sweet talker
By Kathleen Sloan-McIntosh
Heading up the walkway to the beautiful old house where Anna Olson lives, I
can’t help but think how much it resembles a giant iced cake. How
absolutely apropos that Anna Olson, the preeminent baker of pastries and
desserts, should live here; what could be more fitting for the woman who
has worked hard to make her name synonymous with cakes, pastries, and
all manner of sweet things? Anna comes to the door with her trademark
smile and two doting beagles competing for space at her feet. The sweet
aroma of fresh-baked peach muffins cooling near an open kitchen window
is in the air. As we sit in her kitchen and talk about her career, her
marriage to fellow chef Michael Olson, and their life together, it is
clear that, while she didn’t start out to be a chef, Anna Olson is
pursuing a sweet and very personal passion with determination and
conviction.
Anna was born in American peach country, Atlanta, Georgia. Her family moved to Toronto when she was six and that is the city where she grew up. “Dad was a university professor so it was just expected that I would go to university and I did, studying political science at Queen’s in Kingston. For a while I thought about law, but then it was pointed out to me that I wouldn’t really make a very good lawyer because I have this tendency to believe everything people tell me,” she says with a laugh. “So I spent three years in the banking industry in downtown Toronto. Around mid-day when all my colleagues were waiting for the housing index figures to be released, I headed to the St. Lawrence Market—I could see it from my office window.”
It soon became clear that the pursuit and preparation of good food was becoming more and more important to the young woman. “One night I couldn’t sleep and got up and headed to the kitchen to bake muffins, something I did on a regular basis. Then it hit me; I realized this is what I should be doing with my life, this is what I wanted.”
Anna chose the culinary program at Colorado’s Johnson & Wales University and spent a rigorous eighteen months there before graduating and travelling around the U.S. “I was interested in learning the American perspective and was trying to decide between working in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, or New Orleans.”
Anna decided on New Orleans but before she left home, her parents took her to what was to become an important dinner at a new place in Niagara called On the Twenty. Though she clearly didn’t know it at the time, she was about to meet her professional and personal future head on. >>
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Photo by Sheryl Thornton