When Luke Hayes-Alexander was 12, he asked his father to buy him a pig. The boy, then in Grade 7, had announced to his parents that he was going to become a chef and would teach himself the craft. He wanted part of his training to be in butchery. The family owned and operated a casual restaurant in downtown Kingston, which they opened when Luke was a toddler and named after him, and their only child had been helping in the kitchen since he was small. Rob Alexander was the head chef, and Carrie Hayes ran the front-of-house. Rob dutifully ordered a 15-pound suckling pig from an abattoir and deposited it on the kitchen table. Then he offered to assist. Luke, armed with a carving knife, declined the help. He had examined anatomy drawings in books, and he wanted to discover the animal for himself.

He followed the lines of flesh, muscle and bone. There wasn't much blood – the pig had been drained – and, anyway, he wasn't squeamish. Knowing where to cut, and why, came naturally. Then and there, Luke decided that the way to demonstrate his respect for the creature was to use all of it in his cooking. Eating meat, he believed, wasn't wrong, but leaving anything to waste was.

Now, six years after he carved his first pig, Luke Hayes-Alexander is executive chef of this tiny, exotic restaurant. He has devised everything from the decor to the menu, serving such fare as rabbit rillettes sided with pistachio purée, wild blueberries and preserved lemon-polenta shortbread; squash risotto with asiago, olives and crispy capers; rainbow trout with white beans and croquettes béarnaise.

Foodies, alerted by newspaper accounts and word of mouth in the blogosphere, have been converging from Toronto, Ottawa and Montreal. Carrie, a petite 45-year-old with ringlets of orange hair, even hosted a couple from Brooklyn who, hearing of her son's cuisine, flew to Pearson, drove to Kingston, ate, slept over and then returned home. Over the past few years on Chowhound, the ardent foodie Web site, diners have been chronicling his progression as a chef in enthusiastic strings of conversation. "Best meal I've had in years," one Chowhounder posted. "The dishes were intriguing, inventive and humorous." Another, after first wondering if the two-hour drive to Kingston would be worth it, ended up raving about the food.

What kind of teen is this?
 

Precocity is unsurprising in some fields. The anguished teen poet or graduate student in math who is too young to drive barely raises an eyebrow. But it's rare that we order a $30 plate by a cook who can't legally taste the wine his waiter is recommending. We expect our chefs to have, along with basic qualifications, years of experience in a variety of kitchens, and worldliness, often born of wandering the globe and sampling cuisines. As well, there is the kind of passion, sensuality and bravado that can be acquired only, we assume, over time and with age. An 18-year-old from Kingston who has never been to chef school or travelled abroad is facing a double bias: too young and too unapprenticed to possibly be good.

One recent afternoon, I knocked on the door of Luke's to be fed by its namesake. The chef answered and offered a firm handshake and a wincing smile. Luke has shoulder-length brown hair, gentle features and expressive hazel eyes. He wears the same uniform to work each day: dark jeans with a dress shirt and tie. He's six-foot-three, with wide shoulders and size 14 feet. Carrie says he has always been polite and softly well spoken. But he is also shy; when he first started working at Luke's, he found it difficult to greet customers. He is clearly one of those people who lives most passionately inside his own mind.

Before Luke took over the kitchen, the restaurant offered mid-range fare with an emphasis on local ingredients. Rob, who had graduated from the George Brown Chef School and apprenticed under Michael Bonacini at the old Windsor Arms Hotel, smoked fish, roasted chickens, and kneaded dough each night for the next day's bread. Luke remembers watching his father devote himself to the patient cooking required to prepare a proper hollandaise sauce for Sunday brunch.

He found school much less engaging. His Grade 2 teacher told his parents that their son was the most intelligent student she'd ever had. She also confessed to not knowing what to teach him. Already bored in class, he was assigning himself extra tasks, including reading War and Peace, which he then summarized, not badly, for his mother.

Luke didn't have many friends. Gym class, which he considered an exercise in humiliation, made his stomach flip. His physical fragility was exacerbated by Type One diabetes, diagnosed when he was seven years old. Diabetic children don't gorge on birthday cake or devour raw cookie dough with friends. They learn to be intensely aware of their bodies, disciplined and vigilant about what they eat. For Luke, that meant learning all he could about food.

