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(Image: Renée Suen)
Name: Osteria dei Ganzi
Neighbourhood: Church-Wellesley Village
Contact info: 504 Jarvis St, 647-348-6520, ganzi.ca, @ganzitoronto
Owners: Dan Gunam (Roosevelt Room, Story’s), Luca Viscardi (Toula) and Ron Yeung
Chef: Guerrino Staropoli (Cherry Hill House, Mississauga)
The Food: Casual Italian with pastas, cicchetti (small snacks typical of Venice) and simple meat and fish plates. Italian barbecue and pizzas made in an outdoor oven are added to the menu in the summer.
Claudio Aprile closed Colborne Lane in February with little notice in order to focus on his growing stable of Origin restaurants. Last night, at Origin Liberty Village, Aprile enlisted six of the top chefs who’ve passed through Colborne’s kitchen—Matt Blondin (Momofuku Daishō), Steve Gonzalez (Top Chef Canada), David Haman (Woodlot), Ben Heaton (The Grove), Jonathan Poon (Chantecler) and Andrew Wilson (Colborne Lane’s final chef de Cuisine)—to join him for a tribute to the pioneering modernist restaurant. Each chef created one hors d’oeuvre and one course, revealing the ways they’ve diverged since their time at Colborne but also betraying debts to Aprile’s style—right down to his idiosyncratic way of describing dishes on the menu.
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Porzia’s pizza di nonna, served with bitter seasonal greens (Image: Renée Suen)
The buttery pizza di nonna at Porzia isn’t really a pizza at all. Like most of the dishes at Basilio Pesce’s three-month-old Italian restaurant in Parkdale, the recipe is a tweak on a family staple—in this case, his grandmother’s freshly baked bread (with her limited English, she referred to anything made from dough as pizza). Although it looks like garden-variety focaccia, it tastes more like a delicious cross between brioche and a scone with a flaky crust and a tender crumb. Pesce stuffs the savoury pastry with melted cheese, mortadella and salty prosciutto, for a mouthwatering sandwich that’s as satisfying and rich as a slice of pizza—without all the grease. $10.
Porzia, 1314 Queen St. W., 647-342-5776, porzia.ca, @porziaparkdale
The vibe at the Terroir Symposium this year was decidedly touchy-feely. Hundreds of chefs, restaurateurs, wine experts, activists, writers and all-purpose food enthusiasts congregated yesterday at the Arcadian Court for talks and panels about the stories and memories behind the food they eat. The impressive roster of speakers ran from Toronto eminences like O&B’s Peter Oliver to up-and-coming out-of-towners, like the editors of the hot new food magazine Fool. But the highlight of the day was the keynote address from the revered Danish chef René Redzepi, of Copenhagen’s Noma, which ended the symposium with a standing ovation. Below, seven things we learned at Terroir VII.
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After eschewing brunch for most of its 23 years, Splendido has finally decided to cater to Toronto’s collective Sunday-morning obsession—albeit in a characteristically indulgent style. Chef Victor Barry’s two-course breakfast, appropriately dubbed The Spread ($35), starts off with a generous assortment of flaky pastries, house-made charcuterie, fine cheeses, pickles and spreads—by itself, this would make a fine and filling brunch.
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Name: Bar Isabel
Neighbourhood: Little Italy
Contact info: 797 College St., 416-532-2222, barisabel.com, @BarIsabel797
Owners: Grant van Gameren (Black Hoof, Enoteca Sociale) and Max Rimaldi (Enoteca Sociale, Pizzeria Libretto)
Chefs: executive chef Grant van Gameren and chef de cuisine Brandon Olsen (Black Hoof)
General manager: Guy Rawlings (Room 203, Brockton General)
The food: Sharing-friendly plates ranging widely from Mediterranean standards like a whole grilled octopus ($49) to chicken wings ($10) served escabeche-style.
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Name: Bushi Udon Kappo
Neighbourhood: Yonge and St. Clair
Contact info: 1404 Yonge St., 416-323-9988, bushiudon.com
Owners: Koki Oguchi and Don Suzuki
Chef: Koki Oguchi, formerly chef and owner of the Danforth’s shuttered Sakawaya
The food: House-made udon noodles, as well as an extensive assortment of Japanese sharing plates.
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(Image: Yours Truly)
Yours Truly’s 29-year-old head chef, who came to Toronto by way of some of the world’s most celebrated kitchens, is exiting the Ossington strip restaurant and the city. Replacing Claudio is Lachlan Culjak, who has worked in the kitchens of Toronto institutions Splendido, Nota Bene and Scarpetta and trained at Noma, a world-renowned Danish restaurant that receives close to 100,000 reservation requests a month. The new chef says he’ll continue Claudio’s lauded 20-course tasting menus, which propelled Yours Truly to the top of our list of the city’s best new restaurants last year. Claudio plans to travel around the United States indefinitely before moving to London, England, where he hopes to start his own restaurant.
