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Posts with category ‘Chefs’

Greetings

Posted on April 1, 2006

Greetings and welcome to the first digestive tract. I’ve never been a blogeen before but the sensation is strangely exhilarating—writing on the fly, without valiant editors and fact-checkers to catch dangling participles and verify scurrilous gossip. It’s cool to be à la minute instead of having to wait for three months to share news of last night’s dinner in a magazine column. And a blog offers a forum for direct communication—or so I’ve been led to believe—which could be interesting during this target-on-my-back time of the year when Toronto Life’s annual restaurant rankings are live and on the newsstands.

Lounging About

Posted on April 17, 2006

David Lee and Yannick Bigourdin, co-owners of Splendido, have thought of a way to keep themselves occupied this summer by colonizing the entertainment district. They’re taking over the vast, three-storey space of The Original Motorcycle Café on King Street West when it closes on May 31, sprucing up the interior and reopening a month later as King West. The idea was first suggested to them a year ago by someone who happens to be a silent partner at Splendido and TOMC, but neither Lee nor Bigourdin were prepared to let their attention waver from Splendido until now. “And of course that will always be our main priority,” says Bigourdin. “David will continue to cook at Splendido nearly every evening. But we will oversee King West. It’s exciting and scary at the same time.”

Sommelier Summary

Posted on May 1, 2006

April was the coolest month—at least, it was for me, exploring hip downtown restolounges for a future article. Only four out of the dozen visited had food you might ever want to meet again but it was the peripheral observations that proved most entertaining. A chef throwing down the towel and walking out the door when asked to cook a chicken breast for a female customer’s accessory puppy. A suave, very well-dressed couple feeding each other scallops then making out shamelessly on a banquette. A soi-disant “sommelier” who couldn’t pronounce the names of some pretty well-known grape varieties and cheerfully told me he hadn’t actually tasted any of the wines he was recommending. Quite a contrast to last Monday’s gala lunch at Via Allegro where the prizes for the 2005 Wine Tasting Challenge were handed out. The six winners (three pro, three amateur) bagged a total of $30,000 in cash, trips, Spiegelau stemware, free meals and scholarships, making it easily the most valuable sommelier competition in North America. (I think Chicago is next, with a prize of US$8,000.) Click on www.winetastingchallenge.com for the list of winners and to find out how to enter this year. Why not give it a try? The Challenge is open to everyone, a stipulation insisted upon by Felice Sabatino, president of Via Allegro, when he created the competition, which is now conducted under the auspices of CCOVI at Brock University. There’s no entry fee. Toronto Life is a sponsor, I’m proud to say.

Put Out The Light

Posted on May 8, 2006

They say that being thrown out of a restaurant is a rite of passage for a critic; I’ve always hoped that someday it would happen to me. When the world-famous Rubino brothers bounced the National Post’s Jacob Richler from Luce soon after the restaurant opened (the feud reaching back to the early days of their other restaurant, Rain), I did feel a twinge of envy. Luce is off the lobby of the Hotel Le Germain and the Rubinos’ cast-iron contract meant they also provided room service to hotel guests, so Jacob cleverly booked a room, ordered various dishes and still wrote his piece. It was the talk of the town.

Charcuterie

Posted on May 23, 2006

So I made it to Cava on Monday evening—the new restaurant’s fourth night of existence. That’s far too early for a fair review but I was there on my own buck for once and curious to see what Chris McDonald has achieved. The four-square room is very simple—its old concrete underfloor polished up like some abstract grey-on-grey terrazzo, green and white walls that are destined, one hopes, for adornment, and a long bar down the eastern quadrant. Chris was behind it, looking calm and cheerful in his chef’s whites, and he stayed there all evening, playing delicate riffs with a knife and a Serrano ham—high priest of his own umami shrine. It was good to see that Avalon’s gorgeous crockery and monogrammed Champagne flutes have found a new home, the latter now used for cava and Waupous dry cider from Prince Edward County, a change which kind of summed up the difference in intent between the two restaurants. The tables are small and wooden with no linen but a broad slate band across the middle to take the heat of a cast iron casserole. They also have an odd little hole in them—just the right size, it turned out, for a customized retort that ends in a metal loop into which the server can slip a paper cone. It came into play twice during the evening—once for popcorn with a delicate butter-caramel chewiness that eventually gave way to a slow-building chili heat, and again for herbed frites that I venture to say might be the best in the city.

More Treats

Posted on May 29, 2006

The last time I sat down with Rodney Clarke, proprietor of Rodney’s Oyster House, Long John Silver fan and the man who single-handedly re-introduced the oyster to Toronto, he was eating a dish of enormous Grande Entrées cooked with butter and panko crumbs, golden and oozing juice. Oysters of such a size, he suggested, would one day be a thing of the past. Except, being Rodney, he put it much better than I ever could. My tape recorder was running so I saved the immortal words: “Who knows if you’ll see virginicas this size in the future. Farmers are impatient and an oyster needs a good eight years to grow. One day, when you get old, you’ll say, ‘Shit, I remember going to Rodney’s and he had these things that were as big as the tongue on a mountie’s boot! Where are those ones today?’”

