Model Milk's Justin Leboe

AGE 38

HAILS FROM Vancouver, B.C.

BEST KNOWN AROUND TOWN FOR … being the wunderkind former executive chef at Rush restaurant.
 

EARNED HIS STRIPES AT … prestigious kitchens all around the world, including Accolade in Toronto and Daniel, French Laundry and Waterloo House in Bermuda. “I started washing dishes when I was 13 for Umberto Menghi in Vancouver,” he says. “The day I started, I watched the cooks on the line and knew that’s what I wanted to do.”
 

ON HIS NEW CALGARY RESTAURANT, MODEL MILK … “We’re borrowing the bistro style and keeping things flexible to change the menu daily,” he says. “I want it to feel like you’re at your friend’s house for a dinner party of 100 people every night.” Expect the atmosphere to be loud and the place to be open late. There’s even a Japanese wood smoker for slow-cooking meat on an open fire. “We’re  looking at a departure from the food style that we had at Rush. It’s a paring down of that to what’s essential, rather than the formality of it all. If we feel like smoking ribs for 12 hours, then we will.”
 

WHAT'S IN A NAME? The restaurant takes over space in the 1932 art deco Model Milk building, a former dairy. Milk bottles appear in reliefs on the outside. It was in operation until the 1960s, and even had a milk bar where you could get ice cream out front.
 

ON CALGARY'S CULINARY CLOUT … “Calgary is on the cusp of a really good food scene that the rest of the country has to take seriously,” he says. “People throw around the tagline of Portland [Oregon] because Portland has such a grassroots restaurant scene that is getting so much attention because it’s so anti-establishment, young and progressive. You look at the non-traditional restaurants opening in Calgary in the last year alone, it’s the same direction.”

Model Milk

308 17 Ave. S.W.

403-265-7343

modelmilk.ca