'Now I can dream': Matty Matheson on his journey to culinary stardom

When Matty Matheson was growing up on the East Coast (he was born in New Brunswick and later raised in Nova Scotia), his family rarely ate out in restaurants. Instead, they cooked every day.

"My mom used to mill her own grain, like, not even make her own bread," the Canadian chef and restaurateur says in a live on-stage interview with Q's Tom Power. "This bag of grain was cheaper than buying flour."

But there was one restaurant that Matheson's family spent a lot of time at during their summer and winter vacations: a diner called the Blue Goose, which his grandfather owned on P.E.I. "I think my love of restaurants maybe comes from the love of my grandfather," he says.

Today, Matheson is one of the best-known celebrity chefs in the world. Not only are his restaurants packed every night, but he's one of the executive producers of the Emmy-winning series The Bear, and he's just released his third bestselling cookbook, Soups, Salads, Sandwiches. But his journey to culinary stardom wasn't an easy one.

After his family moved to Fort Erie, Ont., Matheson started feeling indifferent about school and his future. He describes himself as a "very disgruntled youth" who often got in trouble, and who was only interested in partying and going to punk shows in Toronto.

"I wanted to be with freaks," he says. "I was an outsider kid in my town. I wasn't a farmer, and I wasn't an athlete, and I wasn't a jock, and I wasn't whatever it was. You know, I dyed my hair green and had nail polish and wanted to listen to White Zombie."

At 19, Matheson enrolled in Humber College's culinary arts program in Toronto, which is where he finally discovered his passion for cooking.

"Humber College was a thing that gave me self-esteem and self-confidence," he says. "I was able to cook and able to do something that I genuinely kind of liked…. I never had a natural ability — I wasn't good at science, I wasn't good at math, I wasn't good at recess or I wasn't good at gym class."

But after leaving college, Matheson still didn't have a big dream or ambition. "Now I can dream," he says. "But before, I was just working."

I was making a restaurant because I wanted to run a restaurant. I wanted my home.- Matty Matheson

He was 26 when he opened his first restaurant, Oddfellows, which became known for its food, but also had a reputation as a late-night, early-morning party spot in Toronto.

"[We were] a bunch of kids that didn't know what to do," he tells Power. "I was making a restaurant because I wanted to run a restaurant. I wanted my home. Like that's all it was, was a home. I was there 16 hours a day. You drink there, it's a place to hang out, it's a place to sleep sometimes, it's like a place for everything."

Every Sunday, Matheson would host "Taco Hell" at Oddfellows for his friends, where he'd give them all-you-can-eat tacos and booze for free. "[Oddfellows] only lasted two years," he says. "We were just paying to have my friends come…. I was always doing things without business plans. I'm a bit smarter now, that's for sure."

At his other restaurant, Parts & Labour, Matheson remembers giving away $10,000 worth of beer one week. "We're like, 'OK, but we made money.' And they're like, 'No, no, no, no, no. There's no money. We gave away $10,000 in beer that we can see.'"

Even after having a heart attack at 29, Matheson didn't stop partying. He didn't die, so he figured he could just keep going while hiding his drug addiction. His friends decided to hold an intervention for him.

"The next day I went to a meeting and, yeah, the miracle happened," he says. "I think I was genuinely at my spiritual bottom."

For Matheson, getting sober was the final step he needed to take to really catapult his career. He hosted his own culinary travel series on Viceland called Dead Set on Life, launched a YouTube channel that's racked up hundreds of millions of views, and has now branched out into acting and executive producing The Bear. 

"I think being accountable to yourself and being accountable to others around you and understanding your part in every relationship that's around you and just having mindfulness and openness and willingness to go forward in a way is a nice way to live," he says.

The full interview with Matty Matheson is available on our podcast, Q with Tom Power. He talks more about his work on The Bear and his latest cookbook, Soups, Salads, Sandwiches. Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

Interview with Matty Matheson produced by Lise Hosein.