The mutiny at Buvette Daphnée

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It was about two hours before the acclaimed ByWard Market restaurant Buvette Daphnée was to open its doors on a Friday night in late May. Servers were mopping the floor and setting up tables to conform with the night’s reservations. Chefs were scrambling at their stations, trying to assemble the ingredients they needed for the upcoming service.

Unexpectedly, according to staff who were present, Dominique Dufour — the restaurant’s celebrated chef and part owner — wanted a server to be fired. What made her decision all the more surprising was the allegation that it wasn’t because of the server’s performance, but rather because Dufour wanted to hire the server’s boyfriend, a cook. Dufour had told staff that the restaurant’s upper management had a rule that couples couldn’t work together.

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Dufour reportedly delegated another employee to let the server know she would be phased out. But after that news was broken, the server demanded to discuss her firing directly with Dufour, then and there, in the cosy restaurant. When the server confronted Dufour, the chef denied wanting to fire her, staff said.

Chaos quickly ensued. The employee with the unenviable task of telling the server she was being fired then had it out with Dufour. She reportedly yelled at Dufour, calling her a liar and much worse.

“You can only berate and bully someone so much until they have their breaking point,” said one worker who was there of her co-worker’s tirade.

The staffer who blew up at Dufour walked out, refusing to work her shift that night. But she was not alone. According to witnesses, another worker spontaneously packed up and left, and then another.

Facing a mass walkout, Buvette Daphnée was forced to shut down before serving a single guest on what would have been a busy night with dozens of reservations on its books. Customers were called and, according to an employee, told that a burst pipe had caused the restaurant to close for the night. On its social media, the restaurant posted that night that its temporary closure was due to “technical difficulties.”

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The walkout at Buvette Daphnée, followed three days later by staff quitting en masse, appears to be the culmination of months of cresting, behind-the-scenes tensions at a restaurant that had enjoyed near-instant success after opening late last summer, and even kudos in mid-May this year from the prestigious Canada’s 100 Best Restaurants list. (This writer is a judge for that list, and included Buvette Daphnée on his ballot.)

According to separate interviews with six former staff members (both in the kitchen and customer-facing), Dufour led a chronically mismanaged restaurant. They say she singled out a few employees for verbal abuse, sometimes in full view of colleagues and customers. They say frustrations ran so high with what Dufour would decide to do — such as frequently change her menus and add new dishes — or not do — such as not having the required prep work done for the evening service — that the walkout was, to quote one kitchen worker, “inevitable.” (The interview subjects were granted anonymity out of their fear of losing future work opportunities in Ottawa’s tight-knit restaurant industry.)

“You always felt you were walking on eggshells with her. You didn’t know when she was going to explode,” said one worker. “She didn’t apologize for outbursts or reactions, you didn’t know what would set her off.”

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“The past couple of months, she’s been getting more manic and chaotic,” said another worker. “She just does things and I don’t think there’s any rhyme or reason for them. That was a big thing for a lot of people.

“Half of us have panic attacks almost every day,” that worker added.

You can only berate and bully someone so much until they have their breaking point

Employee

Two workers said Dufour treated them well and they commended her culinary creativity. But both workers said Dufour was not doing nearly enough to manage her kitchen, and as a result, its usual pressures were far out of hand.

“Treating staff improperly is not OK,” said one of those workers. “Managing poorly, which causes stress and anxiety every day at work because you’re not sure if you’ll make it and you’re not happy with the work you’re putting out, it’s not OK.”

Dufour, in an email statement, said: “It was hard to come to the realization that I had people being displeased in Buvette… I take full responsibility for not being the leader expected of me for my team and by my team.

“I did, in this moment, come to the realization that I did not have the tools necessary to fix all of the issues,” Dufour wrote. “I recognized that there was a communication breakdown, between myself and the staff, which I did not know how to navigate.”

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Dufour wrote that she is “stepping back” from the restaurant for health reasons and because she is six months pregnant with her second child. She did not answer a follow-up question asking for the specifics of “stepping back,” but said she is looking forward to watching Buvette Daphnée succeed with a “new team” going forward.

The workers said they’re coming forward because Dufour should be held to account, and because what happened at Buvette Daphnée is a cautionary tale about a dysfunctional workplace that should have been a great place to work.

“It was the best team in the worst environment,” said one worker.

“The most important thing to me is highlighting the importance of healthy restaurant environments so that this job can be a career with all the luxuries of a ‘normal’ job, but getting to do a job you’re passionate about,” said another worker. “In bad kitchens, you sacrifice well-being for passion, but I don’t believe that to be necessary in 2024.”

