Chef Michael Caballo plays from his own songbook, seeking inspiration from nature, his heritage and his travels.

Every line cook has experienced the unadulterated hell of kitchen service; it’s that moment when a routine service suddenly and dramatically ramps up. Orders are coming at you faster than you can process them, and you just can’t keep up. Your body takes on a huge whack of stress — the pressure to perform is immense. The need to recover is even greater. ‘Where did all these customers come from?’ you ask yourself, wishing you could vaporize every one of them immediately.

Instead of sitting home being “lazy,” 12-year-old Marc-André Jetté landed his first job as a dishwasher at Les Quatre Feuilles, a restaurant in Rougemont, Que., owned by his best friend’s father. He immediately fell in love with restaurant culture. “It was fun,” he says. “People who work in the restaurant business are passionate” — they work hard and like the fast life.

Singers aren’t the only ones who need a great voice; restaurateurs also have to strike the perfect tone.

“There’s a few restaurants that have a unique voice, and that’s really special,” says Michael Caballo, executive chef and co-owner of Toronto’s Edulis, whose voice was recently heard nationwide when his culinary home was named Canada’s Best New Restaurant in 2012 by EnRoute magazine. The honour was the realization of a dream. “That was the goal — to be included. To be number 1 wasn’t even really considered. It was a very, very pleasant surprise,” he says.