Ail Caesar

Posted on June 12, 2006

My father hated garlic. Hated it with an almost superstitious passion. In other ways he was a very adventurous eater, cooked rich, hot curries from recipes gathered in India during World War II, liked to pour whisky onto his corn flakes, occasionally made and bottled his own chutneys and pickled walnuts, relished a raunchy game bird oozing dark blood and adored Gentleman’s Relish (the nearest thing to the ancient Roman garum sociorum then available in England). But garlic was the anathema. It may have had something to do with the fact that he was an actor, and it is an old tradition of the theatre for a Juliet to eat garlic before the matinée if she happens to hate the man playing Romeo (or vice versa). But I think it went deeper than that. Garlic, uncooked and injudiciously used, is such an inharmonious ingredient. It’s the schoolyard bully, the tuba in the string quartet, a slash of orange graffiti on a cathedral door. You can’t ignore it. Like some malevolent virus, it leaps from the fork and burrows into the taste buds, laughing at Listerine. I know it’s supposed to be good for you, but that’s a medieval fallacy born of the fact that garlic-eaters were shunned, even by rats, and therefore less likely to catch the plague. And I’m now beginning to think that an aversion to the odorous little bulb may be genetic because I, like my dear old long-departed dad, have discovered a garlic antipathy in myself.

Eigensinn Farm

Posted on June 19, 2006

Pulling in to the yard at Eigensinn Farm on Friday night I realized it had been more than ten months since I was last there. It felt like two weeks ago, which is partly because the days skip by bewilderingly quickly when you’re both busy and old and also because last summer’s visit—to the Heaven on Earth project—was so vivid and extraordinary that details were burned onto memory’s hard drive. This time, though, was just a regular dinner in the dining room of the farmhouse, my wife and I at one table, two other couples at theirs, a party of five from Vancouver. The evening light was bright in the room, which looks less serene than of old, mostly due to 13-year-old Hermann’s paintings crowding the crimson walls. Some of them are remarkably beautiful; all of them show a precocious eye and an innate kinetic energy. I guess it’s inevitable he would have talent.

French Caviar

Posted on June 26, 2006

I’m sitting here mulling over comments posted by lunchbill about last week’s blog, a report of an evening at Michael Stadtländer’s Eigensinn Farm. “What’s to get,” asks lunchbill, “the co-opting of nature and country life by an elitist, wealthy, urban culture? Some people do get ‘it’ and realize that some other people need to return to reality.” I’m not sure if he/she objects to Stadtländer (born and raised on a farm near Lubeck) owning and working his farm in Ontario and subsidizing the operation by feeding people in his dining room, or if the problem is people from the city going out into the countryside in order to eat. I don’t see anything particularly reprehensible in either scenario. It seems to me Stadtländer did return to an earthy, honest reality when he gave up the urban rat race and started farming organically 13 years ago. And I can’t think of a less elitist human being than Michael—artist, social activist and environmentalist, yes, but not elitist.

JK mk IV

Posted on July 17, 2006

The museum itself isn’t quite ready for prime time but Jamie Kennedy at the Gardiner is now open for lunch, for dinner on Friday and for special events. The space (on the third floor of the gorgeous new Gardiner Ceramic Museum) is effortlessly beautiful—clean, modern lines in slate grey and natural wood, open-plan, airy and full of light from floor-to-ceiling windows and skylights. I imagine it’s going to be a very popular rendezvous once the liquor licence is approved. Tables are widely spaced (for now, at least) and there are two or three out on the balcony in the open air; or you can eat at the black granite bar where the eight elegant stools look broad enough to accommodate almost any bottom.

Housekeeping

Posted on July 24, 2006

Tired of Toronto and the overfamiliar surroundings of your own kitchen? Bored of the way you cook? James Morris, owner of Rundles, in Stratford, has a suggestion. He calls the idea “Cooking in the House.” First you form yourself into a party of between one and four persons. Then you drive out to Stratford. You stay for four nights in the gorgeous, Shim-Sutcliffe-designed house next to Rundles restaurant—all glass and modernity and luxurious comfort with views of the lake and a wee water garden at the rear. For three mornings, Neil Baxter (chef at Rundles and Master of Cookery at the Stratford Chefs School) teaches you in an exclusive little cooking class during which you prepare your own lunch. Afternoons and evenings are free to absorb all the cultural treats Stratford offers—including a bumper crop of Colm Feore performances this season. I don’t know what the adventure costs but you can find out by visiting www.rundlesrestaurant.com, where you’ll also find images of the aforementioned Morris house and information about Neil Baxter—one of Canada’s most gifted teachers. I think it all sounds rather marvellous.

Many Tomatoes

Posted on August 21, 2006

We’re all still dazed by the news reported in David Lawrason’s blog that the LCBO computer is delisting Tio Pepe fino sherry, one of the most versatile and delicious aperitifs known to man. Is nothing sacred?

