The smoker is at the heart of The Stockyards Smokehouse and Larder, but the life of the wood-fired beast began long before the St. Clair West, Toronto, restaurant opened in 2009.

There was a time when prospective employees went, cap in hand, to the back door of a restaurant to ask for work. But times have changed. A serious shortfall of staff in some parts of Canada — notably Calgary and Vancouver — is an issue, and, according to the Canadian Restaurant and Foodservices Association (CRFA), by 2015, some 35,000 staff positions will remain unfilled across the country.

Burgers and fries weren’t really new when Ray Croc catapulted McDonald’s into franchise history in 1953. In Canada, White Spot had been around since 1928, but it was the proliferation of those ubiquitous arches that enabled the QSR segment to make its fast, fat-filled way into the dining habits of the earliest baby boomers, changing the way dinner was viewed forever. It was cheap, quick, and everyone loved those fries.

The Subway story is one of American entrepreneurialism and whimsy. The chain that reaches from Singapore to San Francisco and Vancouver Island to St. John’s, N.L., began on a whim. A non-descript sub shop called Pete’s Super Submarines was opened in Bridgeport, Conn., in 1965 by high-school student Fred DeLuca, an aspiring doctor eager to earn money for medical school. The first store was funded by a $1,000 loan from family friend Peter Buck, a local nuclear physicist. Today, Doctor’s Associates Inc., (DAI) is based in Milford, Conn., and led by DeLuca, CEO.