Wildfires Are Yet Another Challenge for This Young Immigrant Chef

It’s 6:30 p.m. on a Sunday and Armaan is in his element: standing in a kitchen, bouncing between a grill and a stove and a deep fryer, assembling a meal for hungry customers.

Nothing else about the last month has been normal. Not the flaming mountainsides as he fled Clinton, not the living arrangements, not the work locations or the general uncertainty. Armaan spent a year learning to cook in one of Toronto’s fanciest restaurants. Now he’s stirring sauces in a trailer parked at an elementary school overlooking a smoky little town.

Armaan ladles gravy into a container, steams a mix of vegetables, checks a deep fryer. The temperature has dipped to 30 C. It’s considerably hotter inside the trailer, which Armaan is sharing with another cook. A helicopter carrying a bucket rattles overhead. In the distance, a large plume is visible.

In the parking lot, two dozen firefighters wait. Their day done, they squat beside the road, scrolling phones; lounge in pickup trucks, arms draped through open windows; chat with Armaan’s boss, Manmeet Sra, as he prepares containers and positions sauces.

Then the food is done, handed to Sra through the trailer’s window, placed on the plastic table, scooped up by firefighters, toted to the trucks, shovelled into mouths. The rush over, trucks depart, though others will arrive over the coming hours. Inside the trailer, Armaan keeps cooking.

Armaan — he doesn’t have a last name and sometimes just writes “N/A” on documents — grew up in Ambala, a modest city north of Delhi. As a child, he learned to cook curries with his mother. By his early teens, he realized he wanted to do it for a living. He found a respected two-year program at Toronto’s George Brown Polytechnic, got the green light from his hesitant parents, moved to Ontario at the age of 18, got a part-time job and was on his way.

Four years later, Armaan, now 22, sits on a bench overlooking Lillooet and talks about his life with a faint accent, a warm smile and what amounts to a shrug.

He talks about his ambitions, his love of cooking, his journey to this parking lot and his future with the same reserved, optimistic, unexcitable tone.

“I love being in the kitchen,” he says simply. “I like the thrill. I like serving people.”

During culinary school, Armaan worked part time and as an intern at Oliver & Bonacini, a Toronto-based group of fancy restaurants. After graduation, he headed north and worked seasonally in the kitchen of a golf club in Ontario’s Muskoka tourist region. Last summer, he saw an online ad for a sous-chef position at the Cariboo Lodge, a hotel and restaurant in Clinton, B.C.

Armaan has a work visa, and a full-time job in a small town would help him stay in the country and progress toward achieving permanent status. So he packed his bags and knives and headed west.

Armaan was used to the lights and bustle of downtown Toronto. Clinton, about 120 kilometres northwest of Kamloops, has no stoplights and about 600 residents.

“From fast life, I was into slow life,” he says. “But it was pretty nice.”

Among the first things he did when he arrived was visit each of the half-dozen restaurants and cafés in town and try their food. Mexican. Chinese.