amazing.