From Eating Out Of India's Garbage To Feeding Toronto's Rich: Chef Sash Simpson's Success Story
Years before Sash Simpson led the kitchen at celebrity chef Mark McEwan’s legendary North 44, before he worked his way through the ranks from line cook to junior sous chef to executive chef, before he was on the cusp of opening his own high-end restaurant and wine bar at Yonge and Summerhill, Sash Simpson lived in a different universe.
He doesn’t remember much about his time growing up on the streets of Chennai, India, over 40 years ago. His memories are fuzzy, he says, like television static. He recalls that his mother had long, beautiful hair, and that his father was deaf and mute. He had an older brother and sister.
Somehow, when he was around four or five, he went astray. After that, it’s a blur of wandering, begging, stealing food and doing whatever he could to survive on his own on the streets.??
Sash's life in India
Four decades ago, he was a street kid in southern India, eating out of garbage bins behind restaurants in Chennai, a textile hub in the state of Tamil Nadu.
When he was around 8 years old, staff members of an orphanage noticed him begging at a bus station. He was living in a nearby movie theater, cleaning floors in return for a place to sleep. The orphanage workers persuaded him to come back with them, and that, in his telling, is when his life really began.
“People ask me if I have seen?Slumdog Millionaire,” Simpson says. “I’ve lived it. That was me,"??he was quoted as saying by a local publication in Canada, TRNTO.
He spent a few years there until Torontonian Sandra Simpson, who at the time ran the orphanage and others around the world?under the name Families for Children, adopted him.
From Chennai to Canada
Simpson grew up in a family of 32 siblings: Sandra’s four biological Canadian children, along with his 28 adopted sisters and brothers from Korea, Spain, India, Vietnam, China, Cambodia, and Bangladesh. The children shared the cooking at home with Simpson in the kitchen on Wednesdays making spaghetti.
“I always made so much that there was enough for seconds,” he recalls as per TRNTO report.?
Sandra had no intention of adopting another child, having already taken in plenty, but this tenacious little boy — who she calls Sashi — was difficult to ignore.?“Sashi persists in whatever he does,” Sandra says. “Every time I visited our Indian project, Sashi would be front row and centre asking, ‘Canada, mummy, please.’ ”
They lived in a 22-room mansion in Forest Hill, one of Toronto’s wealthiest neighborhoods, on loan from an investment banker and philanthropist. Sash got his first job delivering newspapers at age 12, so he could buy his own clothes, separate from the household’s communal pile.
At 14, he began working as a dishwasher at the restaurant where his older sister Melanie worked as a waitress.
"Bring my Indian roots here"? ?
With no culinary school training and no prestigious restaurants on his resume, he was turned away by North 44 twice. The final time he went to apply, Simpson made a deal. He’d work for free for three months just to prove himself, and if the boss didn’t like him, he’d leave. The team took to him after just a week.
“I have never forgotten where I came from,” he says. “We live in a diverse city and country—that’s what makes a difference in the flavours of cooking … But at the end of the day, I bring my Indian roots here.” That’s why you see dishes such as Chilean sea bass with Madras curry and Moroccan-style lamb lollipops with coconut cream curry on the menu. “I wasn’t raised in India, but I know I’m from there, and I want to learn about my roots, and this is my way of experimenting.”??
Hit by the pandemic
Simpson opened his own restaurant last year, with all the luxury touches he could never have imagined 45 years ago: valet car service; four kinds of caviar, and vodka served with gold-encrusted ice. However, he claims the timing was terrible.?
Toronto’s restaurants have been among the worst hit in North America, losing about 80 percent of the reservations they had received in 2019, according to data collected by OpenTable, an online restaurant-reservation service. They were shut for almost five months during the first wave of the coronavirus, and then after a two-month reprieve, ordered closed again on Oct. 10.?
Currently, Simpson is at work on his own restaurant, a 95-seat spot called Sash. Set to re-open after the pandemic, it will serve brunch, lunch and dinner — modern food with global infusion from France, Japan, Italy and India.
He gets wistful thinking about his previous existence and how far he’s come. He’s built a solid life for himself: he’s married, with a four-year-old son and another child on the way. He’s focused on moving forward, but that doesn’t mean he’s let go of his past completely.
“One day, when I have time on my hands to wander the streets, I’ll try to find my parents,” he says. “They don’t know I’m alive. I’ll do that run one day.”
