Our People | Benoit Pageau
Since he starting cooking professionally at seventeen years old, Benoit’s world consisted of fine dining at restaurants in swanky hotels and ski resorts. He learned from top-end chefs in Montreal and, when he moved west to pursue his passion for snowboarding, in British Columbia. In 2011, he was working at the Rockford at Revelstoke Mountain Resort when a chef there invited him on a catering gig for a staff party. Benoit accepted.
Little did he know the gig was a two-hour drive north of town, followed by three hours on a barge across a lake and up a dirt logging road to a remote camp.
At the time, staff and construction workers were building Mica's new luxury lodge. Those two days of cooking were Benoit’s first camp chef experience, and, assigned to pastries, his first time baking. The lead chef had brought in cake mix - in case, Benoit realized, he wasn’t capable of figuring out baking from scratch. He did figure it out, on the fly, just like he figured out how to cook breakfast, lunch, and dinner for forty people without the full chef’s team of a restaurant that he was accustomed to.
He not only loved it. He excelled at it.
When Mica offered him a job as pastry chef at the new lodge, he snapped it up. Ten plus years later and with formal culinary school training under his belt, he’s our Executive Chef, creating five-star meals with seasonal and local ingredients from one of the most remote kitchens in British Columbia.
It’s not always easy. There was the time that the then-head chef ran out of eggs and several dozen had to be flown in from town - the most expensive eggs Benoit had ever cooked. Or the time, when Benoit had just become executive chef, that a group of long-time guests requested only pub food for dinners, no fancy meals. To which Benoit agreed (of course) but decided to make everything from scratch, including burger buns and onion rings, which turned out to be far more work than any high-end meal.
But he can’t imagine going back to cooking in a restaurant in the city. It’s the challenge of cooking way up here, and surprising people with the quality, that makes Benoit tick. He rarely repeats a meal the entirety of the season. If he overhears a guest say they love a certain meal or they’d be so stoked to consume a particular type of food, Benoit will serve that the next evening. It makes them feel special, not to mention excellently tops off a good day of skiing.
“It makes me happy as a chef to be able to create and use what I have here and what I bring up,” he says, “to offer an incredible food experience to people far from home who don’t expect to be fed like kings and queens on the side of a remote mountain.”
And partnered with the culinary program, is the opportunity to get out heliboarding on the playful terrain of our Canadian Rockies tenure. Or, during breaks, join the team behind the lodge for jib sessions on custom-built pipes and jumps.
When he’s not running the kitchen at Mica, Benoit trades his chef’s apron for a board - sometimes on wheels, sometimes on snow. A skateboarder since the age of nine, he’s a regular at the Revelstoke skate park, still throwing tricks with the same energy as the local groms. He’s part of Wasted Youth, a tight-knit crew of skaters and snowboarders who ride, film, and push each other to go bigger, deeper, and keep chasing their passions. His year is split between two extremes - planting trees in the summer and crafting five-star meals in the winter - all so he can chase the moments that matter most. Whether he’s stacking clips in the backcountry, dropping into dreamy pillow lines, or cruising with his wife Leah and their dog Indy, Benoit makes the most of every season, balancing hard work with a life well lived.
Chef’s kiss to this guy!
View an article that highlights Mica Heliskiing Culinary program for Food & Wine Magazine
