After being on the Island for only four months, the new executive chef at Waterloo House was thrown a curve ball when the lights went out on the morning of the Belco fire.

With the electricity out, newly arrived Canadian Justin LeBoe was left with $10,000 worth of food waiting to spoil in the hotel refrigerator and guests who still needed to be fed.

?They called me first thing in the morning and said, ?you better get down here?,? he said. ?Luckily, Coral Beach has generators so we just moved everything we had over to Coral Beach. You have to roll with the punches. There is not a lot you are able to do in that situation. We managed.

?We had gas stoves, but with no extractor fans it gets very hot. There were no lights in the kitchen. It felt like a 100 degrees outside and it would have been even hotter in the kitchen, if we?d tried to cook with no extractor fans and no lights. Do you really want to put chefs in there??

Luckily, there were contingency plans that had been set up after Hurricane Fabian struck a few years ago. Staff at Waterloo House handled the problem by setting up barbecues outside, and ferrying the guests who didn?t want barbecue to Coral Beach where the restaurant was in operation.

?I think Coral Beach needed the freezer space back right away because the next morning my stuff was back at Waterloo House at 7 a.m.,? Mr. LeBoe said. ?I didn?t even have to phone for it. They were really great. It was probably a drag to them to have to move a bunch of stuff, but they did.?

Mr. LeBoe is originally from Vancouver, but has travelled all over the world cooking in top restaurants. Most recently, he worked at the prestigious Peninsula Hotel in Beverly Hills, California.

At the Peninsula he was working 14 hours a day, six days a week. He decided he wanted to work somewhere that would bring more balance to his life.

?This is my first executive chef position,? he said. ?I was a sous chef five years prior to this. Bermuda seemed like a great place to fulfil all of the requirements of what I was looking for. I decided that in my next job I would commit myself to the same level of cooking, but I wanted there to be more balance in my life.?

He said Beverly Hills was much more pretentious than Bermuda.

?It was great,? he said. ?There are so many things that you get to see and experience as a chef that you are not going to see anywhere else.

?Bermuda is not a pretentious place to the level that that was. You do get to meet celebrities, but you realise very quickly that they are the low man on the totem pole, so to speak. It is the executives, agents and producers who wield the power. Unless you are one of the ten actors on the A list, you have to hustle if you want to work in the industry. It is the people who control the money in the studio who have the power.?

In addition to California, he has also worked in Washington DC, New York City, Toronto and Australia.

In Virginia, he adopted a Weimaraner dog who has now crossed the continent with him several times. At home, the dog enjoys sampling Mr. LeBoe?s creations when his back is turned.

?A new goal of mine is to make myself more internationally recognisable,? Mr. LeBoe said. ?For a lot of people is the goal, executive chef of a boutique hotel. I am still very young, 32. I think for me, there are places that I want to go and things I want to do in terms of food and beverage.?

One of Mr. LeBoe?s goals at Waterloo House is to heighten the restaurant?s individuality and profile in the community.

?For me, the whole thing hinges on whether you can create an individual identity for a restaurant,? he said.

?You don?t want the restaurant to be so far out there that people will be intimidated by the food, or have to figure out what they are eating.

?The idea is that you can walk into a room and know that you are only in one spot. The atmosphere matches that. Any of the truly great restaurants in North America are entirely unique.?

He said he doesn?t want to follow the crowd in terms of what other restaurants are doing, he wants to create something that has some integrity and honesty to it.

Mr. LeBoe first started working in restaurant kitchens when he was just a kid.

?I started washing dishes when I was 13,? he said. ?When they found out I was 13 they sent me home because they were breaking child labour laws. They told me to come back to work when I was 14. They marched me into the dish room, and I walked by the cooks, and they were flipping pancakes. I was mesmerised and I knew that was what I wanted to do. I was pretty lucky.?

Mr. LeBoe had a few second thoughts at the age of 18, when one jaded chef he worked for questioned why he wanted to spend the rest of his life in a stuffy kitchen.

?Maybe he was just burnt out from the whole thing,? said Mr. LeBoe. ?I started thinking, ?I?m 18. What do I know???

After that he went to Simon Fraser University and studied political science and philosophy. He paid his way through college by working in kitchens. When he graduated, he was sure that cooking really was what he wanted to do with the rest of his life.

?When I came out of school, I was lucky enough that I already had all those years of experience,? he said. ?I knew how to make stocks; I knew how to make sauces. I had already had a kind of apprenticeship. I wasn?t green to it.

?I got very very lucky with some of the chefs I got to work for. It was a letter writing campaign in terms of some of the chefs. It was banging on kitchen doors and asking for a job. I was very fortunate.?

He said studying political science and philosophy was not in vain. Philosophy taught him how to think out of the box.

?I spent four years constructing and reconstructing arguments,? he said. ?You learn how to think laterally rather than linearly. It was four years of training in how to think. That helps me in the kitchen, not thinking so much about what you are cooking, but how you are cooking it.?

He most loves to cook fish and bread, although he has little time for pastry making.

?I am a typical chef in that I say no to pastries,? he said.

?Most chefs don?t have time for it. It takes a certain breed. Had I done it again I would probably be a pastry chef, mostly because there are so few of them they can pretty much demand what they want.

?It is difficult to say any one thing in terms of my favourite thing to cook.

?Cooking fish is the most rewarding thing, simply because it is so delicate. If it is 30 seconds on one side it is too raw and 30 seconds on the other side and it is overdone. With other things you have more leeway and leniency. This demands a little bit more technical precision.?

Unfortunately, he came to Bermuda too late to become involved in this year?s Culinary Arts Festival which includes cooking competitions between local chefs.

?I worked for a chef in Canada who represented Canada at the Bocuse D?Or in 1999,? he said.

?I was an apprenticeship for him during that period. He won the jury prize for meat. I went through that whole experience with him. I am more about making the guests happy.?

Mr. LeBoe has been visiting Bermuda for four years, and even came to last year?s Culinary Arts Festival.

?It is great to wake up in Bermuda every morning,? he said.

?I think that Bermuda is on the cusp. In terms of food quality, when I started coming here four years ago to now, there has been a marked improvement.

?We have made some progress, but I think that there is still a ways to go. I would like to see lots of things improve.?

He said any changes that he makes at Waterloo House will happen slowly.

?You don?t want to bite off too much too soon,? he said. ?I don?t want to have cooks in the kitchen who are lost or frustrated. You don?t get anything out of people when they are negative, down or tired. It is going to be gradual. It will be more like turning things around with a paddle. You will get there slowly. I don?t think it is fair to the reputation of the house or the cooks who have been there. It takes three to five years to build a great reputation for a restaurant.?

He said at his age he is only just beginning to understand the nature of patience.

?It is going to be an ongoing process of hiring and team building,? he said. ?It is all about the team that you have. I have seen lots of things in the kitchen that involve technical ability. If I can?t pass that on, because someone doesn?t know how to cook, then I am not going to be successful. That sort of training isn?t something that can happen drastically overnight.?

He said he is pretty happy with all the dishes at Waterloo House, although he will be working to add new things.

?We are working on a new crab dish as a starter,? he said. ?I am pretty excited about that. We ran it last week as the special and we couldn?t keep it in the house.?