Dessert has gone savoury with celery on ice cream, marrow in pudding and parsnips with pastry. Here, five salty-sweet ways to finish a meal.
All stories by Emily Landau
Flavour of the Year: Five twisted takes on steak tartare
The steak house app has gotten freaky lately, with everything from raw beef heart to pine bark and elderberry mustard. Here, the top five.
Spotlight: former teen heartthrob Jason Priestley stars in David Mamet’s theatrical scorcher Race
(Image: François Berthier/Getty Images)
Jason Priestley spent the ’90s playing the unimpeachably noble high schooler Brandon Walsh on the ur–teen drama Beverly Hills, 90210. Since then, he’s been chipping away at that innocent image—most recently as the coke-snorting, babe-banging car salesman Richard Fitzpatrick on HBO Canada’s Call Me Fitz. Starting this month, he throws himself deeper into the moral murk for the Canadian Stage production of David Mamet’s controversial drama Race.
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The Amazing Adventures of Michael Snow: an uncensored history of Toronto’s most notorious art star
Fifty years ago, Snow’s iconic Walking Woman sculptures made him an international art star. That was just the start of a rich life full of famous friends, bohemian bacchanals and city-wide scandals. His latest work, a dancing light beam on the Trump tower, is his most flamboyant feat yet
VIEW PHOTOS OF SNOW’S LIFE AND ART »
One afternoon last summer, Michael Snow stood on an upper floor of the Sheraton hotel examining his latest creation from a distance. It was a test run of Lightline, a 65-storey light sculpture he designed for the new Trump hotel. A glowing white spire, made up of thousands of LED lights, snaked up the seam of the tower like a stripe on a marching band uniform. Then it began to move. A blast of light shot up about 20 storeys and flickered in staccato bursts. “It waltzes,” Snow tells me. “The light jumps up and down in a rhythm—buh-bum, buh-bum.” Sometimes the computer-operated animation will flash like a strobe light, or mimic the stop-and-go of traffic, or a rainfall or snow. “The snow is really quite beautiful,” says Snow.
But the sculpture had mechanical problems, and, shortly after the test, it was shut off. It was still out of order as of this February. “Guess they have other things to worry about first,” Snow grumbles, a coy reference to the panes of glass that have been falling off the building.
Of all the works Snow has produced over the years, Lightline is the only one that wasn’t his idea. Eb Zeidler, the architect responsible for the tower—and the Eaton Centre and Ontario Place—called Snow up in 2009 and asked him to devise a light beam on the side of the building. Snow happily accepted and transformed it into a kind of cinema, controlling the movement of the lights with a computer program. That the hotel was named for the tackiest man in North America didn’t faze him. Donald Trump and Snow actually have a lot in common: unshakable ego, wilful disregard for public opinion and a knack for stoking controversy.
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Flavour of the Month: delicious reinventions of the classic Caesar salad
The vintage salad has endured all manner of permutations since its birth in the ’20s, but none as luxe, light and irreverent as the versions currently on Toronto menus
The Erotic Education of Anna Silk: the Lost Girl star on playing a bisexual succubus
A woman in a leather miniskirt and stilettos staggers down a darkened corridor and rings the buzzer beside a bolted door. The man inside interrupts his bare-chested boxing workout to let her in. “I’m busy,” he grumbles. “Please,” she pants through gritted teeth. Then she jumps him. They square off in a round of violent yet balletic sex. He hoists her off the ground and onto a counter; she retaliates by slamming him into a wall. He paws at her breasts while she claws at the tattoos on his back. Off comes her shirt, and he stealthily peels off her underwear. Soon they’re naked on the bed and she’s straddling him. They growl, groan and grunt like the Williams sisters at Wimbledon. As they arch together in one final thrust, the whites of her eyes turn solid black.
Trend we Love: Philly cheese steak, spotted in low- and middlebrow incarnations
The traditional cheese steak from I Went to Philly, and OddSeoul’s Koreanized version
Those who’ve grown weary of sanctimonious locavorism will welcome the sudden ubiquity of the Philly cheese steak on Toronto menus. The greasy cafeteria staple, in its traditional incarnation, is an oozing mountain of sliced rib-eye, grilled vegetables, hot peppers and Cheez Whiz piled into a squishy bun. It arrives on red checked paper, sends a rivulet of dribbling cheese down your shirtfront and defiantly flaunts its lowbrow junk factor in the face of fresh-and-local ideals. Here are some of the traditional and revamped versions we’ve spotted on menus around the city of late:
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Must-try: plain Jane panna cotta gets a mozzarella makeover at Buca
At Buca, the imposingly cool King West osteria, chef Rob Gentile jacks up his traditional Italian dishes with whimsical substitutions—pizzas smothered in duck egg yolks instead of tomato sauce, bison prosciutto instead of pork, chocolate ice cream made with pig’s blood instead of cream. The inspiration for his latest bait and switch came on a recent trip to Sicily, where he tasted a savoury panna cotta made with buffalo mozzarella. He has reimagined the recipe as an autumnal dessert, whipping the mozzarella into gossamer fluff and fortifying it with cream and gelatin. He serves it with Concord grapes two ways—in their natural pearl state and as stewed mosto cotto—and adds a flourish of citrus-infused olive oil, crumbled pistachio biscotti and a pinch of vanilla salt. The exquisite cloud has the creamy texture and tangy pucker of the world’s best cheesecake filling, the daintiness of meringue and, in case you’d forgotten what you were eating, just the slightest panna cotta jiggle. $12. Buca, 604 King St. W., 416-865-1600.