Kulture Vulture

Posted on August 28, 2006

News trickles in that chef Claudio Aprile’s business partner at Colborne Lane, due to open in November, is none other than the extremely busy Hanif Harji, whose most recent enterprise, Kultura, opened officially two weeks ago. Assisting with Colborne Lane’s debut will be manager Terry Hughes and sommelier Kim Cyr, both of whom are currently resident at Kultura, along with veteran front-of-house guy and sommelier Kevin Wallace. Hughes and Wallace were also involved with the birth of Doku 15 earlier this year—that project the brainchild of Zark Fatah, who combined with Hanif Harji on Blowfish. Are you following this? I guess the point is that Harji and Fatah seem to be involved with a good many very cool restaurant-lounges these days and that Hughes et alia are the go-to guys if you want your new place to hit the ground running.

In Tray

Posted on October 2, 2006

Back to Toronto just in time to catch the damp end of summer. Now I can put away my Ernie Whitt bat and T-shirt and look for my Dougie Gilmour pyjamas—the two sporting seasons fit together nicely with neither team making the playoffs. Sigh.

Terra Madre

Posted on October 10, 2006

Mother Earth—the clay from which we are all formed. Except for those who sprang from the ocean’s foam or who came here from a distant planet (you know who you are). On Wednesday, Jamie Kennedy at the Gardiner Museum hosted a delightful dinner to raise funds to send Ontario artisanal farmers, producers and chefs to the next biennial Terra Madre gathering in Turin, headquarters of the Slow Food movement. It was an excellent event, with 145 enthusiasts sitting down (eventually—everyone had summer to talk about so pre-prandial conversation was intense) in the Gardiner’s stunningly beautiful, glass-walled, candlelit event space. Anita Stewart, culinary activist, author, MA (Gastronomy) and probably the person who knows more than anyone else on earth about Canadian food from coast to coast to coast, gave an inspiring and patriotic keynote speech. Wines were coordinated by Paul DeCampo from Henry of Pelham winery—all of them delightful, especially H of P’s unfiltered 2000 pinot noir and a 2002 merlot from Lailey Vineyard.

Tubers in the Moonlight

Posted on October 16, 2006

A peculiar week has yielded three very different but memorable meals. First, a dinner at Truffles, enjoyed on October 2. My wife and I had gone there intending to review the restaurant and review it I did, completing my analysis last week and awarding no less than four stars. I share this double-secret information because I have since heard that Executive Chef Lynn Crawford is leaving Toronto at the end of the month to become Executive Chef at the Four Seasons hotel in New York and so my stellar review is wasted. Whoever replaces Lynn Crawford will have to be allowed to settle in, oversee her or his own menu for Truffles and then we’ll have another look.

Now It Can Be Told

Posted on October 24, 2006

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The third meal alluded to in last week’s post was an extraordinary progressive dinner hosted by Stephen Leckie in celebration of his 50th birthday. Stephen is the founder of Gold Medal Plates (of which more later) and draws his friends from an extraordinarily broad cross-section of life—avant-garde musicians, major political figures, Olympic athletes, filmmakers, captains of industry, the occasional ink-stained wretch. At 5:30 last Saturday evening, sixteen of us rendezvoused at Célestin, where we stood about breaking the ice, drinking gimlets and eating torchon of foie gras wrapped in prosciutto. An hour or so later we trooped out onto the sidewalk. There stood a monstrous white vehicle like some kind of stretch SUV which Stephen introduced as the Culinary Chariot. It looked as if it might be capable of flight, all gleaming and weirdly lit like a car from another dimension. We climbed in, settling onto luxurious leather sofas while a sound system regaled us with dulcet airs and various light and laser shows charmed our eyes.

More Golden Plates

Posted on November 6, 2006

I flew into Winnipeg on Thursday for the second Gold Medal Plates event of 2006, the tournament preoccupying me in recent weeks. Cold wind and a foot of snow—winter has already come to the prairies—but it was charmingly warm in the sumptuously decorated Convention Centre. The evening was a huge success with Olympic and Paralympic athletes “assisting” their assigned chefs most graciously. A large and generous crowd relished the offerings of the city’s finest restaurants and then settled down to listen to gold medallists Paul Rosen and Clara Hughes deliver their extraordinarily inspiring speeches. Even hardened culinary professionals had tears in their eyes.

Come to Whistler

Posted on November 13, 2006

So, David Gaunt is now chef at Crush after leaving Eagles Nest golf club. I haven’t tasted his Crush menu yet but he’s talented and driven and I will certainly check it out before the world is very much older. I did go to Maro, on Liberty Street, the latest venture from the guys who own Brant House, Brassaii and West Lounge. David Adjey is executive chef of all the properties and I enjoyed what he has done at Maro—a bunch of bite-sized, globally inspired starters priced from $2 up, then main courses that take a principal ingredient like lamb or cod and present it two ways on the same plate, in an Asian and also a western treatment. A couple of dishes were marred by oversalting but there was lots to enjoy. If you go at lunchtime, you’ll find the place imitating a friendly local noodle house.

