Andrew Dallman (l) and Cam Dobranski in Medium Rare Chef Apparel
Keeping chefs outfitted in the kitchen and out
The pristine chef whites of old-school French restaurants will always be sharp and respectable but today’s younger chefs are a bit more edgy and with open-concept kitchens they’re on display. So what’s a cook to wear if he’s getting tired of the regular whites? Time to check out Medium Rare Chef Apparel ( mediumrarechef.com ).
Cam Dobranski a Calgary chef and owner of Brasserie Kensington and Winebar Kensington first came up with the concept for Medium Rare just over a decade ago. “I wanted to do [the line] because I didn’t have many options with what to wear” he says. Initially Dobranski had a girlfriend whose mom sewed and made him some different things but when the girlfriend dumped him he had to look for other options.”
Shortly after starting up Dobranski brought on business partner Andrew Dallman. “We always wanted Medium Rare to be a successful business but we just didn’t know how. I’d always test out new designs on my friends or sometimes I’d wear something really off the wall so people would look at me and say ‘Oh that’s cool where did you get that?’”
The line first caught on locally where it is worn by restaurant teams at National Taste and Market as well as at Phil and Sebastian where baristas wear the cool custom denim apron with leather accents while pulling espresso shots behind the counter.
Although Medium Rare primarily appeals to the local restaurant community some local food enthusiasts also look to the product line to up their style in their home kitchens. For the more casual approach to cooking avid home chefs will like the line’s simple graphic T-shirts or mechanic shirt-style kitchen jackets.
These days the business is growing exponentially — Medium Rare is now outfitting restaurants across Canada in American cities like Pittsburgh and Chicago and across the ocean in Portugal Denmark and Spain. Medium Rare T-shirts and hats were also been worn by some of the final competitors on the most recent season of Top Chef Canada and even celebrity chefs like Chuck Hughes and Chris Cosentino have a few pieces in their closets.
Recently wd-50 one of the most talked about restaurants in New York City placed a large order with Medium Rare making them the only establishment in the American food mecca to wear the line. But in a city like that it’s only a matter of time before other restaurants follow suit.
So what’s next? This fall Medium Rare will be bringing out an exclusive line of stylish Mozo shoes which chefs can take from the kitchen to the streets and launching their Medium Rare chef team a lineup of talented chefs across North America working as ambassadors for the brand.
“Chef clothes will be chef clothes for the next hundred years. We’re just trying to revolutionize them a little bit” says Dobranski.
“We’re not trying to reinvent the wheel we’re just trying to give some other options. It’s not necessarily just chef clothes we’re selling it’s an attitude.”
