It’s 6:30 p.m. on a Sunday and Armaan is in his element: standing in a kitchen, bouncing between a grill and a stove and a deep fryer, assembling a meal for hungry customers.
Nothing else about the last month has been normal. Not the flaming mountainsides as he fled Clinton, not the living arrangements, not the work locations or the general uncertainty. Armaan spent a year learning to cook in one of Toronto’s fanciest restaurants. Now he’s stirring sauces in a trailer parked at an elementary school overlooking a smoky little town.
Armaan ladles gravy into a container, steams a mix of vegetables, checks a deep fryer. The temperature has dipped to 30 C. It’s considerably hotter inside the trailer, which Armaan is sharing with another cook. A helicopter carrying a bucket rattles overhead. In the distance, a large plume is visible.
In the parking lot, two dozen firefighters wait. Their day done, they squat beside the road, scrolling phones; lounge in pickup trucks, arms draped through open windows; chat with Armaan’s boss, Manmeet Sra, as he prepares containers and positions sauces.
Then the food is done, handed to Sra through the trailer’s window, placed on the plastic table, scooped up by firefighters, toted to the trucks, shovelled into mouths. The rush over, trucks depart, though others will arrive over the coming hours. Inside the trailer, Armaan keeps cooking.
Welcome to Clinton
Armaan — he doesn’t have a last name and sometimes just writes “N/A” on documents — grew up in Ambala, a modest city north of Delhi. As a child, he learned to cook curries with his mother. By his early teens, he realized he wanted to do it for a living. He found a respected two-year program at Toronto’s George Brown Polytechnic, got the green light from his hesitant parents, moved to Ontario at the age of 18, got a part-time job and was on his way.
Four years later, Armaan, now 22, sits on a bench overlooking Lillooet and talks about his life with a faint accent, a warm smile and what amounts to a shrug.
He talks about his ambitions, his love of cooking, his journey to this parking lot and his future with the same reserved, optimistic, unexcitable tone.
“I love being in the kitchen,” he says simply. “I like the thrill. I like serving people.”
Photo for The Tyee by Tyler Olsen.
During culinary school, Armaan worked part time and as an intern at Oliver & Bonacini, a Toronto-based group of fancy restaurants. After graduation, he headed north and worked seasonally in the kitchen of a golf club in Ontario’s Muskoka tourist region. Last summer, he saw an online ad for a sous-chef position at the Cariboo Lodge, a hotel and restaurant in Clinton, B.C.
Armaan has a work visa, and a full-time job in a small town would help him stay in the country and progress toward achieving permanent status. So he packed his bags and knives and headed west.
Armaan was used to the lights and bustle of downtown Toronto. Clinton, about 120 kilometres northwest of Kamloops, has no stoplights and about 600 residents.
“From fast life, I was into slow life,” he says. “But it was pretty nice.”
Among the first things he did when he arrived was visit each of the half-dozen restaurants and cafés in town and try their food. Mexican. Chinese. Whatever.
“I wanna learn. I’m curious about the food,” he says.
After a few months, he moved into an RV trailer in a mobile home park. He had no friends his age, but Armaan didn’t complain. He saw potential in the small town.
“People are really nice and everyone knows each other,” he says. “If you do good things, you’re in their good books and appreciated. So that’s what I was working on.”
And the kitchen offered connections. When Becky Spreng, a longtime Clinton-area resident, was hired as a server, she immediately took a liking to the restaurant’s young chef.
“He was so friendly,” she says. “We’d just sit there and have good laughs all day, every day.”
Photo courtesy of Becky Spreng.
Armaan showed Spreng photos of dishes he cooked in Toronto; she tried to imagine going from that to cooking burgers in Clinton.
The fire comes
In July, the air grew increasingly smoky as two fires west of town chomped their way through dense forests. Clinton’s population swelled with firefighters. Semis hauled backhoes through town. Forests Ministry pickup trucks became ubiquitous. The wind picked up, the sky grew dark, and suddenly it was time to go.
On the other side of the globe, his mother didn’t know about any of this. As young people throughout history had done, he had kept his parents in the dark.
“I have to think about them, too, because they know I’m here by myself,” he says, much later.
Armaan didn’t have a vehicle. The mountains were on fire in front of him and behind him. But he did have his friend and co-worker Becky Spreng. Around 9 p.m., Spreng pulled up to the side of the highway with her husband and kids. Armaan piled in and they fled with no idea what the future held for Clinton, their homes and their lives.
