When food is around, it is not uncommon to see what may appear to be an angry expression on the face of chef Anthony Mair. However, that look is merely one of passion.
Mair is a lifelong chef who slaughtered his first pig as a five-year-old Jamaican farm boy. He followed in his mother’s culinary footsteps and attended George Brown Culinary School and as a cooking apprentice, won four gold, three silver and two bronze medals in various competitions in his hometown of Toronto. The enterprising chef would then open his own restaurant—Mardi Gras—in Europe before returning to Canada to open Harlem Underground, an Afro-Caribbean fusion eatery, before selling it to start his own cutlery business.
At Harlem Underground, Mair specialized in serving guests cuisine that blended African- American dishes with a Caribbean twist. Traditional foods like ribs or blackened catfish would be seasoned with Jamaican spices and a typical barbecue sauce would be mixed with passion fruit, mango and guava fruit essences. If that wasn’t enough to satisfy customers, the restaurant would serve southern fried chicken that was marinated in Jamaican jerk spice, then dipped and fried in creamy buttermilk. “Harmony existed in the food,” he says.
With dishes like this, I am sure many customers were up in arms when Mair decided to go from using the knives on a daily basis to selling them.
The decision was prompted during a conference in St. Lucia where Mair was invited to participate in a cooking demonstration. When he got down to the business of slicing and dicing, he found that the knives given to him were “atrocious.” Surely a man as committed to edible excellence as Mair wouldn’t tolerate subpar knives, so, of course, he decided to do something about it. In that moment, Mair Cutlery was born.
However, he hasn’t completely abandoned his cooking roots.
“I’m going back home to redefine the notion of Jamaican cuisine,” says a man as dedicated to his home country as he is to his food as well as his cutlery. “There are a million things in the Caribbean that people don’t know about.” For example, he said, breadfruit, a starchy food grown on trees, is extremely versatile and can be used to make flour, wine, soups and more. Not only that, it can also be used to fry, roast or bake foods.
His intense ego also lends itself to filming a pilot for the Food Network titled, “Soul Food Redemption,” a documentary-style show in which Mair returns home to Jamaica to give an insider’s look at the history and style of Jamaican cooking, similar to what Mario Batali, one of his inspirations, does.
He praises cooks like Batali for his ability to weave in historic stories into his food and Jamie Oliver for his zealousness in getting healthy eats in schools.
“Prior to them putting that first taste of food in their mouth,” says Mair of Batali and Oliver's approach to culinary storytelling, “They could taste it.”
He adds of Oliver, “I love what the brother is doing with the schools in America. Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant.”
When all is said and done, the food and knife innovator hopes that his hard-earned investment in the cutley business today will pay off and lead to a stress-free future. “By putting myself in a market where knives are essential,” says Mair, “I want to be able to island hop the rest of my days.”
For more information about Anthony Mair and Mair Cutlery, visit www.anthonymair.com.