When Cambridge chef, Connor Blackmore, closed the doors on his popular Preston restaurant, Sauceboss, in November 2021, he swore he was out of the restaurant business for good.
But then he found a location he couldn’t resist.
“My childhood home is right down the street from here,” Blackmore said. “I kind of came right back to where I started. It feels good to be back in the area.”
The menu at his new restaurant, The Nook Cook House, on St. Andrews Street, is a departure from the kind of food he was serving at Sauceboss.
“This is more geared to breakfast and lunch and healthier options,” he said. “Sauceboss was a lot of deep-frier, street food. This is more your yogurt parfaits, fresh-baked goods, eggs, breakfast wraps, soups, that kind of stuff.
Blackmore’s circuitous journey back to his old stomping grounds has been a learning experience starting, of course, with his education.
“I went to St. Andrews down the street for elementary then Glenview Park Secondary,” he said. “I was more artsy than sit-down academic, so I went to culinary school at Liaison College in Kitchener.”
After college he honed his culinary skills in the kitchens of local restaurants such as the Napa Grille & Wine Den and Symposium Café Restaurant on Can-Amera Parkway where he was kitchen manager.
His talent and passion for cooking spilled over into his private life and soon he was starting his first business.
“It was kind of an accidental business,” he said. “I started doing sauces on the side for friends and family. It was just like a little side gig and it kind of exploded online. I was doing it from home, and I thought, maybe it is time to start looking for a spot and grow it.”
He found a location on King Street in 2018 and launched Sauceboss with the intention of bottling and selling sauces part time while he continued to work at Symposium.
“That’s the way it kind of started but the bottling stuff became way more expensive than I thought,” he said. “I decided to go back to my roots as a cook and mix the sauces in with the food to showcase how they taste. It really took off.”
Many restaurants struggled when the pandemic hit two years later, but the Sauceboss business formula was COVID ready.
“We had the takeout window and the glass,” said Blackmore. “We didn’t have to open the doors. There were so many things we could do to keep everybody safe and because we were already geared for the takeout, it flourished.”
As the popularity of the restaurant grew it began to monopolize Blackmore’s time and took its toll on his personal life.
“There was a series of events, but that was a big factor with Sauceboss,” he said. “I was never home. I shut down last November, just over a year ago.”
He planned to get out of the restaurant business altogether.
“I started working my other career, which I’m still currently doing as well,” said Blackmore. “I’m working for the toy company Lego. So, I do that at night and that was supposed to be my only thing, but I started missing the food industry three or four weeks later. I missed the adrenaline. I missed the rush.”
He took a job for a short time at the Easy Pour Wine Bar on Blair Road, but when the shifts conflicted with his other job, he found work as a breakfast and lunch cook at the Country Girl Family Restaurant on Hespeler Road.
“I was planning on staying there as long as I could,” he said. “The employees were great. Everyone there was awesome so, it wasn’t about the job. It was more about this opportunity.”
It was an opportunity too good to pass up, but it still took some convincing.
“A couple of my best friends own the store next door,” said Blackmore. “They just kept pushing me, ‘You gotta take this spot.’ I kept saying, ‘No, I’m not ready for another restaurant. Maybe in 20 years.’ But the more and more I kept coming over here, I’m like, oh man, if I miss this opportunity, I’m going to be really upset with myself.“
Blackmore has put the past behind him, but there is one popular item from the Sauceboss menu he has resurrected.
“I’ve had a lot of requests for the sloppy joes so, I have them in here as a special,” he said. “We sold a couple, which is nice, but I don’t want to bring back too much of the Sauceboss style and confuse people.
The new space has opened up other opportunities as well.
“I want to get into some local live music, like acoustic sets and paint nights,” he said. “Mel, she’s the baker here, and we’ve been talking about doing baking classes. So, there are all sorts of different things I have in the works.”
More important is the added time he’ll have to spend with his fiancé and six-year-old son.
“It’s nice here because I get to work while he’s in school and I’m typically home by the time he is home from school,” Blackmore said. “So, he doesn’t have that, ‘Oh, he’s always at work like before.”
Blackmore is taking his time to get everything right this time.
“I told myself I would never do another restaurant again and here we are sitting in another one,” he said.
“It’s kind of weird how life works, I guess, but this one is for life. I’ve put too much into it and there’s too much more going into it. This is it for me.”