Spirit of Hospitality

Posted on December 4, 2006

Last Monday, with the Leafs away and the Raptors resting, a more boisterous gathering took over the Air Canada Centre’s Platinum Club. Youthful chef and porcelain entrepreneur Rudy Guo put together his annual extravaganza of chefs from across the country to raise money for the scholarships and bursaries handed out to student cooks through his Spirit of Hospitality program.

Queue is for Quince

Posted on January 2, 2007

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Anyone who lives in the Yonge Street-Davisville-Eglinton area and has more than a passing interest in food must know La Salumeria, the tiny but well-stocked Italian deli owned and run by Rita and Ernesto Fuda for the last 20 years. Charles Oberdorf, then food editor of Toronto Life, introduced me to the place a decade ago (in those days Ernesto cut the best prosciutto in the city and carried more olive oils than almost anyone else). It was the first Italian deli in Toronto I had found that actually smelt like an Italian deli, with a complex and delectable aroma of freshly cut parmesan cheese, sopressata sausage and fresh crostoli made by Rita’s sister-in-law.

Globe Bistro

Posted on January 8, 2007

Finally got to Globe Bistro on the Danforth, where Café Brussels used to be. I had called half a dozen times since it opened in November but they ran into delays getting their liquor licence. Anyway, I wanted to give the place a few weeks to get up and running. Others felt differently and the room has been busy since day one. A fine room it is. The original floor from the long-ago days when the premises were part of a bowling alley is still in place. And Café Brussels’ balcony tables, outdoor patio and private room have been retained, though the balcony railing is now frosted glass. Instead of the old art nouveau look, the soaring space has been given a clean, unfussied modern décor in neutral tones that allows for a play of light and shade. Heavy white cloths cover the tables. Lots of veteran waiters buzz about—you’ll recognize them from half a dozen places—and manager Adrian Amara watches over the action. The owner, Ed Ho, is also out on the floor, quietly bussing tables, which is a good and conscientious thing to see. I’d say they have found the sweet spot in terms of mood, that small area of the spectrum of conviviality that is chic enough to work as a place for a romantic date but comfortable enough to attract quartets of grown-up locals in sweaters and sports jackets every day of the week.

East-West Reunions

Posted on January 15, 2007

Good news for the city: Patrick Lin is coming back from Hong Kong to take over as Executive Chef of Senses down at the Soho Metropolitan. I have a huge amount of time for Lin. Remember him as chef of Truffles in the early 1990s? And then a triumphant return there towards the end of the decade? Hotelier Henry Wu soon wooed him away to become executive chef at the Metropolitan Hotel and to cook in the open kitchen at Hemispheres Restaurant & Bistro. Most recently he has been executive sous chef at The Royal Garden Hotel in Hong Kong where he managed the food and beverage operation of the hotel, including its restaurants Dong Lai Shun, Inagiku, The Royal Garden Chinese Restaurant, Sabatini and Greenery.

In Vino Verity

Posted on January 22, 2007

To Verity—the excellent club for women at 111 Queen Street East—for a midweek rendezvous in the library hosted by Sopexa, where we tasted a good range of vins doux naturels including Muscat de Rivesaltes, Maury and Banyuls. Such delectable wines! After years of drought, the LCBO has now seen fit to bring a handful to Ontario, which may not change anyone’s life but is an amazing boon to those of us who like serving wine with dessert. Banyuls is one of the few vini that laughs at the menace of chocolate the way Errol Flynn used to laugh at Basil Rathbone. I fell in love with it about 14 years ago on a trip to Roussillon that then meandered up into Languedoc. Still an eager cub reporter, I managed to convince myself that I had unearthed a Cathar-revivalist conspiracy communicated through the labels of certain Blanquette de Limoux wines… but that is another story.

Fishy business

Posted on January 31, 2007

I still can’t get over the fact that skate is endangered! Skate! Not a rich man’s fish. Indeed, as recently as last year, it was a cheap staple of every Korean restaurant (served raw and crunch the cartilege) and a good many bistro lunch menus. How can we earthlings have brought the poor old skate to the brink of extinction? We really must be raping our oceans! The world would be a great deal better off without human beings – so cunning and acquisitive with our clever little fingers and our dirty little hearts. Still, looking at the bigger picture, it’s probably a good thing we have such a destructive impulse. We will soon be gone. Then the planet can take a moment to cool off, check its lip gloss and touch its hair, and face the rest of eternity with perky courage, like Geena Davis in A League of Their Own.

