Adam Vettorel Named Alumni of Distinction Apprenticeship Recipient

Co-Owner and Chef, North & Navy and Cantina Gia

Cook Apprentice, Class of 2007

As a young man, Adam Vettorel’s intended goal was law school. Restaurant jobs were just what he took on to pay the bills along the way.

Vettorel began working in restaurants in high school, and continued working his way up the line while taking a bachelor’s degree in environmental studies at Carleton University and then a second degree in political science. “I loved working in kitchens, and I had a proficiency for it,” he says, “so I was able to pay my way through university without taking out a student loan.”

But as his political science course load grew heavier, Vettorel was compelled to step away from the kitchens. He had a mentor at the time, a lawyer to whom he confided that the kitchen was where his real passion was, not the law. He gave the younger man the life-changing advice he wanted to hear: if he was passionate about cooking, that is what he should pursue.

Today, Vettorel is one of Ottawa’s most admired restaurateurs. With his business partner, Chris Schlesak, Vettorel is chef and co-owner at the upscale North & Navy and the neighbourhood restaurant Cantina Gia. To reach this position of prominence in his profession, he spent years working with some of the best chefs in the city, including John Taylor at the much-missed Domus Café (which closed in 2014) and Steve Wall in the innovative Wellington Village mainstay Supply and Demand.

After abandoning his second degree two credits short of graduation, he enrolled in Algonquin College’s Cook Apprentice program, Class of 2007. “I had been thinking of working and travelling, and if you want to work in different countries, you need certification. That’s why I decided to go to Algonquin and get my accreditation as a Red Seal Chef.”

The Algonquin program gave him a foundation in world cuisine. Prior to enrolling, he had worked in contemporary kitchens and Italian kitchens. The College’s courses taught him many of the classic French techniques that have become part of the culinary heritage of the world. “You know, the sauces, the styles of preparation that gave me a really good foundation in cooking.”

After graduation, he spent five years at Domus Café, working his way up to becoming chef de cuisine. In each of the last two years he was there, the ByWard Market establishment was voted best restaurant in Ottawa. He moved on and continued to advance his skills and knowledge of the business at Whalesbone, in a corporate job with the Fratelli Group, and Supply and Demand, where he was part of the restaurant’s opening team.

Vettorel’s family is from the Veneto, the region of Italy that includes Venice. When it came time to open his own restaurant with Chris Schlesak, it was important to them that they set themselves apart. They wanted to serve the region’s distinctive style of Italian food, authentic dishes specific to Italy’s north that brought new flavour profiles to local dining.

The transition from running other people’s kitchens to opening and operating his own restaurant was the biggest challenge he ever faced. “I knew it wouldn’t be easy but I thought it was something I could handle.” North & Navy was and is to this day a resounding success – it has been named one of Ottawa’s Top 10 Restaurants. But Vettorel is refreshingly open about the “horrible anxiety of being in charge” he experienced in the early days of the business.

“People are counting on you not to make mistakes,” he says. Staff trust that their cheques will appear on time. They expect the boss to have answers when something goes awry. Customers have high expectations every day at every sitting. “If things go wrong, everything is your fault, and that really weighs on you. I think it’s something all small business owners have to grapple with.”

At first, he says, he worked “every day, all day” to meet the challenges. That was clearly going to be unsustainable, so over time he found himself trusting other people to handle certain tasks, and he and his partner solidified their roles and responsibilities in a way that played to their individual strengths.

Their aims were lofty: to provide a high-level product and execute high-level service every night. Having found a kind of working balance, they continued to work hard to impress new customers and delight regulars with wine dinners, special menus and other means of creating a buzz.

They were so successful that “the two grinders,” as Vettorel describes himself and Schlesak, decided to up the ante by opening their second restaurant. North & Navy was a destination fine-dining establishment; Gia Cantina was intended to be a neighbourhood draw in the Glebe that was approachable, accessible and casual – a kind of little sister to its downtown sibling.

Gia Cantina opened to positive reviews in February 2020, about a month before the COVID-19 pandemic shut everything down. After absorbing the initial blow to their restaurants, the co-owners began to consider their priorities. “Right off the bat, we thought of our staff,” Vettorel says. “We wanted to keep them as busy as possible – we predicted that if we simply let them go and shut things down, we’d have a hard time getting the team back together. We could lose a few of the teammates and then on top of that when things re-opened, everyone would be out of practice.”

But how to make it work? There was take-out business, but that was relatively small. Vettorel noted that every time he opened Instagram or the newspaper, there was someone in need of food. There were homeless shelters that could not operate their kitchens because of pandemic restrictions. A safe space for families escaping abusive situations had no kitchen of its own to feed its clients.

“It was a no-brainer,” Vettorel says. “We had kitchens. We had cooks. Charity was something we could supply. It was something that kept us moving in a time of great stress and anxiety, and something that also made us feel we were contributing to the greater good. We just put our heads down and started to chop some onions and stopped thinking about what was wrong in our lives and how we were helping people with bigger problems.”

Among the many people Vettorel and Schlesak helped through the pandemic were the capital’s hard-pressed front-line workers. Staff at the Ottawa Hospital and the Brewer Park COVID-19 assessment facility were sent a weekly lunch by the restaurants’ teams. Vettorel says when he felt defeated by the impact of the pandemic, he simply had to imagine how much harder it was to be on the front lines facing a direct threat of COVID-19 infection every day. “If you were just at home thinking about it, you’d drive yourself crazy. But by keeping busy and helping out, we got through.”

As the third wave of the pandemic receded in the spring of 2021, the provincial government gave the green light to restaurateurs to reopen their patios to customers. On a perfect June day, Vettorel and his team experienced the thrill of welcoming customers back to North & Navy. “We kept making a joke, saying ‘Oh my god, food on plates!’ My team and I try to make beautiful food that looks as good as it tastes and we had abandoned that for takeout, which was still good food but without the visual appeal.”

Now they could put almost a year and a half of pent-up energy into the most elaborate, over-the-top dishes they could imagine for guests who wanted a great meal on a patio surrounded by happy strangers. Vettorel speaks enthusiastically about his memory of that day when he was able to create great meals and a “European vibe” for his guests on a quiet Ottawa street.

It’s no surprise when Vettorel says that he loves being a chef now more than ever. “I love coming in and seeing the team – they keep me energized when I’m feeling low, like when a young chef has a new ingredient or new recipe they want to try. I kind of feed on that energy. It keeps all the hard work from being a chore.

“When you have a good night and everyone comes together and does their part perfectly, it feels exactly like a sports team winning a game. I think I’m addicted to that feeling. There’s a lot of work required to achieve it. But it’s worth it – the reward is great nights with a group of happy guests enjoying great food and great wine. I couldn’t think of a better job.”