Chris Gama (Clementine, Baby Baby): Brunch Worth Taking Seriously
When Chris Gama walked into Green Gates restaurant as a teenager looking for work, he showed up in his Sunday best. His resume listed babysitting as experience. The chef who hired him remembered the look on his face years later. That kid started washing dishes.
There was no culinary school epiphany, no family restaurant, no cooking-obsessed childhood. Just a teenager who wanted a job and ended up staying in the kitchen. From Green Gates he moved to line cook, then got a call from chef Tristan Foucault to sous-chef the opening of Oui Bistro (now Peasant Cookery), where he spent five years. While working at Segovia, he pursued a food science degree. He co-founded a pop-up dinner series called Table Manners with friends, one-night events he described as "like opening a restaurant every time."
The path was built shift by shift. Not degree by degree.
Five-star cooking on a $13 plate
All four of Clementine's founders had spent time in Melbourne. Australian breakfast culture showed them what the meal could be: ambitious, technical, a proper dining experience. Winnipeg had nothing like it.
In February 2016, they opened Clementine in a basement on Princess Street in the Exchange District. Gama ran the kitchen alongside co-owners Carolina and Raya Konrad and Adam Donnelly (of Segovia). The projections were wrong on day one. They needed double the kitchen capacity within the first month. It took two years of sales data before anyone believed the numbers weren't slowing down.
What Gama did with brunch was apply fine-dining technique to ingredients nobody takes seriously. Bacon gets an overnight sous-vide before being fried in maple glaze. Potatoes go through a three-step cooking process. Duck chilaquiles, mushroom curry toast, smoked Arctic char on crispy potato cakes. Every flavour profile pulled from somewhere across the globe, landed on plates that won't break anyone's budget.
The pricing was deliberate. Gama excludes luxury ingredients on purpose. No foie gras, no lobster. "Great ingredients, but not expensive ones," as Peguru put it. The technique is five-star; the access is democratic. That's not a constraint. It's a philosophy.
Dan Clapson asked the question in The Globe and Mail in 2018: can a brunch restaurant be considered one of the country's best? Six years later, Canada's 100 Best answered it. Clementine landed at #74 in 2024. The only brunch-only restaurant on the list.
Better guest experience. Bigger nights. $299. Once.
The metric that matters
Ask Gama about his greatest fulfilment as a chef-owner and you don't get an answer about food. You get this: "If the staff are happy, it's going to translate to the table."
He's also pushed back on the word "chef" itself. He told Peguru he doesn't like the term because it's strayed too far from what it should mean: "a leader, mentor, manager, and really great cook." Not a celebrity. Not a brand. Someone who runs a kitchen and takes care of the people in it.
That philosophy shows up in how Clementine operates. The kitchen runs on empowerment, not hierarchy. The consistency that earned national recognition wasn't built on a star chef performing at the pass. It was built on a team that stays because they want to be there.
Surviving the split
Clementine started as a four-way partnership connected to Segovia, Winnipeg's most celebrated restaurant at the time. In 2020, Segovia closed permanently. Adam Donnelly left to start a sourdough company. Carolina Konrad went her own way. The founding team that had built something together fractured.
Gama and Raya Konrad kept going. No rebrand, no drama. They had a restaurant that needed to serve breakfast the next morning, so that's what they did. The partnership became a duo. Clementine kept cooking.
That same year brought the pandemic's absurdities. Gama and Konrad posted an Instagram photo advertising bottled cocktails. They deleted it after 20 minutes when a colleague pointed out it was against regulations. A liquor inspector showed up within two hours. No cocktails were sold. They questioned the enforcement priorities. They went back to serving brunch.
The second restaurant
In March 2025, Gama and Konrad opened Baby Baby at 137 Osborne Street, in Osborne Village. Dinner service. Walk-in only. A 90s aesthetic the Meetings Winnipeg blog described as "Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness." Everything different from Clementine except the principles.
The kitchen isn't Gama's to run alone anymore. Executive chefs Daly Gyles and Nick Gladu, with experience from London and Vancouver, lead the line. The menu reads simple (small, medium, large) but Peguru's review called it "complex cooking dialed up with confidence" under a deliberately understated structure. Pickerel beignets with fermented plum. Scallop XO noodles. Whole sea bass over passionfruit beurre blanc.
Baby Baby made the Air Canada Best New Restaurants 2025 finalist list within six months of opening.
What other owners can take from this
Gama's path carries a few patterns worth sitting with. He didn't wait for credentials to start. He worked kitchens for years before anyone knew his name, and the work taught him more than any degree would have. He applied serious technique to a category everyone else treated as casual, and proved the category could compete nationally. He prices his food accessibly not because he has to, but because he believes he should.
And when the founding team he'd built with fell apart, he didn't blow it up or start over. He kept the thing running and eventually built something new alongside it.
His Instagram bio gets it right. Favourite things? "Breakfast? Family. Family, right. I thought you meant of the things you eat."
Sources: Peguru, The Globe and Mail, Canada's 100 Best, CBC, Tourism Winnipeg, Eat North, Peguru Baby Baby review.