First Gold Medal Plates Canadian Culinary Champion

Posted on February 5, 2007

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This weekend, in Whistler, B.C., we held the first ever Gold Medal Plates Canadian Culinary Championship—the culmination of a journey that started six months ago. Last fall, we crossed the country, holding Gold Medal Plates gala events in seven cities—Halifax, Ottawa-Gatineau, Toronto, Winnipeg, Edmonton, Calgary and Vancouver. The purpose was to raise money for Canada’s Olympic and Paralympic athletes but part of the show in each city was a cooking competition between the top ten local chefs. We awarded a gold medal to the winning chef from each city and invited them to Whistler for the weekend of February 1 through 4, to compete for the ultimate title. My challenge was to think of a format for the Championship that would truly test the chefs and in the end we came up with a three-part competition.

Out for the County

Posted on February 12, 2007

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When the good folks at Myriad Restaurant Group in New York telephoned certain top seafood suppliers in Toronto, this week, checking on the quality and availability of fish up here, rumours swiftly circulated that a branch of Nobu might soon be coming to town. An intriguing notion but quickly squelched, alas, by a call to the States. No plans exist for a Nobu Toronto. So were those enquiries purely hypothetical? Just idle curiosity on the part of a New York restaurant company? How peculiar.

New York and breakfast

Posted on March 26, 2007

Just got back from a 72-hour, 9-restaurant eating visit to New York City—not a feeding frenzy, more an exercise in relentlessly sustained satiety. With me was Nathan Isberg, chef at Czehoski and Coca, who proved a thoroughly delightful travelling companion, partly because we seem to like pretty much the same kind of food but also because he generously bought me the latest copy of Seaways’ Ships in Scale magazine. He certainly knows how to butter up a critic. We encountered some unexpected disappointments but they were more than made up for by inspired cooking at Casa Mono, Del Posto, Blue Ribbon Brasserie (the Manhattan one, not the Brooklyn one) and The Spotted Pig. Did we eat a lot of duck eggs? I rather think so, but with duck eggs even two can seem like a lot. I must get my notes in order and generally sort through the mare’s nest of memories that remain from the trip, separate fact from fancy, and fashion the more accurate bits into a column for June’s Toronto Life.

The cheese stands alone

Posted on April 2, 2007

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Saturday was a most exciting day for this cheese-eating peacemonkey, when I had the signal honour of being inducted into the Confrérie des chevaliers du Taste Fromage de France. In all, nine of us were dubbed Chevalier in a splendid ceremony held at Cheese Boutique while members of the public stood and cheered and mounted knights, maidens, trumpeters and a falconer from Medieval Times put on a show both inside and outside the store. The Grand Maître of our order, legendary cheesemaker and cheese merchant, Christian Room, came from Paris to do the honours, surrounded by officers of the Confrérie, all of them resplendent in green robes and feathered hats. An avatar of the god Krishna was an unexpected but welcome guest (see photo), joining the group at the microphone. Then the newly minted chevaliers plunged our swords into a sumptuous strawberry and pistachio-marzipan cake the size of a tabletop made by Amuse-Bouche’s Bertrand Alépée.

Steamed muscles

Posted on April 9, 2007

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It’s amazing how a casual remark can alter weather patterns across the planet. Last week, I pointed out to a friend that I had miraculously escaped ice storms in four different countries this winter, arriving in their wake in time to enjoy sunshine and unseasonably warm afternoons in London, Greece, New York and Toronto. I really should know better. All the weather demons, the demiurges of tempest and drought, storm-riding banshees, rain-bringing brumal cluricauns and silent white vampires of nocturnal snowfall must have overheard my comment and blatt! Temperatures plummet. My rhubarb had just pushed its bloody knuckles through the mud. My tulips were doing their sinuous shoot-dance whispering “we are tulips” in that strangely sibbilant high-pitched Dutch accent tulips have. All the lilies were reaching faceless green fingers towards the light, like Cadmus’s teeth. Will they now survive? Will they be nipped in the bud? Oh God, what have I done?

La grande boutique

Posted on April 23, 2007

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Now it can be told. Last Friday, Fatos Pristine, the laird of Cheese Boutique, and his sons signed the papers on a 4000-square-foot property right across the road from the Boutique. They have been thinking about expanding for a long time, pondering the wisdom of opening a new branch downtown or uptown. “But my father pointed out that one of the main things people enjoy about Cheese Boutique is that it’s a family business,” says Afrim Pristine. “Our customers like seeing us all together and hard at work—my dad, my mom, my brothers…” When 18 Ripley Avenue became available, the die was cast. As well as being across the street, the property has other unique attributes. Long ago, it was a gun shop that sold firearms to the police and in the basement is a 100-foot tunnel where the weapons were tested. It’s cool, dark and moist—a perfect “cave” for ageing cheese. Within minutes of signing the lease, Afrim was on the phone ordering 600 wheels of manchego and 300 wheels of parmiggiano reggiano specifically for the new tunnel. Now he’s working on designs for some sort of conveyor belt that will silently and gently move the cheeses as they age in the damp darkness, communicating one to another in achingly slow, reassuring, telepathic cheese-speak.