“If we want systemic change and we want this not to happen to anyone else, we have to speak,” said a third worker.

***

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Before Dufour appeared as a chef-testant on the 2020 season of Top Chef Canada, she described herself in a promotional video as “definitely a bit of a wild child.” In the video, she says she began her working life in the fashion industry but did restaurant jobs for “pocket money.

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“The only time I was ever happy was when I went to work at the restaurants and that’s how my career got started,” said Dufour, a Montrealer who went on to cook in kitchens in Vancouver, Yukon, Toronto and her hometown before she came to Ottawa in 2018.

She moved to Ottawa to open Norca, the restaurant at the Hotel Le Germain Ottawa, a then-new boutique hotel on Daly Avenue.

Within about a year, Dufour left the hotel and opened her restaurant Gray Jay Hospitality on Preston Street. Soon, she appeared on the hit Food Network Canada show, raising her profile nationally. Gray Jay moved to an Echo Drive location in the fall of 2021, but it closed on New Year’s Eve of 2022.

Dufour and Devon Bionda, her business and life partner, wrote in a message to this newspaper that Gray Jay closed “due to a perfect storm of circumstances,” which included the impact of COVID-19 lockdowns, silent partners cashing out their assets and impending and prolonged construction near the restaurant.

This writer gave positive reviews to Gray Jay at its two locations, and especially last fall to Buvette Daphnée, which brings to Ottawa the kind of food and hospitality that makes many Montreal wine bars special.

Another feather in Dufour’s cap is that she has been invited to cook this Sept. 25 at the 2024 Ottawa edition of Canada’s Great Kitchen Party, which sends its winner to the 2025 Canadian Culinary Championship in Ottawa.

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In her statement emailed to this newspaper, Dufour called the opening of Buvette Daphnée and its recognition on the Canada’s 100 Best Restaurants list “a great challenge, which has also unfortunately been compounded with many personal challenges.”

She said the workload involved in launching Buvette Daphnée just before Labour Day last year was so intense that, a month later, she suffered a miscarriage.

“Which wasn’t my first, either,” she added. “The restaurant industry being a physically demanding and seldom forgiving environment, it is a reality that a lot of us women who choose this path, have to contend with.”

At Buvette Daphnée, Dufour’s partners are chef Jordan Holley, the chef of the acclaimed restaurant Riviera on Sparks Street, and Todd Brown. Brown is the CEO of Ottawa Venues, a sprawling group of Ottawa restaurants and bars that includes Riviera, Datsun, two El Camino locations and a number of bars, mostly in the ByWard Market on York and Clarence streets. Buvette Daphnée, however, is not part of that group.

Hours after the May 31 walkout, Brown and Holley met with small groups of Buvette Daphnée employees to discuss the crisis. Brown and especially Holley “looked like they were disappointed with what they were hearing,” said one person who met with the two owners.

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Since earlier this year, the other owners were aware of staff complaints about Dufour. The co-owners had hired a coach for Dufour to help her become a better manager. But two employees said that the coach’s advice to Dufour fell on deaf ears.

“It had no impact,” a worker said. “I didn’t see her management skills increase. Nothing got better.”

Holley and Brown did not respond to an email request for comment. Two phone calls to Brown’s extension at Ottawa Venues went directly to a message that his voice mailbox had not been set up.

Dufour, in her statement, said she began counselling to help with both leadership and communication a few months ago.

“These are hard skills to acquire in a short amount of time and although I tried my best, I couldn’t change enough, fast enough,” she wrote.

One employee said Dufour said she was told by the coach that she needed to cook less and manage more. “‘I love cooking, I just want to be cooking and I don’t want to not cook,’” Dufour told the worker.

“I was shocked,” said the worker. “We were all screaming at (Dufour) to stop cooking, as in making new dishes. Like, just be a manager.”

That worker praised Dufour for her flavour combinations and unique techniques and for creating dishes that “pull people in.

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“Dom has personality in her food, for sure. People love personality,” the worker said. “Her dishes are fun and the food was always delicious.”

But in April, when the wine bar tried to open a sixth night, Sundays, for dinner, Dufour did not hire more staff to handle the extra workload. The result was that “we were hyper-stressed out, discouraged with the job and frustrated with Dom,” the worker said. “Everybody was burnt out.”

“Every service, it felt like we were drowning,” said another worker. “As soon as we opened six days a week, it was terrible, it was horrible. We were definitely understaffed. Dominique, she’s our chef, she should be working, covering for people who were off.”

Buvette Daphnée was open for only three Sundays before it had to scale back to five days a week.

