Every chef has his style and Jeff Suddaby’s blends traditional cooking with a health-oriented twist and a simple, less-is-more approach to recipes.

Suddaby is the host of Who’s Coming For Dinner? on TVTropolis and CanWest Global. He’s owner of the popular Huntsville restaurant Three Guys and a Stove, and is opening a new Three Guys and A Stove eatery at Blue Mountain Village.

If that’s not enough he’s also the author of two cookbooks and a new one is just hitting the bookstands. The book will be launched at Blue Mountain.

Suddaby was meeting local media Monday, as the crew from Generator Productions set up his TV kitchen in the Village Market.

Suddaby started cooking as a 12-year old, making bread at a Muskoka resort. He moved on to work in restaurants in Toronto, Guelph, and Muskoka before opening his own restaurant.

He started the cooking show eight years ago and the cookbooks were an outgrowth, a way to let viewers and fans have some of his favourite recipes.

The second Three Guys and A Stove is due to open by mid-November in the Village’s Mosaic building.

“With launching a store here, we thought it would be a great idea to do the show here,” he said.

Thirteen episodes of the show are being taped this week at the Village, with a live audience for each episode.

“The real emphasis for my show is balanced meals,” Suddaby said. That’s not a surprise, because his wife, Bev, is a registered dietitian. Knowing the importance of good nutrition. Suddaby has a dietitian on each episode of his program.

“In our society, our meals tend to be pretty protein-heavy,” he said. “We really push the all-round, well-balanced meals. All our menus make sure we’re covering one-third of what we’re supposed to intake based on Canada’s Food Guide.”

His dishes tend to be traditional items — food that’s been around for ages — but twisted around a bit to make them healthier.

“We want to try to eliminate some of the heavy fats, like butter and creams, that typically are pretty popular,” he said. “We can replace those flavours with other ingredients with lower fat.”

That’s the big challenge, because most people associate fat with flavour.

“We call it lifestyle cuisine,” he said. Blue Mountain is a natural location for his type of cooking because it attracts people who pursue an active, healthy lifestyle.

His restaurants serve a menu that is similar to the dishes from his shows and books. The menu is built around staple foods, and about half the dishes are either vegetarian or offer the option of including or excluding meat. Rice, pasta, meats, and lots of fresh fish are part of the typical Three Guys and A Stove menu.

Canadian cuisine is entering something of a golden age, and Suddaby is one of the chefs who is giving it an identity.

“You have to remember the history of those cuisines. Italian, French, Chinese — they all go back centuries,” he said. “We all like those.. Why take them away? But if we can add our own little twist to it, our style, that’s great. We’re just starting to define what our style is.”

The new generation of Canadian chefs are people who combine great passion for food with broad expertise and a lot of imagination, Suddaby said. They’re using all of those elements to experiment and find new dishes or new twists on traditional dishes.

“My family eats everything. Some things are good, some things are bad, and they let me know what they think,” he said. If a new dish passes his family’s inspection, it’s likely to wind up on the menu at Three Guys and A Stove.

“We end up with a lot of unique dishes that other restaurants don’t have,” he said.

So what defines a chef? To Suddaby, it’s more than knowing what ingredients to put together.

“What’s the difference? It’s all about this — if you have passion for food you can be taught to coo,” he said. ”Doesn’t matter if it’s for 200 people in a restaurant or two people at home. You gotta have that passion for food.”

If all you do is throw pre-cooked foods into the microwave, you probably don’t have that passion for cooking. But if you’re willing to take the time and effort to prepare foods from fresh ingredients, you’re probably a chef at heart.

Suddaby doesn’t think of cooking as work. To him, it’s fun, a way of expressing himself as well as providing all the good nutrition he and his family needs.

Besides, he says, sometimes the only time he gets with his family is the 45 minutes to an hour he spends in the kitchen preparing a meal. His wife and kids often gather with him, and they have a chance to talk while he’s working on dinner.

“It’s really the only time I get to see them,” he said. “It’s family time for us. We’re just hanging around in the kitchen putting dinner together. It’s a pleasure for us.”

Chefs, he said, run into the same stumbling blocks the rest of us meet. For example, you’re making a dish and it just hasn’t got the right flavour.

“Grits are an example,” he said. In the American south, it’s a matter of throwing on lots of butter, but most of his customers wouldn’t go for that. He’s had to work to find a way to serve this traditional food with a new twist that appeals to active, health-conscious diners.

Baked potatoes are another example. Most of us love to load them with butter, sour cream, bacon bits and so on. Suddaby, looking for a new twist, took his cue from the fast food industry. He was in a supermarket one day and took note of the number of potato chip flavours that exist.

“Why couldn’t you do the same for a baked potato?” he said. “I wanted to eliminate adding the high fat stuff. So take a baked potato, poke it full of holes, marinate it in cider vinegar, roll it in sea salt, and then bake it like you normally would. Now you’ve got a salt-and-vinegar baked potato.”

Such simple ideas are often behind Suddaby’s recipes. Like many chefs, he isn’t a real stickler for measuring ingredients. That’s one item on which his wife takes issue with him, he said. Being a dietitian, she’s careful about knowing how much of every ingredient goes into a meal.

“Recipes are just ideas,” he adds. Whoever is doing the cooking is welcome to put their own twist on it. “If you don’t like broccoli, take out the broccoli and put ina green vegetable you do like. You like pepper? Put in some extra pepper.”

Barry Marcus, the show’s producer, said he’s always wanted to tape some episodes here because he sees Blue Mountain as representing the type of lifestyle Suddaby’s cooking appeals to.

“Jeff’s amazing. He’s a chef’s chef,” Marcus said. “It’s all about the food and the people eating it. He’s not interested in producing something that look beautiful but no one wants to eat it. Healthy food for an active lifestyle -- that’s the show’s philosophy.“