Up the ramp

Posted on May 7, 2007

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To Eigensinn Farm yesterday for Michael Stadtländer’s Wild Leek Festival, a fundraiser for local women’s shelters. It was a glorious day with a cloudless forget-me-not sky and warm sunshine flooding the broad, deep dell in the maple forest. You forget how much sun reaches the forest floor when there are no leaves on the trees. There were patches of wild leeks on the northerly ridge—bright green against the grey-brown carpet of leaf litter—though most of them grow in another part of the property. To either side of the pathways little trout lilies were everywhere—just delicate single green leaves. “You can eat them, too,” said Michael, picking one each for those of us who were standing close to him. It tasted as sweet as a corn seedling.

Willi Fida

Posted on May 13, 2007

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Just about 21 years ago, when I was a bran-new freelancer with an occasional gig at Toronto Life, the food editor at the time, Joseph Hoare, sent me down to the Harbourcastle Hilton to cover a press conference. There were three chefs hanging around in whites—all of them European, as was the custom, if not quite the rule, in those days: the Hilton’s executive chef, the great Albert Schnell, the restaurant chef for the hotel’s flagship restaurant, Willi Fida, and his sous chef, Marc Thuet, a big bear of a guy who had just been sent over to Canada by Anton Mosimann of the Dorchester in England. (Mosimann had worked under Schnell in the ’60s in Montreal.)

Hello, Saylor

Posted on May 21, 2007

An unfulfilled ambition for the long weekend was to get out of the city, preferably to Bloomfield in Prince Edward County to check out a new café that opened there on May 19th. It’s called Saylor’s Café (274 Main St., 613-393-5387) and is rumoured to serve a particularly delicious soup of local asparagus, potato and roasted red onion. I have never met the two women who own and run the place—Marnie Woodrow and Eliza Clark —but I have been a longtime fan of Woodrow’s writing since I first read her book of short stories, In The Spice House. It sits on my small shelf of indispensible food writing and, like her online journal can be read and re-read for pleasure and inspiration.

In the raw

Posted on June 11, 2007

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I’ve been spending some time with Patrick McMurray’s new book, Consider The Oyster: A Shucker’s Field Guide, (McClelland and Stewart/Madison Press). It’s a handsome little volume, well illustrated with photographs of shuckers and shucking competitions, old oyster markets and people eating oysters. The shots of actual oyster beds are worth lingering over and of course there’s a family album of all the many different kinds of oyster that pass through McMurray’s Toronto restaurant, Starfish, each pic surrounded by lore, history and tasting notes. That alone makes the book a vital vade mecum for the itinerant Ostreavore—not to mention the chapter on the different shucking techniques of recent world champions (himself included).

Gluttons

Posted on July 3, 2007

To Winnipeg on a flying visit to eat at Gluttons, the specialty food store and bistro at 842 Corydon Avenue (204-475-5714). It’s an interesting place, on the cusp of suburban Winnipeg and its Little Italy area, housed in a 1919 building that was originally a bank, then a fur storage ,and is now Gluttons, owned by a most hospitable young man called Jameson Watermulder. The real reason for my visit, however, is that the chef there is none other than Makoto Ono who won Gold Medal Plates Grand Finale, the Canadian Culinary Championship in February, beating out such established stars as Mark McEwan and Robert Clark, and I’ve been meaning to pay him a visit for ages.

Crystal Five

Posted on July 9, 2007

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I was sitting in the ROM’s new restaurant, C5, late last week, when the mimolette question arose yet again. Properly aged mimolette is one of my absolute favourite cheeses. A whole one looks like a beaten-up stone cannonball until you prize it open. Inside, the paste is dark orange and so firm that it’s better to dig out fragments with a wedge than try to cut it with a knife. The flavour is bizarrely rich, like aged gouda only much more so—like hazelnuts and caramel and condensed milk and salt—incredibly delicious and with a finish as long and intense as Göttedamarung. I think it would be my desert island cheese. Indeed, I have always imagined this was the cheese that Ben Gunn fantasized about and begged for after his sad marooning. The Mimolette Question, predictably enough, is what wine do you serve with this potent Boule de Lille? The classic answer is a dark, tannic Cahors, but it’s very hard to find any Cahors in Toronto, and Argentinian Malbec (same grape, different hemisphere) is too polite to do the trick. I recently tried some other wines with a hunk of the orange god but they gave up completely and disappeared on the palate—even Ontario Baco Noir and a decent Chilean Cabernet Sauvignon that filled my head like blueberry paint but had no answer for the mimolette. Port? Nah. Islay single malt? I poured a dram of Ardbeg which is as pungently phenolic as any spirit known to man—like drinking iodine—but it and the cheese spoke different languages. Save the Ardbeg for an aged cabrales—now that’s a passionate marriage. I’m told that an old sweet Vouvray can charm mimolette but it, like a good Cahors, is not available on the ROM’s rather expensive but as yet not very extensive wine list. So the cheese and I were left to each other’s company, unwined but otherwise happy.

