In the gleaming kitchen of MARCUS Restaurant + Terrace, as members of his team buzz around him, Jason DeJordy-Morris introduces the dishes that comprise the lunch menu. The lightly grilled Canadian yellowfin tuna tataki with pickled wild garlic and crispy shallots, the salmon filet with salsa verde and avocado purée sprinkled with ikura caviar, the sashimi and tartare made from “half a tuna that we get every week from Mexico”, the tomato and watermelon salad, “a sweet gem that we cut like a ruby”. Among the desserts: a rolled cake with fruit and mascarpone. “Recently, we were making it with ‘sunshine egg’ mangoes from Miyazaki Prefecture, Japan, but that season is over,” he continues. “We’re showcasing fruits from around the world, like grapes from the Champagne region or plums from the West Coast.”
MARCUS’ Executive Chef says the lunch menu is a lighter reflection of the evening menu. It’s as bright as the elegant dining room on the third floor of Four Seasons Hotel Montreal, designed by Zébulon Perron. Jason says that the first time he walked in, he instantly felt like he was on vacation. “I felt like I was somewhere else, even though Leonard Cohen is right there,” he says, pointing to the Montreal artist’s towering mural that can be seen through the windows among the downtown skyline. The energy he describes as “festive” and that “everyone who walks through the door feels” is attributed to the renowned Chef Marcus Samuelsson, after whom the restaurant is named and whose right hand he has been working with for two years now. “Marcus is the essence of the celebration. He has incredible energy. I want to make sure I convey that spirit through the food, that my team has fun cooking, and that the customers feel it.”
From backstage to the world stage
Jason owes his career to the party. But not in the way you might think. There was a time when he was invited to a party, and rather than mingle with the guests, he would retreat to the kitchen to prepare whatever ingredients he could find. “As an introvert, it was a way to connect with people without having to talk to them,” he says. One thing led to another, and friends asked him if he wanted to take care of the food for the events they were hosting. That’s how he discovered the adrenaline of cooking for a large crowd and the satisfaction of getting the goods delivered. “It’s something you can’t get anywhere else. It’s very rewarding.”
Despite his rock star looks, the Montreal chef found himself in the spotlight against his will. “I was lucky enough to be surrounded by enough people to be successful,” he says humbly. That’s ignoring the virtuosity he displayed first as chef of Le Fantôme in Griffintown and then of Le Pastel in Old Montreal, where the menu fluctuated with his moods. Early in my career, I decided I didn’t want to just repeat the same dishes,” he says. “I wanted the opportunity to jazz it up, improvise and constantly change the menu.”
Like any good virtuoso, he first learned his trade by rubbing shoulders with some of the maestros of the culinary world. In the kitchens of Corton in New York, he learned attention to detail from two-Michelin-starred chef Paul Liebrandt. In Copenhagen, Sam Nutter and Victor Wågman, former sous-chefs at NOMA, and Bo Bech, one of the instigators of the new Nordic cuisine, showed him how to be bold with flavours. More recently, while in Tokyo, he split his time between the micro-restaurants of chefs Satoshi Furuta and Masamichi Amamoto (also Michelin-starred), who cook for no more than six or eight customers at a time. There, Jason perfected the art of sushi, which he puts into practice at MARCUS, where the menu focuses on the delights of the sea.
Facing the music
Today, Jason DeJordy-Morris leads a brigade of 36 cooks, overseeing three daily courses at MARCUS, as well as events at Four Seasons Hotel Montreal, which on some nights, means more than 300 mouths to feed. Would he prefer the role of conductor to that of jazzman? Jason counters that being a chef is not just about cooking. “You also have to run a restaurant, work out logistics, solve problems, be critical… Even if you are successful, there are always things to improve.” This never-ending performance is actually one of the aspects of his job that stimulates him the most. “I like to be driven by constraints,” he admits. With a large-scale restaurant like MARCUS, the chef is served. And, by his own admission, that’s why he accepted the challenge.
Despite the high standards of the establishment, he has not denied his “jazz side”. He sometimes serves his creations of the moment to regular customers or improvises menus for his employees. Although he considers himself a demanding chef, who imposes rigour, he wants to inspire a certain amount of risk-taking in his team: “the opportunity to play their instrument. What we call the kitchen battery,” he adds, deadpan. Above all, he gives himself the freedom to constantly evolve the menu. “We don’t just execute recipes. A dish we served a year ago won’t be quite the same. And if we’ve mastered it perfectly, that’s a sign that it’s time to change it.” As you can see, Jason DeJordy-Morris is not the type to follow a score. And what he composes at MARCUS is more like a symphony.
Written by violaine-charest-sigouin
Photography by Four Seasons Montréal