His parents, watching their son grow increasingly miserable in public school, enrolled him at Sempar, a small private school that provided a classical education. At the school, the boy encountered for the first time a passion for learning that matched his own. He studied Beowulf and Rosemary Sutcliff's novels about Roman Britain; his class acted out the parts in Julius Caesar. Computers were available but rarely turned on. Each week, students were escorted to the local public library to borrow as many books as they could carry.

George Turcotte, then the school's headmaster, remembers Luke as brilliant and thoughtful. Early obsessions, even before cuisine, were literature and art. When he was 10, his mother let him fill one wall of Luke's with a mural. The painting is still there, a floating, dreamy impression, as he explained when he finished it, of the first harvest moon he saw in Prince Edward County.

Soon after, Luke announced he wanted to become a chef. Starting with Grade 9, his mother decided to try home schooling and focus on his training in the restaurant. The way other children pore over comic books, Luke studied Jacques Pépin's Table, Thomas Keller's The French Laundry Cookbook and Charlie Trotter's guides to vegetables, desserts, meat and game. He didn't play sports or video games or watch television. He didn't feel he had much in common with kids his own age. The few boys he did hang out with were misfits, like himself.

Carrie set the curriculum and oversaw the studies. Always, the goal was to fold a high school education into an apprenticeship in cooking. All that Luke had hated about public school – the boredom and forced learning, the fact that he was made to feel guilty for asking questions – disappeared once it was just him, his mother and books. They focused on European history, in particular France and Italy, and the Romance languages. A typical assignment: "Pick 20 of your favourite chefs from around the world and give me a complete biography of each." The Internet came in handy, especially for quick surveys of restaurants and menus, but Luke, who spent hours wandering through the stacks of the public library admiring old books, preferred to learn by turning pages. Carrie borrowed books from Queen's University and each June would present his work to the local school board for approval.

By age 15, Luke's training in the kitchen had reached a stage where he felt ready to take over. The family had bought a house and some land in Waupoos, Prince Edward County, about an 80-minute drive from Kingston, and were making the daily commute. Rob chose to devote himself to their farm: he had planted grapevines and was preparing to oversee his first harvest. Luke's the casual dining restaurant began its metamorphosis into Luke's the foodie destination. The decision to make Luke executive chef was risky. It also placed tremendous pressure on a boy chef. But for the parents and their son, the restaurant was as much a schoolhouse as a business. A calm, nurturing school, away from bullies and dumbfounded teachers.

In his mid-teens, Luke made two essential discoveries. One was the cuisine and philosophy of the Spanish chef Ferran Adrià, the godfather of molecular gastronomy and the owner of El Bulli, often named the best restaurant in the world. Adrià, who prefers the term "deconstructivist" to describe his mode of cooking, aims to provoke and surprise with contrasts of flavours and textures and temperatures. The high concept of molecular gastronomy, its intelligence and playfulness, appealed to Luke. "Gnocchi" made of scallops or a "caesar salad" served as a soup raised questions about how we perceive foods, and how we taste them. Such cooking obliges diners to slow down and think about the experience.

Around the same time, Luke discovered charcuterie. One fabled standard, tête de cochon, or pig's head, caught his eye. With Luke, any recipe encountered in a book or any new ingredient discovered on a store shelf has to be cooked and tested at once, to see how it works and tastes.

Luke asked his parents for a pig head, which they fetched from the butcher and placed on the kitchen table, like some grisly children's rhyme. Following a recipe, Luke removed the meat and pounded it flat, dicing the tongue and ears. He then rolled everything in cheesecloth for overnight braising. Next, the flesh and fat was sliced into medallions and pan fried.

Rob thought that the result, while creamy and delicious, was too outré for their clientele. Carrie decided to find out. She invited diners to taste pig's head as an amuse-gueule. The dish proved so popular it became a staple. Not long after this, Luke gently evicted his mother from the kitchen. He knew what he wanted, he knew how each dish should be plated, and he wanted to do it himself.

He also began keeping notebooks of his recipes and thoughts. He was flooded with ideas: a new way to use an ingredient, a variation on an existing dish, creative ways to present food. Notions came to him in the kitchen and during the daily commute from Waupoos. Sometimes he would wake up in the night with a recipe fully formed. Carrie insisted that he jot them down before they were supplanted by others. The notebooks piled up and became the basis for menus, one per season, with few repeat dishes. Adrià's avant-garde philosophy, Pépin's peasant cuisine, Rob Alexander's simmered sauces and lovingly kneaded bread – in Luke's mind they all came together. Or, rather, they are still coming together, every time he steps into the kitchen.
 