Four entrances and an exit

Posted on July 23, 2007

I went to Amaya on Thursday and enjoyed myself no end. Call the cooking there New Indian or Contemporary Subcontinental—or better yet, don’t. It’s more like the way very good, rather sophisticated Indian friends cook in their homes with fresh textures and subtle spicing. But the facts, the facts…! Amaya is on Bayview Avenue, where JOV Bistro used to be. Derek Valleau (ex Crush) and Hemant Bhagwani (who owns Mantra in Burlington) are the proprietors, working the room as good owners should, and they have brought the brilliant and charming Lynn Stimpson in as manager from Cava (and a great many other places—she’s a career front-of-house star with a CV as long as the Nile). The chef, Dinesh Butola, also comes from Mantra and he knows his stuff. We finally have someone to contend with Vancouver’s Vikram Vij and with the team at Amaya in London, England (no relation—and no comparison, either, since our Amaya is content to woo Leaside while the London version aims to be the sexiest, haughtiest venue ever).

Pork and pinot

Posted on July 30, 2007

My daughter has secured a summer job as staff photographer at a camp near Minden. She returns to the city for three days while the cohorts of unruly children change—which is heaven for this doting p. who wants nothing more than to cook for her. After a month of wieners and frozen hash browns, she craves flavour and gorges on gravadlax, roast beef and maki rolls. I send her back with a cache of Tabasco, hoping she’ll use it to brighten her lunches not startle some foe by spiking his milk shake. I never went to camp. We didn’t have them in England. Much to my regret.

Hot off the barbie

Posted on August 3, 2007

I’m posting early this week to give everyone a chance to participate in the World’s Longest Barbecue on Saturday, August 4th. It is the brainchild—love child?—of our most indomitable culinary activist and all-round gastropatriot Anita Stewart, and the instructions can be found here. As can the details of the grand prize—a Weber Genesis E 310 gas grill valued at $899. I’ll be on Corfu by the time you read this but I will take part, doing my bit by firing up the charcoal barbecue on my terrace (using coarse chunks of olive charcoal burnt by pals in the village) to grill whatever meat is available but finishing it with a very Canadian maple syrup-based barbecue glaze.

Salad Days

Posted on August 27, 2007

Three skinny feral cats have fallen in love with my wife and follow her everywhere like a retinue of tiny servants. It might be Wendy’s personality or it might be her habit of opening tins of tuna for them twice a day. I bought some lamb chops on Thursday, intending to barbecue them. While the black and the white cats struck flamboyantly distracting poses in the courtyard to the delight of all, the grey tabby pulled the bag of meat off the kitchen counter, tore it open and ravaged the cutlets. To the victors the spoils. The cats ate the raw meat in the garden, away from the wasps.

More summer treats

Posted on September 10, 2007

Back to Toronto and happy to find that summer still lingers here, though Canadian friends (typically) are getting gleeful about the imminent glories of autumn with its brisk days, colourful trees and hockey. Talking of which, Tie Domi was sitting at the next table to me on Thursday when we had dinner at Mark McEwan’s new restaurant, One. So much more exciting than the fanfaronade of film stars and starlets also swanning about the highly glamorous room. One is already terrific—there’s a Beverley Hills buzz to the place—and the food was impressive for any restaurant that was only three days old. Ingredients of notable quality cooked simply—just what the elite like. I was particularly happy with a warm salad of roasted carrots (so tender and flavourful) paired with big chunks of avocado, fresh orange and a subtle cumin–coriander dressing. By no means complicated but such a great match of flavours and textures. It’s a bit early to be talking about the food quite yet, however. Even the hyper-organized and savvy McEwan deserves a week or two before the critics drop in—though I noticed at least two of them there, quietly forming judgements…

Youth Movements

Posted on September 17, 2007

Having finally got through the cruel deadlines that had accumulated during my self-indulgently prolonged stay in the somnolent madness of Greece, I have been catching up on old webular connections such as the Saylor’s journal. It reminds me that music is essential and hard work epiphanic and that there are friends to be made out there if we only have the courage to introduce ourselves.

A very fine day

Posted on September 24, 2007

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The picture above shows my son, Joseph, and his wife, Kayoko Sugishita, pointing at an unexpected wedding guest—a handsome red fox that trotted into the garden where their wedding was held, just after the pronouncement, and sat down among the roses for a while. It was the final detail needed to complete the afternoon—something slightly magical and strange—though just one of several blessings. Sky god Eochaid the Dagda (from whom my family is descended, according to my Uncle Bob) saw fit to give us a forget-me-not sky and warm sunshine. Katie Luong of Flower World on Spadina created exactly the bouquet and flower arrangements we had hoped for. Above all, The Charles Inn in Niagara-on-the-Lake did a superb job as the venue for the ceremony and dinner.