A chef’s duty
Those living close to a wildfire will sometimes say it feels like a war zone. A wildfire battle is not war, thankfully. But there are parallels — the constant rattle of choppers, the long gazes at the distant hills, the uncertainty of what the future holds, the arrival of large bands of young men and women and massive logistical efforts to support the fight.
As the threat to Clinton escalated, upwards of 500 firefighters arrived. They brought their own tents but still needed food. The BC Wildfire Service’s crews relied on local restaurants during the initial stage of the fight to save Clinton, with the Stagecoach Café — with support from the Cariboo Lodge — cranking out hundreds of meals before the evacuation.
The evacuation of Clinton forced the BC Wildfire Service to relocate its camp to the north. Soon after, Manmeet Sra got a call from the service, which needed a company to feed its crews while it organized food services.
Eight years ago, Sra left his job with Enterprise, the car rental company, and opened a pizza place in Kamloops with his wife, Simran. It was enough of a success that the couple was asked to serve food at events. Eventually tents turned into a trailer, branded Hungryysh, that caters events in the area. The business has continued to expand, and this year Sra connected with the BC Wildfire Service to provide catering services if needed.
Photo for The Tyee by Tyler Olsen.
Around 8 a.m. on a Sunday in late July, Sra’s phone rang. Could he feed some fire crews? Sra, already preparing for an event that day, asked when and how many.
“Tonight,” he was told. They needed dinner for 270 firefighters. The next day, they would need breakfast, lunch and dinner for even more people.
“We only had a couple hours to make the preparations and to see if we could actually do it,” he said.
Sra started calling around, checking his own supplies — he says they always carry enough food to make 500 meals — and heard the Cariboo Lodge might still have some food they could use. He also learned a couple of its workers might be able to help.
Return of the cook
Armaan had fled to Cache Creek and was living with Becky’s family — and cooking dinners each night — when he got the call. The next thing he knew, Armaan was heading back to Clinton, which was still under an evacuation order.
The following days were a blur. Armaan and his colleagues would wake up every day around 4 a.m., head to the Hungryysh food truck in the middle of town and start working. As firefighters poured into the area to battle the flames, more and more meals needed to be cooked. Within a couple of days the crew was cooking 450 breakfasts, 450 lunches and 450 dinners. They would finish after midnight, briefly sleep, then do it all again.
It sounds exhausting. Armaan acknowledges it was difficult but downplays the effort.
“It was for the firefighters,” he says. “My role is really small, to be honest. It’s the least I can do for these guys because they’re going out. We’re just there at their camp, which is safe, and they’re trying their best to keep the town safe.”
On to the next fire
After four days, the BC Wildfire Service had set up a camp kitchen and the contract ended. But Armaan’s fire journey has continued.
When Clinton residents returned to their homes last weekend, Armaan was two hours away in Lillooet, where Hungryysh had been contracted to feed 110 firefighters tasked with trying to stop several fires in the area, including one just south of town.
“It’s pretty easy because we’re only doing 110 people every day,” he says.
Photo for The Tyee by Tyler Olsen.
The contract ended Sunday night. The fire crews had largely done their job, holding the line on the Riley Creek fire and stopping it from encroaching on Lillooet (and this reporter’s home). As they pulled away, a horn tooted its appreciation and the firefighters waved and yelled, “Thanks.”
Sra, the boss, waved back.
“When you do business for a good cause, it makes us more humble,” he says. “We feel we achieved something.”
For Armaan, the fires that upended his life also brought new opportunities.
The situation in Clinton left him uncertain about the future and his old job, which was critical to ensure his visa extension next year. With Armaan having proven himself, Sra has offered him a job in Kamloops and support to keep him cooking in Canada.
Armaan is set to leave Clinton behind, though his former co-worker, Spreng, hopes she won’t have seen the last of him. She says her family has adopted the chef.
“He does not have a choice,” she says. “We are his Canadian family now.”
Armaan, for his part, has his eyes focused on the future.
A lover of pasta and Italian food, he dreams of one day having his own vegetarian restaurant offering Italian-Indian fusion cuisine. He is also eyeing more schooling.
“I want to work myself to the top, but sometimes you have to take a step back.” ![[Tyee]](https://thetyee.ca/design-article.thetyee.ca/ui/img/yellowblob.png){kind=small}
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