Scott Iserhoff (Bernadette's, Edmonton): Cooking as Responsibility

Scott Iserhoff was a teenager in Timmins, Ontario when he saw David Wolfman on television. Wolfman was one of the only Indigenous chefs on Canadian TV at the time. When his mother asked what he wanted to do with his life, Iserhoff told her he would be a chef.

He enrolled at Fanshawe College's culinary program in London, Ontario. After a year of French technique and nothing else, he was bored. He wanted to cook venison, bison, duck. So he left, learned on the line instead, and picked up hospitality management through night classes. He later finished a degree at George Brown College in Toronto.

Fifteen Years, Then a Wall

What followed was a decade and a half of kitchen work, 10 of those years in downtown Toronto. Twelve-hour days. The grind that restaurant people know well: you love the craft, but the industry wears you down until you stop enjoying the cooking. That's where Iserhoff hit.

He looked west. Edmonton. A kitchen coordinator job. Not glamorous, but it was a reset.

The move wasn't random. Iserhoff is Mushkego Cree from Attawapiskat First Nation in northern Ontario. He grew up in South Porcupine, near Timmins, but his formative years were spent visiting Attawapiskat, 500 kilometres north, where his grandparents Louis and Bernadette Shisheesh taught him how food connects to land, to community, to identity. He watched his family build tipis, break down moose, distribute the meat through the community. Those experiences sat quietly in him through years of French technique and Toronto brunch services.

Edmonton brought them back to the surface.

Pei Pei Chei Ow: Seven Years of Groundwork

In 2017, Iserhoff founded Pei Pei Chei Ow. The name means "robin" in Omushkegowin, the Swampy Cree language of his people. His grandfather used to call him that as a kid.

The company wasn't a restaurant. It was a catering operation, an education platform, and a community hub. Cooking classes, youth programs, community dinners, cultural events. Iserhoff and his wife and business partner, Svitlana Kravchuk, built it deliberately: community first, then maybe a restaurant. They operated out of Whiskeyjack Art House, a collaborative space bringing together Indigenous food, art, and storytelling under one roof.

Kravchuk, who is Ukrainian from Boyarka in the Kyiv Region, handles the business side. The partnership blends two immigrant and Indigenous traditions into something neither could build alone.

By 2022, Western Living named Iserhoff a Foodie of the Year. Still no restaurant. Still catering, still teaching. The recognition validated what Pei Pei Chei Ow had been doing for five years: proving there was an audience for contemporary Indigenous cuisine in Edmonton, and building it one community dinner at a time.

Bernadette's: The Sit-Down

In May 2024, seven years after founding Pei Pei Chei Ow, Iserhoff and Kravchuk opened Bernadette's on 104th Street in downtown Edmonton. Thirty seats including a small patio. A seven-course tasting menu. Named after his grandmother, Bernadette Shisheesh, the woman who taught him that energy transfers into what you create.

The menu is described in three words: seasonal, traditional, political.

Seasonal and traditional are straightforward: elk, bison, Saskatoon berries, root vegetables, wild mushrooms, squash. The ingredients of the land around Edmonton, cooked with techniques that draw from both traditional and contemporary methods. The menu changes constantly because the seasons dictate what's available, a rewrite that costs something every time.

Political is the unexpected word. Iserhoff serves dishes made with SPAM. Not as a joke and not as nostalgia for its own sake. SPAM was one of the processed foods that became staples in remote Indigenous communities through government food programs that displaced traditional foodways. Serving it at a fine dining table is a deliberate choice: it opens a conversation about food insecurity, about colonialism's impact on Indigenous food systems, about what was lost and what's being reclaimed. Guests who try it tend to love it. Many get a wave of nostalgia they weren't expecting.

Four months after opening, Bernadette's landed on the Air Canada Best New Restaurants 2024 longlist. The restaurant holds a 4.8-star rating on OpenTable.

The Weight Nobody Talks About

There's a line Iserhoff has used in interviews that captures something most restaurant profiles skip over entirely. He has spoken about the pressure of knowing that if Bernadette's fails, people won't just see one restaurant closing. They'll generalize the failure to all Indigenous food businesses.

That pressure is real and specific. It's not the normal anxiety of running a restaurant, which is already significant. It's the knowledge that your success or failure carries more than your name. Iserhoff has said he and Kravchuk have to set the bar high and be consistent because the stakes extend beyond their own business.

This is worth sitting with. Most restaurateurs carry the weight of rent, payroll, reviews, reputation. Iserhoff carries all of that plus the knowledge that he's representing something larger than himself. Not by choice, exactly. By circumstance. Edmonton's first Indigenous fine dining restaurant doesn't get to be just another restaurant.

What Stands Out

Three patterns emerge from Iserhoff's path that other independents might recognize.

First, the long runway. Seven years of catering, education, and community building before opening a restaurant. That's not a delay. That's a strategy. By the time Bernadette's opened, the audience already existed. The brand was known. The relationships were in place. Most restaurant openings are cold starts, which sits near the top of the list of things that sink new restaurants. This one had seven years of warmth behind it.

Second, the burnout pivot. Fifteen years in kitchens, burning out because the cooking had lost its meaning. The move to Edmonton wasn't retreating from the industry. It was redirecting toward the thing that made cooking matter in the first place: connection to land, culture, community. The best pivots aren't away from something. They're toward something you forgot.

Third, the food as vehicle. Bernadette's isn't just a place to eat. It's a place that uses food to tell stories, start conversations, and challenge assumptions. That's an ambitious mandate for a 30-seat restaurant, and it's working.

Sources: Explore Edmonton, Western Living, Globe and Mail, CBC News, Taproot Edmonton, IAM Collective, Canada Culinary.

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