Jameson Watermulder

For many people, cooking and serving even one turkey dinner is a challenge, but not for Executive Chef Jameson Watermulder. At his former position as Executive Chef at Summerhill Market in Toronto, every holiday season he cooked and served a complete turkey dinner for over five thousand people. This small task included cooking thousands of turkeys, as well as two thousand kilograms of potatoes, one thousand five hundred kilograms of squash and one thousand kilograms of cranberries, according to aCBC report. However, that kind of feat is all in a day’s work for Jameson.   Jameson studied and graduated from the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg before launching his career as an Executive Chef and restaurant owner. As a first success in his culinary career, Jameson was instrumental in opening and running the Winnipeg restaurant, Gluttons. The restaurant was featured in several online and print magazines, including the Air Canada publicationEn Route, which listed the restaurant as a unique and enjoyable culinary experience. After a short 8 months of being opened, Gluttons received its first five star rating and was voted as Canada’s Top New Restaurant.   Although his success at Gluttons earned him national attention, Jameson’s work at Summerhill Market in Toronto also alerted the culinary community to his skills. Summerhill Market is an upscale grocery market that was basically a Mom and Pop shop. After Jameson’s arrival, it became a particularly well-known destination for its gourmet prepared meals.   While serving as Summerhill Market's Executive chef, Jameson expanded the market’s catering menu and elevated the home meal replacement menu selection to include more than eight hundred items. The home-style recipes and the inclusion of using the best, freshest and unique ingredients made the market’s food well-known in and around the Toronto area, creating a destination for foodies. In addition to expanding the menu selection at Summerhill Market, Jameson also lead in developing and training the market’s kitchen brigade from a 15-member team to one that included 125 staff members. The combination of these two accomplishments gave Summerhill Market the leading edge to take top honors as Canada’s best Independent Grocer.   Even while building a career, over the years, Jameson has found ways of giving back to his community. While working to establish Gluttons, Jameson participated in the Gold Medal Plates contest, which supports Olympic and Paralympic athletes. In 2007, he and Chef Makoto Ono won the first Annual award for Top Chef in Canada.   Jameson loves sharing many of his recipes online, including one for his famous broccoli salad and Summerhill’s chicken pot pie to name a few, but he really loves giving back to the community and charity’s close to his heart. He participated, for example, in the 2010 Chef’s Challenge for the Cure in support of cancer research and has been active in supporting camps and other charitable causes. 

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