Six-foot-four and slightly gawky, with alabaster skin and a shock of black hair, Luke Hayes-Alexander is emerging as one of Canada’s most intriguing, inventive and buzzed-about chefs. All before his 19th birthday.

Luke Hayes-Alexander at work

Born in Kingston, Ontario to a pair of boho food lovers, Hayes-Alexander now runs Luke’s, the restaurant his parents opened in honour of their only child back in 1993. At that time, dad Rob Alexander ran the kitchen, mum Carrie Hayes managed the dining room and little Luke served as an omnipresent – and omnivorous – kitchen helper. With its fresh-baked breads and roast chicken, smoked fish and Sunday brunch, Luke’s was not stuffy or fancy – just a casual, family-run establishment with exposed brick walls covered in its namesake’s primary-school murals.

Sixteen years later, Carrie is still working the 22-seater front room but, in 2006, Hayes-Alexander replaced his father as head chef. The handover was gradual, yet risky; Hayes-Alexander had barely set foot in high school let alone a culinary academy. But what he lacked in formal training and experience he clearly possessed in confidence and conviction.

He began his kitchen career preparing desserts alongside his father, who now oversees the family’s small home-winery, about 75 minutes outside of Toronto. “I knew by age 11 I wanted food to be a part of my life but by 15 I knew food would be the main part of my life” he says.

Unlike teenage musicians or actors or even science whizzes, there’s no model for the teenage chef-savant. So Hayes-Alexander created his own master-toque master-plan. He traded high school for home school; comic books for cookbooks; chemistry experiments for culinary ones.

By 15, he had read hundreds of cookbooks, become familiar with the restaurant’s kitchen and perfected recipes culled from the first to the 21st centuries. Along the way, he also discovered an unlikely passion for charcuterie – the ancient art of curing, smoking and drying meats, and whose sausages, pâtés and confits remain a hallmark of Luke’s 13-course tasting menus.

“I suppose it was an atypical upbringing,” concedes Hayes-Alexander, who has never been outside Canada. “But this was what I wanted; my life is about food – shopping, prepping, serving, developing; I’m thinking about food, I’m obsessing about food, I don’t know what I do ‘for fun’.”

This single-mindedness means very little is left to chance. Every dish at Luke’s is methodically developed, its ingredients locally sourced and analysed for taste, character and compatibility. “The flavours must always flatter each other,” he explains. “You can’t just throw things together and hope for the best.”

It’s within this cocoon of rigour and discipline that Hayes-Alexander allows himself to indulge in experimentation. Take his version of the classic caesar salad. The core components – lettuce, cheese, bacon, dressing – are reimagined with Adria-like whimsy. The lettuce arrives in the shape of an ice cream cone; the cheese as Asiago “rice crispies”; and the bacon is reduced for an hour to a jam. “The lightness of lettuce, the saltiness of the cheeses, the bacon’s smoky richness – the caesar salad flavours are all still there,” he explains. “But they’re plated in a way that demands you to stop and think and consider.”

Hayes-Alexander considers food’s role in history, in culture and in the home. Unsurprisingly, he does most of the cooking in his own home – both because he’s food-obsessed and to control the Type 1 diabetes discovered when he was seven. The diagnosis forced him early on to become minutely familiar with everything he consumed, which meant that every meal had to be home-made. “I don’t have memories of food that is not home-made,” he says. “We always needed to know what was in our food and not deal with unusual ingredients.”

Hayes-Alexander‘s latest “it” ingredient is lamb, “a meat I adore” – and he has been reworking his signature rillette appetiser to better balance its flavour spectrum. After two “agonising” weeks of test recipes, he decides to coat the pâté-like lamb in Panko (Japanese breadcrumbs) and pair it with lemon, Saskatoon berries and Campari. “Unusual,” he admits. Though no more unusual, in fact, than the dishes emerging from the top chefs in New York or Toronto to whom Hayes-Alexander is often compared.

Hayes-Alexander has barely started his first act, let alone given thought to his second. But he’s already – tentatively – looking beyond the kitchen at Luke’s. There’s a nearly-finished cookbook that he hopes to publish, filled with dozens of recipes and essays which  – with a burst of teenage enthusiasm – encourage readers “to have fun, get dirty, put on some good funky music, and COOK!” And there are plans for a European grand tour so that he can experience haute cuisine at its origins rather than just through the internet.

Will he ultimately abandon sleepy Kingston for the bright lights of some big-city kitchen? If he does, it will be for the food rather than the fame. “New York, Toronto, Montreal – these are cities where every imaginable ingredient is available,” he marvels. “In Kingston, for instance, we only get white mushrooms and Portobello mushrooms. In a world where there are thousands of varieties of mushrooms, you can’t imagine how frustrating that is for me.”

Spoken like a true tortured artist.

Luke’s, 264 Princess Street, Kingston, Ontario; tel: +1 613 531 7745; lukesgastronomy.com Dinner only; closed Mondays