How These Pickle-Loving Chefs are Putting Canada on the Map

The Noma fermentation lab is world-famous, the highest height one can reach as a pickle-loving chef. The past and current heads of the lab — David Zilber and Kevin Jeung — both hail from Canada, Toronto specifically, and that might be more than a mere coincidence. 

I am immensely fortunate for having grown up in Toronto,” says Zilber on the phone from Copenhagen. He ran the lab from 2016 to 2020 and co-authored the New York Times bestselling The Noma Guide to Fermentation with René Redzepi. “Pick any residential street in Scarborough or North York, and you’ll find people from 30 different cultures living on it. Get together for a barbecue and there’s everything from jerk to wontons to kimchi. That kind of thing helps to inform your palate.”

In 1981, Toronto’s population was made up of 13.6% visible minorities; by 2016, that number had gone up to 50% and informed the upbringings of chefs in the making like Zilber and Jeung. More than New York, more than Dubai, Toronto — the fourth-largest city in North America — is home to more than 230 nationalities with more than 140 languages spoken. 

Ironically, Zilber hated pickles as a kid, would pick them off his McDonald’s burger with distaste. His first real pickle experience was at 18, at his first kitchen job. 

“I started on garde manger,” he says. “We would make kimchi, but four-star fancy kimchi. Everything was julienned: the daikon, the cabbage, all of it.” In that same restaurant, he’d soon be pickling mushrooms and octopus. “Really wild flavors,” he says.

Jeung, who began working at the lab in 2019 and is its current director, also credits his hometown with expanding his palate. 

“Growing up in Toronto was a naturally occurring education of cuisines from around the world,” he says. “I had sushi, dim sum, roti, falafel, pho, and more at a very young age.” And he also had pickles: danmuji, jangajji, pickled ginger with sushi, hot-pink pickled turnip with shawarma, mango pickle with curries, and the various condiments that went into the hot pot at home, from preserved mustard greens to fermented bean paste. 

But it was diners — and a kosher dill — that first awakened Jeung’s pickle palate. “My grandfather was a chef at a diner in The Beaches,” he says. “He had an affinity for smoked tongue on rye.” After his grandfather had retired, the family would go to one in Willowdale regularly for a deli feast. “I tasted my first kosher dill at the Steeles Deli [there],” he says. “That was a turning point for me.”

So it was the world that first brought pickling to Canada, not the other way around. “Pickling is not something that has a genesis in Canadian culture,” says Jeung. “Pickling is a way of preserving produce, and that’s a worldwide thing. Canada’s advantage is that it can bring so many parts of the world together.”

And in Toronto, that bringing together doesn’t mean turning them into something else. This isn’t about fusion but about letting each cuisine shine, embraced by a dining public that demands that — a city of immigrants that is less a melting pot than a pickle pot. 

“I take my Swedish girlfriend to Canada, and she walks down an ethnic aisle of Loblaws [supermarket] and her mind melts,” says Zilber. “And that isn’t to say that Loblaws is particularly great, but the fact that they're stocked with all those things is a testament to the city and the clientele. I’m a much richer person for having grown up there.”

So the question isn’t, “How did two Torontonians end up running the world’s most famous pickle factory?” It’s more like, “Who better to do it?”