Then on May 13, Canada’s 100 Best Restaurants smiled on Buvette Daphnée. Not only was the restaurant ranked 97th on the 2024 Canada’s 100 Best Restaurants list, but it was also eighth on the magazine’s list of 10 best new restaurants.

The accolades sent in hordes of new customers. One worker said Tuesday nights following the kudos could be two or three times as busy as usual, with as many as 90 customers rather than the usual 25 to 30.

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“We got significantly busier every single day and Dom made no adjustments to how things were organized,” said the worker. “She was doing nothing to make our lives easier, and consistently every day we were falling more and more behind.”

Two workers cited the example of Dufour in late May buying a massive piece of tuna that would need to be broken down for tuna tartare or a special item, when the restaurant was already buying cheaper, smaller pieces of tuna that would save prep time and money.

There were nights at Buvette Daphnée when nearly half of the items on the short menu were not available because the prep hadn’t been done, another worker said.

“It was so embarrassing. The quality of the food really went downhill when we started getting busier. The made-fresh bread started becoming left-over, day-old bread. The servers didn’t have enough support and customers were complaining, and things were taking too long,” said another worker. “It wasn’t the service of a ‘Canada’s 100 Best Restaurant.’”

In recent months, Dufour’s demeanour worsened, said one worker.

“You could see Dom becoming a little more aggressive with the staff, a little bit more snappy,” said the worker, who contended that Dufour favoured the back of house more than she did the front of house. “If there was a simple mistake in the front of house, she would get very angry.”

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Two employees, one server and one kitchen worker, came under constant verbal fire from Dufour, said several of their co-workers. Dufour “made (the server) cry until she was gasping for air,” another worker said.

One worker said Dufour doesn’t understand the impact of her actions and interactions with other staff. “She doesn’t get it,” the worker said. “I don’t think she realized she was frustrating people to that extent, and with specific people, really hurting them emotionally.”

In her statement, Dufour said that during her second trimester, she was “gripped by the anxiety of once again having to navigate how to reconcile my personal challenges and professional ones.”

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On Monday, June 3, nearly all of Buvette Daphnée’s 15 or so workers met at the restaurant with Brown and Holley, according to multiple people who attended the meeting. Dufour did not attend.

The day before, employees received a message from Holley on 7shifts, an app that links restaurant workers with their employers for scheduling and other purposes. Screenshots of the message, which were shared with this newspaper, read:

“Firstly, I would like to apologize for what transpired Friday. No one should ever be made to feel that way in the workplace, or anywhere for that matter.

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“Listening to you all individually really cemented the feeling that we have a very dynamic, professional, talented team at Buvette Daphnée.

“Todd and I would like to call a meeting Monday at 230, at the restaurant to discuss these matters further.

“I hope and look forward to working with you all, in what I promise will be a much more efficient, organized, fun, less stressful work environment. A work environment we can all be proud of and keep building on.”

The consensus was if Dom is involved in any capacity, there’s no way we can work with her and there’s no way we can make her any money

Employee

At the meeting, Brown and Holley proposed that staff return to work so that the restaurant could re-open for dinner the following day, on Tuesday, June 4. They proposed that Dufour would be removed from the kitchen, but would stay on the payroll as a “creative director,” working from home. Holley would become more involved at Buvette Daphnée and spend several nights a week in the wine bar’s kitchen.

But the split between Dufour and staff was such that the workers refused to return even if the chef left the kitchen.

“The consensus was if Dom is involved in any capacity, there’s no way we can work with her and there’s no way we can make her any money,” said one worker.

“The message was we don’t support her anymore,” another worker said. “To go back and work for her (while she was still with the restaurant in some capacity) doesn’t seem right either. I’m not going to support that.”

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Some workers felt that in keeping Dufour on the payroll, Brown was repeating what had happened in response to the crisis surrounding Ottawa chef Matthew Carmichael.

In October 2017, Carmichael, then the chef and part owner at Riviera, Datsun and two El Camino locations, admitted to sexually harassing three women with inappropriate comments, and that cocaine and alcohol abuse factored into his behaviour. Carmichael said he had removed himself from the operations of his restaurants for five months, but did not say he would be leaving them entirely.

“They’re just doing the same thing they did with Matt,” said one Buvette Daphnée worker.

In the end, nearly all of the Buvette Daphnée staff resigned, either at that meeting or later by email.

There has been no word on when the restaurant will reopen.

On June 7, one week after the walkout, the restaurant posted a story on Instagram that said it was seeking résumés for open jobs in both front of house and back of house. Buvette Daphnée would be “hiring all positions.”

phum@postmedia.com

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