The Way We Eat Now: how foraging infiltrated fine dining and became a foodie phenomenon
(Image: Left: Caballo’s sautéed wild Saskatchewan chanterelles; right: Forager-chef Michael Caballo at Edulis)
On a late-summer evening, I descended into the Don Valley with 50 well-to-do Torontonians—mostly middle-aged couples in chinos, linen suits and sandals. We paid $50 each to identify edible plants. Like churning your own butter or whittling your own driftwood spoons, foraging—finding and harvesting food from wild resources—is one of those rugged pioneer traditions that has reached the peculiar status of urban artisanal fetish. Days before the tour, I imagined the calamities I might encounter: stinging nettles, disturbed wasps’ nests, rodents of unknown rabidity status.
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Raising the Bar: nine house-made chocolate bars, the ultimate fancified junk food
Chefs are taking artisanal junk food to a whole new level of twee with decadent house-made chocolate bars.
The Thing: Lago bookshelves from Suite 22 that get kinetic
(Image: courtesy of Lago Design)
Bookcases are not supposed to be fun. The good people at IKEA have been reinforcing that idea for years, mass-producing mind-numbing quantities of the humble Billy, which does one thing—holds books—reasonably well. The Tangram bookcase from the Italian furniture maker Lago gives this way of thinking a giant kick in the pants. The shelves, modelled after the ancient Chinese tangram puzzle, come in seven pieces (five triangles, a square and a rhombus) that can be configured in more than 6,500 ways—a cat, a stork, a fish blowing bubbles or a baseball player in mid-slide, to name just a few. And they’re available in 23 colours, from staid taupe to flashy tangerine. They’re brazenly decorative, borderline silly and undeniably awesome. They also hold books. From $2,100. Suite 22, 160 Bullock Dr., Markham, 905-554-6084.
Must-try: black pudding to die for at The Grove
In a city of diners determined to devour every last entrail, it’s no surprise that blood has made its way onto menus. At The Grove, a refined British pub on Dundas West, chef Ben Heaton turns it into sausage—or black pudding, as the English politely call it. His recipe is traditional: blood (he buys it by the bucket from butchers after they’ve broken down their noble pigs), pork fat, oats to thicken the mixture, mace, allspice and cloves for zing. His presentation, however, is completely modern: he fries the links in olive oil and crumbles them over freshly shucked peas, radish curls and a custard-thick sous-vide duck egg. He finishes the plate with a refreshing lemon-butter foam. The star ingredient crackles as it hits the palate, then melts into buttery richness with just the slightest metallic tang. It’s an ultra-light rendition of the rib-sticking English breakfast staple. Bloody brilliant. $10. 1214 Dundas St. W., 416-588-2299.
Current Obsession: Lori Nix’s spellbinding post-apocalyptic miniatures
To be a regular at the bar pictured here, you’d have to be no more than an inch tall. The whole scene is only about two feet square—too small even for a down-on-his-luck Ken doll. It’s the creation of Brooklyn photographer Lori Nix, who has spent more than a decade creating tiny, elaborate and painstakingly detailed dioramas. She builds the sets out of foam, cardboard, clay, glue, plastic and paper, as well as found objects, then photographs them, playing with light and perspective to make the scenes appear life-sized. The whole process can take up to seven months. Once she has a photo she’s happy with, she often destroys the set, or strips it for parts. In her latest series, The City, on view this month at the Bau-Xi Gallery, Nix drew on her love of ’70s disaster films for scenes from a fictional, post-apocalyptic metropolis in which offices, libraries, beauty parlours and laundromats are depicted in various states of hastily abandoned disrepair. The images are brilliantly disturbing, with a countervailing streak of whimsy. However curious we are about the horrific fate that befell this little burg, what we really want to know is how the hell this all got made. Here, some of the steps involved in creating Bar, just one of the exhibit’s mind-boggling photographs.
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Party Pages: the Diamond Gala was packed with society types and tutus (many tutus)
Anyone wondering where moneyed Toronto arts patrons were on Wednesday night should have checked the Four Seasons Centre, where the city’s old guard convened for the National Ballet of Canada’s 60th-anniversary Diamond Gala. Outside the centre, models posed in the sweltering heat, fanned by custom-designed tutus as white-haired doyennes, tuxedoed power brokers and a handful of devil-may-care party-goers in canvas shorts walked the red carpet. Inside, guests were treated to performances by the company (including the famously breast- and butt-heavy pas de deux from the ’90s contemporary ballet Herman Scherman)—although some members, like principal dancer Jillian Vanstone and first soloist McGee Maddox, were spotted in the audience, enjoying a night off.
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The Pick: The Artist Is Present, a look behind Marina Abramović’s carefully guarded public persona
The performance artist Marina Abramović comes across as positively otherworldly. She looms on the stage, tall and imposing like a pagan priestess. She moans and writhes, chanting in a sonorous, Slavic-accented alto. She flogs her naked body and carves pentagrams into her abdomen. She stands passively, surrounded by sharp objects and a gun (with one bullet) and challenges her audience to harm her. In her most recent exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, she sat for eight hours a day, staring both blankly and piercingly at an endless parade of curious patrons. In all of her pieces, she exhibits supernatural stamina, a wilful disregard for social norms and a chilling solemnity. The new documentary The Artist Is Present, currently playing at the TIFF Bell Lightbox, dismantles that carefully guarded public persona—in it, Abramović is disarmingly human.
