The People Behind the Yukon's Food Scene

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The Yukon's food scene is smaller than most, but the people behind it are doing genuinely unusual, well-recognized things. Here are five of them.

Chef Michael Bock and Air North's Flight Kitchen

Michael Bock is Air North's long-time Catering and Cabin Services Manager, and under him the airline's in-house Flight Kitchen prepares more than 200,000 fresh meals a year out of its Whitehorse facility, working regional ingredients like elk, bison, and wild low-bush cranberries into what passengers eat onboard. He's also behind the airline's well-known warm cabin cookies and cheesecakes. The concept grew popular enough that Air North now retails frozen versions of its meals through Whitehorse grocery stores, and Bock's team went on to open Black Wolf Bistro at Erik Nielsen Whitehorse International Airport, bringing full food service back to the terminal.

Michele Genest and the boreal kitchen

Michele Genest has lived in Whitehorse since 1994, when she moved north from Toronto, and has spent more than 25 years writing about food, including a stint as dining editor of enRoute Magazine and a regular column called the Boreal Chef for Yukon, North of Ordinary magazine. Her two cookbooks, The Boreal Gourmet (2010, winner of a Canadian Culinary Book Award) and The Boreal Feast (2014), built her national reputation for cooking with wild and foraged boreal ingredients, moose, Arctic char, spruce grouse, mushrooms, and berries among them. Her most recent project, Vadzaih: Cooking Caribou from Antler to Hoof, was done in collaboration with community cooks in Old Crow, the Vuntut Gwitchin Government, and the Porcupine Caribou Management Board, connecting her work directly to the same Porcupine caribou herd and community central to Old Crow's own story.

Chef Chris Irving and the Yukon Chef Collective

Chris Irving is a Whitehorse chef whose resume spans Switzerland, Tofino, Vancouver, Hong Kong, Mexico City, and New York, and he's set to appear as a competitor on Top Chef Canada's tenth season, premiering September 26, 2026. He's also the founder of the Yukon Chef Collective, which he started in 2020 during the early pandemic: a volunteer group of local chefs who cooked and delivered several hundred meals a week to the Whitehorse Food Bank using donated ingredients, born out of Irving's own delayed business launch that year. The Collective grew directly out of Well Bread Culinary Centre, the territory's private cooking school run by Cat McInroy, where Irving had been teaching classes.

Well Bread Culinary Centre

Cat McInroy's Well Bread Culinary Centre is the Yukon's own licensed cooking school, running hands-on classes for home cooks in Whitehorse. It's also where the Yukon Chef Collective's earliest meals were cooked, McInroy's teaching kitchen sat empty during the pandemic's early closures and became the Collective's first production space.

Yukon Bunsik

Run by a Korean couple in Whitehorse, Yukon Bunsik serves authentic, from-scratch Korean dishes, house-made kimchi, dumplings, and even their own soy sauce, in a small, well-reviewed spot locals consistently point newcomers toward for something genuinely different from the rest of the city's food scene.

BonTon & Company, Dawson City

Proof that culinary recognition in the Yukon isn't limited to the capital: BonTon & Company, a queer-owned restaurant in Dawson City that opened in 2021, has been recognized by both Air Canada and OpenTable as one of Canada's best new dining spots, a genuinely national-level accolade for a restaurant in a town of a few hundred people.

The Yukon Culinary Festival

Since 2013, the Tourism Industry Association of Yukon has organized the Yukon Culinary Festival, an annual event held in Whitehorse each August with support from the Government of Yukon. It's built around exactly the kind of people in this piece: local chefs, growers, and producers brought together in one place, past editions have included events at the Kwanlin Dün Cultural Centre and a food showcase tied to the Fireweed Community Market. Confirm current dates locally before planning a trip specifically around it.