Stratford Chefs School partners with The Prune Restaurant to offer new dining and learning experience

The Stratford Chefs School and The Prune Restaurant are reimagining their longstanding partnership with a new dining and educational venture called The Prune @ Stratford Chefs School that will be operating out of the chefs school kitchen and dining room in downtown Stratford this summer.

The partnership between the two Stratford staples goes back to the very roots of the Stratford Chefs School, which was founded by Eleanor Kane, the co-owner of The Old Prune Restaurant, which, along with Rundles Restaurant, provided cooking facilities and dining-room experience for the school’s culinary students. Nearly six years ago, the chefs school received a $500,000 from the city loan to establish its permanent downtown dining room and kitchen space at 136 Ontario Street that continues to be used for teaching and offers students dining-room experience.

“We identified as a strategic priority that we have to have dining-room experience for our summer students,” board member David Stones said. “We have a level-one summer program offered to students and we’ve offered it here for the last five summers, however that particular cadre of students does not get dining-room experience.”

While the chefs school offers what it calls lab dinners as part of its fall-winter program to give students the chance to experience what it’s like to work in a four or five-star restaurant, there has traditionally been no such opportunities for the summer students , making it somewhat difficult to recruit for that particular time of year.

As the chefs school board was determining how it could incorporate dining-room experience into its summer program, Bill and Shelley Windsor, owners of Windsor Hospitality, the company that owns and operates The Prune Restaurant and several others, approached the school with a unique opportunity that could benefit both parties.

“Our single-biggest crisis in tourism right now is staffing,” Shelley Windsor said. “To drill down even further, it’s kitchen staffing. So how do we think outside of the box to attract more people into this industry? … The chefs school has always been sort of a leading source of our employment, so how do we keep students in Stratford instead of going to Toronto, to Vancouver, to Montreal for their summer jobs?”

While pondering that question, the team at The Prune was also considering whether they would even open for this summer season. With a reconstruction project by the city slated for Albert Street, where The Prune is currently located, and with the restaurant industry still reeling from the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, Shelley said there was a real question around whether the restaurant could remain financially viable after all of its overhead costs, which, among other things, would have included necessary accessibility upgrades to the building.

“So we thought, ‘Ok, it’s kind of the nail in the coffin,’ ” Shelley Windsor said. “But then we started chatting and we started affectionately reminiscing on our previous relationship with the chefs school and how great it was that we worked as a sort of yin and yang. Their off season was our on and vice versa. So we started thinking, ‘Why couldn’t that exist again? Is this a crazy idea.’ ”

And while the verdict is still out on that question, both the team at The Prune and the chefs school have decided to give it a go, and The Prune owners have listed the restaurant’s previous home on Albert Street for sale. The Prune @ Stratford Chefs School will operate on a partial sub-lease basis out of the school’s dining room from June 1 to Sept. 30 this year. Led by members of The Prune culinary team and staff from The Prune and other Windsor Hospitality restaurants, Shelley Windsor said she will hire students from the chefs school to work in the kitchen, giving them that ever-valuable, real-world experience they need to get the most of their training.

While The Prune @ Stratford Chefs School will only be able to seat roughly 50 guests at a time, roughly half of its previous capacity on Albert Street, Shelley Windsor says the restaurant will remain committed to providing a top-quality dining experience for the city’s visitors and locals alike.

“Despite the fact that we’re reducing our seats, we still want to provide a quality experience to the customer, and we believe there’s a demand for it,” she said.

“This arrangement builds on a very longstanding alliance between the two organizations,” Stones said. ” … This really builds on a lot of give and take between the two organizations and capitalizes on the fact that we know each other, we trust each other and want to continue to work together.”

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