Luke prepared for me a tasting menu of nine all-new dishes from recent notebooks. When he disappeared into the kitchen, Carrie explained that he had spent a week working on the meal. She kept me company in the empty restaurant but didn't eat. Instead, she talked about the menu, her manner a cross of passionate foodie and proud parent. Our table was next to another mural, this one by a local artist, of a pregnant woman with the baby visible in her womb. The mother is Carrie; the embryo is Luke. The dining room is like that, as well: low lighting and ambient jazz make it intimate and almost womblike. Gauzy cloth screens hang like sails between the seven tables. At the rear of the room, near the doors to the kitchen, is a cabinet full of books – Pépin and Fernand Point, Trotter and Heston Blumenthal.

All of this is purposeful, designed to enhance the out-of-the-ordinary nature of the food. Carrie oversees the room, and mother and son share a vision of Luke's and a future that will, as she puts it, "expand the Luke's gastronomy concept." The vineyard has already produced two Luke's vintages, for sale only in the restaurant, and Luke, who first completed a short manuscript of his recipes when he was 16, is now working on a full-length cookbook. Carrie has the same eyes and intelligence as her boy. Intensely protective, she is both the classic helicopter mother of a gifted child – hovering over him, watching, guiding – and a bemused long-time observer of his nature. She confesses that she simply doesn't know why he knows what he does. "The funny thing about Luke," she says, "is that he's completely inside himself." Inside himself, for sure – but with her and, to a lesser extent, his father nearby.

Luke's food is dazzlingly cerebral. A scallop Oreo, for example, adopts the molecular gastronomy conceit of disguising foods: a scallop mousse between cocoa cakes is designed to look like the cookie. His immersion in French peasant cuisine produces full, earthy flavours in a dish of rabbit liver pâté, sautéed kidney, rye waffle and black olive jam.

His version of the Cherry Blossom confection closes the menu. Neither his chocolate blossom nor the crème anglaise and cherry purée inside it, nor even the chocolate sheet angled over the dish, is particularly sweet. In combination, however, the cherry blossom looks and tastes like sugar heaven. It's an interesting meditation on how we construct sweetness with our eyes as much as our tongues – especially from a chef who is diabetic.

"He's most comfortable in the kitchen," Carrie says, comparing him to a kid glued to a piano or backyard rink. "There's that feeling of being exactly where he should be." When Luke emerged after three hours, he answered my questions about the tasting menu politely and precisely, the same way that he replied to queries about coriander (he dislikes it) and the prospect of falling in love ("If I devoted myself to something else, I'd feel anxious").

The restaurant was due to open in about 90 minutes, leaving just enough time to whip up a light meal for himself and his mother: roasted free-range chicken, sautéed spinach, and fingerling potato salad with a gribiche sauce, a sort of Gallic tartar.

Luke's is open only for dinner and generally has a single seating per evening. It is specialized and, for Kingston, exotic to the point that Carrie warns walk-ins that the cuisine may be unexpected. On one of the nights that I was there, a table of four men puzzled over their plates of trout, which resembled sushi rolls, and their medieval pig's head. They ended up pleased, especially with the desserts.

Creating a pilgrimage-worthy foodie mecca, à la Michael Stadtländer's farm, is far more difficult than, say, moving your operation to Toronto or Montreal. Working for someone else, or even just collaborating, could be problematic, too: Luke has trained himself to fly solo in the kitchen, alone with his teeming ideas. "I don't know how much it would interest me to take part in something like that," he admits of the prospect. But then he reconsiders. "One can't always be sealed off in one's little bubble," he says in his oddly formal manner of speaking.

It is not uncommon for prodigies to wake up one morning and decide they'd rather do something else with their adult lives. The morning after the tasting menu, I invited Luke to show me his favourite places in Kingston. In part, I wanted the excuse to talk to him outside the restaurant. Walking down Princess Street in a fedora and sunglasses, he attracted curious glances. He doesn't look like a townie or a Queen's University student. He doesn't resemble a young professor. He looks, to me at least, like an 18-year-old trying out different styles and exploring his emerging identity. We discussed other things he likes and places he might wish to visit. Then, convinced that cooking is what he was put on earth to do, he returned to his restaurant to prepare for the day.