Yacht-galley fine dining
Andrew Siebert
Fifteen years cooking in yacht galleys, brought ashore to Toronto dining rooms and scoring 4.82 doing it.
Picture a kitchen the length of a hallway, moving, somewhere off a coast, with eight people upstairs who have paid for the week and expect dinner to be seamless. Whatever the last port had is what there is. That was fifteen years of Andrew Siebert’s working life, and it is the whole explanation for how he behaves in a Toronto condo: fast, unbothered, and pathologically tidy.
Before the boats there was a Red Seal in Vancouver and a run of resort kitchens through the Caribbean and Central America. Ashore, the cooking is classical and unfussy — beef tenderloin on a potato pavé beside a butter-poached lobster tail, saddle of lamb with Dijon and rosemary, handmade wild-mushroom ravioli under black-truffle velouté, gelato churned at the table while the fondant goes out. He puts his own method at three words: passion, patience, playful. At 4.82 he outscores everyone else on the register, and the notes are unanimous about why — host after host says the evening left them feeling like a guest in their own house.
| Checked | Red Seal certification, Vancouver. Resort kitchens across the Caribbean and Central America. Fifteen years as a private-yacht chef, cooking for charter guests worldwide. Cooks a three-course card at C$175 and a four-course one at C$250. |
|---|---|
| Hired for | Easter and holiday menus, bachelorette parties, and the dinners given as a present — his notes are full of hosts whose children booked the evening for them. |
Two plates from Andrew’s own gallery, shot in service.
Straight off the card
Andrew’s cards, with the figure already on them
He took our Easter menu completely off my hands — resourceful, efficient, no direction needed — which meant I got to sit down and eat with my family. The food was outstanding and the dietary requests were handled without a fuss.
Ryan Y. of Toronto, who scored the night 5.0/5