The fundamental insight behind the addictive Bulgogi Torta from A-OK Foods: few sandwiches are as satisfying as a good, old-fashioned Big Mac. For this cheeky Mexican-Korean creation, chef Chris Jang stuffs sweet grilled rib-eye, a healthy dollop of guacamole and shredded lettuce inside a mayo-slicked Wonder Bread bun, along with a little melted provolone (bracing house pickles are on the side). The resulting sandwich is sweet, salty and fatty, and it melts in your mouth just like the McDonald’s original. Unlike the McDonald’s burger, however, there’s no gastronomical shame associated with ordering it. $7.50
A-OK Foods, 930 Queen St. W., second floor, 647-352-2243, aokfoods.ca, @AOKfoods
Each year, we head over to the annual Canadian Restaurant and Foodservices Association show to get a look at the big new food trends coming down the pipe. Of our twelve predictions from last year, some were dead on (Toronto couldn’t get enough of rustic Italian cuisine, street food and Mexican flavours), while others were perhaps premature (like our forecast of wide-spread home sous vide cooking and the death of cupcakes). Below, seven trends we observed at this year’s CRFA show:
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(Images: Renée Suen)
Chantecler announced in December that it was dropping its à-la-carte menu and expanding its popular lettuce wrap Sundays to rest of the week. Although the move helped attract diners, it also meant that chef and co-owner Jonathan Poon was no longer able to cook the sort of inventive Asian-Canadian fusion dishes that had started to attract attention—which is why, like Yours Truly and Actinolite, he followed through on plans for a new tasting menu last Friday. “I love cooking things like crispy, soggy calamari,” Poon told us, “but I also have a desire to cook food that’s more refined.” The $40, four-course menu alternates between small bites and larger composed plates (which means that about 10 dishes come out in total), and is limited to two seatings a night on Fridays and Saturdays, which must be booked at least four days in advance. For an extra $45, co-owner Jacob Wharton-Shukster will pour a series of natural wines paired with each course. Here’s what Poon served for the menu’s first run.
Zakkushi chef and general manager Hiroshi Tamanaha (Image: Renée Suen)
Name: Zakkushi
Neighbourhood: Cabbagetown
Contact info: 193 Carlton St., 647-352-9455, zakkushi.com, @ZakkushiCarlton
Owner: Masami Wakabayashi of Valuce Hospitality Ltd., the company behind the three Zakkushi locations in Vancouver
Chef and general manager: Hiroshi Tamanaha
The food: Hot and cold Japanese bar snacks, with a focus on kushiyaki, bite-sized meats and veggies threaded on a skewer and grilled over Japanese hardwood charcoal.
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Where Chefs Eat is a new 633-page collection of answers to a very simple question: where to go for a good meal? Those answers are from some 400 of the world’s top chefs, including Ferran Adria, Daniel Boulud, David Chang, Fergus Henderson and Rene Redzepi, as well as Toronto chefs Michael Steh, formerly of Reds, and Claudio Aprile, chef and owner of Colborne Lane and Origin. The guidebook is edited by Guardian critic Joe Warwick, who also co-founded the World’s 50 Best Restaurants awards. It’s not only an inventory of the flashy big-name places in a city, but also of regular neighbourhood and cheap eats spots. There’s even a category for places the chefs wish they opened. We flipped through the tome to pull out the 15 restaurants in and around Toronto recommended by the world’s top chefs.
(Image: Renée Suen)
Name: Porzia
Neighbourhood: Parkdale
Contact info: 1314 Queen St. W., 647-342-5776, porzia.ca, @porziaparkdale
Owners: Basilio Pesce (formerly of Biff’s, Canoe and Bymark) and Marco Petrucci (99 Sudbury, El Mocambo)
Chef: Basilio Pesce. His first solo project
The food: Home-style Southern Italian cooking based on recipes from Pesce’s childhood (the restaurant is named after his mother).
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(Image: Renée Suen)
Room 203 is the latest project from chef Guy Rawlings, who first gained notoriety at Brockton General before taking on consulting gigs at Lucien, Bellwoods Brewery and Bar Volo. The Parkdale space, which kicked off with a new year’s party, is part-catering kitchen, part-culinary wet lab, part-classroom and part-special event space, and is equipped with all manner of modern culinary equipment (a vacuum packing machine, an immersion circulator, liquid nitrogen).
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