On the frontier of fusion food

Chef Ken LeFebour has made a career out of bringing together cuisines and cooking like a modern nonna. But grandmas everywhere may scold him about the title of his first book.

Chef Ken LeFebour never cooks according to recipes and that is certainly reflected in the name of his first cookbook, which really isn’t a cookbook at all.

LeFebour, “Chef Ken” to virtually everyone he knows, has built a long career in taking chances where he’s had them, doing his own thing, and never taking himself too seriously. 

Part biography and part conceptual cooking guide, I’m Just Gonna Fucking Cook explores LeFebour’s journey to Canada, his happenstance path to cooking, his 40 years in kitchens, all while serving up plenty of his joyful, slightly eccentric approach to life. 

“Food, music, dance, art, ever since I started cooking in Toronto as a fryer, it’s really all felt the same to me.” 

LeFebour lives in Dundas, where he developed a following as the owner of the popular Nellie James, where he was creating elevated takeout long before the pandemic forced everyone to do that. 

He was accepted into mechanical engineering technology at Mohawk College but after working a stint doing daily piece work at Firestone, he realized that working life wasn’t for him.

So instead, he took off for Toronto at 19 and got a kitchen job managing a fryer. He loved — still loves — the chaos and physicality of the kitchen and is proud that, from the beginning, he built a reputation as a “bull worker” who could slay any task given to him without complaint.

In those early years, he lived in a cramped apartment upstairs with no stove, keeping his beer cold behind a shared toilet, and sitting on a fire escape, watching the world go by on Queen Street.

In just a few years, he was put in charge of opening a French nouvelle cuisine spot. His boss also offered him an apprenticeship in pre-chef employment at George Brown College in Kensington Market. 

“It was good. It taught me the fundamentals,” says LeFebour, who’s had no other training but always trusted his knack for putting flavours together. 

LeFebour says he was doing fusion cooking before there was any name for it. 

“This was not a concept but there was younger chefs all over everywhere, all over the world, taking the same pathway that I was taking, going to markets, checking out the food, working under chefs that would yell at you and freak you out. We were building out Asian, German, Greek, we didn’t care. As long as it was balanced, I was sending it out.”

He burned out of Toronto in his mid-20s (he’s been sober since before he turned 30) and returned to Hamilton but says he initially couldn’t get a job because of his long hair and black leather jacket. 

But eventually he was cooking at a German restaurant before shifting to Cajun food at The Big Easy on Locke Street. He learned to cook étouffée, gumbo, jambalaya, and beignets. 

“So by then I had German, I had French, I had Cajun and I had my Asian background.”

A couple of times in his life he’s saved enough money to take off and travel — Britain and Europe for nine months, figuring out that he could hop on the last Eurorail train for wherever it was going because it was cheaper than renting a hostel — and then a journey back to India to spend four months with his grandmother.

LeFebour loves to scour markets for fresh products and if he’s not familiar with something, he’ll take it home and experiment. 

“I don't like doing too much research, so I would just taste it, add to it, taste it again. That’s how I cook.”

Other stops of his career include Plum Delicious, the Edgewater Manor, where he brought in caribou, ostrich and wild boar, adding his own flair with sauces to create “off-centre French,” and then Liuna Station. The latter allowed him to use their kitchen to launch his own business while he worked on contract with them. At the end of three years, he was fully working for himself but he had learned banquet cooking in the meantime.

That came in handy with the catering side of his business, Chef and Wife in Dundas. It opened in 2000 in a small, former clothing store without a kitchen. He built what he needed with bartering and flea market finds. He served at the weddings of many of the city’s great and rising chefs, further raising his profile.

Then came Nellie James in 2004 serving gourmet food to-go. 

The name was a tribute to his grandparents. Born in Bombay, LeFebour’s family are known as Anglo Indians, a distinct minority with mixed British and Indian ancestry. His grandfather James LeFebour served in the army there and met his grandmother Nellie, a redhead with Irish and English ancestry, who was born in India. 

His parents immigrated to Canada with their four kids when LeFebour was four. 

He’s had some failures and misfires along the way, including a restaurant in downtown Hamilton, and a keto-focused eatery in Dundas. It was during a meeting with a bank manager about the latter project LeFebour said: “I’m just gonna fucking cook.” 

At 62, LeFebour is mostly retired. He and wife Jackie wrapped up Nellie James last year and he is just doing one-off catering gigs now. He’s grateful for no longer working 80-hour weeks and wondering if he’d ever get ahead. Stepping back has given him time to reflect on his own story.

“No one needs another cookbook, I know that, but I never knew anybody who wrote something like this.” It’s an exposition of storytelling, connections, art and cooking that he says is inspired by all the time he has spent at the Cotton Factory, seeing people break down barriers or not even seeing them at all.

He says his book might be for young chefs or people who understand cooking and want to expand their repertoire. 

He embraces free-form, conceptual cooking, working with what’s at hand. Maybe it’s best described as new nonna cooking, he says. “This is old school. This is what they do. You taste, you smell, you touch, you feel you hear, you listen.”

LeFebour doesn’t measure his ingredients or time his cooking or cook from recipes, though he has had stints in his career where he had to write them. He guides those using his book but wants them to explore and find their way on their own.

“So in the book, I have the ingredients and then the procedure, and then why I do things. I want to take people on a journey, because like anyone doing something so long, I can taste and see food in my head.”

And he’s impatient to share that. When we meet LeFebour in mid-October, he’s still deciding whether to self-publish or try to find a publisher for his book. He says he just can’t wait months or years to make it happen, so he might have to do it his own way once again.