Under Canvas

Posted on October 1, 2007

It seems the worst sort of teasing to write about a meal that was available all through September at Splendido, knowing that particular ship will have sailed by the time you read about it. The dinner was a collaborative effort between the restaurant and Stem Wine Group, a wine agency specializing (though not exclusively) in the wines of Italy. Splendido’s sommelier, Carlo Catallo, chose six beauties from Stem’s portfolio then David Lee created a menu to flatter them. It’s something he does extraordinarily well, and the evening was gastronomic nirvana. If I had to pick one of the six courses (weeping and at gunpoint) it would be a rustic little casserole of rabbit soffritto spiked with Tuscan salami and served over orecchiette pasta—pungent, hearty but at the same time quietly elegant in its balance and textural integrity. The wine was a 2001 Brunello from Collemattoni, and it worked brilliantly. It had to because the wine from the previous course was simply terrific—Masciarelli Montepulciano d’Abruzzo "Marina Cvetic," 2004—maybe the ultimate example of what the often humble M d’A grape can do when coaxed and encouraged.

Meaty, Beaty, Big and Bouncy

Posted on October 8, 2007

Autumn is so much the favourite season of most Canadians I know (and why not? Canada does it so well) that I feel disloyal when reluctantly admitting that I find the fall melancholy to the point of bitterness. I don’t like watching things die. As an avid gardener (and fan of shambling zombie flicks), I know most of them will come back to life—but it’s still traumatic. Gastronomy offers its own take on life after death. Tasting the delectable porcine products showcased by Mario Pingue at Hart House this week made me humbly grateful to the pigs that gave their all but returned to the world as irresistibly moist and tender prosciutto, divine porchetta (which I ate on its own, without the proffered bun, but with a crisp morsel of chestnut-coloured crackling) and a lean, herb-rubbed cured loin, sliced and wrapped like a pink silk ribbon around a grissini stick. I always thought Ontario prosciutto was necessarily inferior to Italy’s product, usually dry and clumsily salty. Pingue’s Niagara product, aged in a naturally humid cave gouged from the Escarpment, is simply fabulous—swine revenant but transformed. There were plenty of other peninsula treats in the room, but I was waylaid in front of Charles Baker’s table (he was pouring his eponymous Riesling and a Wildass red and white from Stratus’s cadet label) and missed everything else.

New Beginnings

Posted on October 15, 2007

Much rejoicing in the basement rec room of my brain that England has made it (OK, somewhat implausibly) to the final of the Rugby World Cup. But the breathless tears of joy are nothing compared with the jubilation of 16 front-of-house staff at Mark McEwan’s new restaurant, One. They just found out they won the October 10 Lotto 6/49—total jackpot a rollicking $4,600,201. I’m happy for managerial supremo Tim Salmon and manager Eric McEwan (Mark’s son) who were part of the syndicate; even happier for the food runners and bussers who also take their equal cut. It works out at $287,512 each. And 56 cents. Most inspiring.

Cause and Effect

Posted on October 22, 2007

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Thursday night saw the spectacular start of the 2007 Gold Medal Plates campaign with a sold-out crowd of over 600 guests at Toronto’s most glamorous venue, The Carlu. Gold Medal Plates, if I may I remind you, raises money for Canada’s Olympic and Paralympic athletes. Our goal this year is a million bucks, and with events scheduled for seven Canadian cities, I believe we can do it. As ever, it’s the goodwill and generosity of the country’s leading chefs that bring in the high-rolling public—plus the chance to hobnob with elite athletes. Never more so than last Thursday. The multitude was in a generous mood during the silent and live auctions, inspired by an extraordinary evening of excellence in Canadian athletics, cuisine, wine and—as a new departure for GMP—music. Jim Cuddy of Blue Rodeo performed three times during the evening and almost stole the entire show when he sang a duet with Steven Page of Barenaked Ladies.

Morimoto at Rain

Posted on November 5, 2007

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To Rain early in the week for a special dinner of alternating courses cooked by Guy Rubino and guest chef, global superstar Masaharu Morimoto, also known as the Iron Chef. The two men know each other well and though Morimoto is currently promoting his first book (it’s called Morimoto, is published by DK and sells for $40 US or $50 Cdn.—I guess DK hasn’t heard about the loonie’s soaring flight or the greenback’s tumbling gyre) he was clearly here for two nights as a mark of friendship and respect to Rubino.

Lives of the Rich and Famous

Posted on December 18, 2007

It was the most amazing wine tasting of Bordeaux I had ever heard of—and I wasn’t invited. Château Haut-Brion 1982, 1989 and 2000; 10 different vintages of Château Lafite-Rothschild from 1899 to 1995; Château Margaux 1966, 1982, 1989, 1990 and 2000; Château Mouton Rothschild 1928, 1970, 1982 (in magnum), 1986 and 1989; Château Latour 1966, 1975 and 1990. It is to drool.

A Year at Les Fougères

Posted on January 7, 2008

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I lost touch with Charles Part and his wife, Jennifer Warren-Part, when they sold Loons, their restaurant on the beachy end of Queen Street East. They had opened it in 1986 and left, I think, in 1992, moving to Quebec and opening a place called Les Fougères in a rural area about 15 minutes outside Ottawa-Gatineau. By all accounts it is a delightful restaurant with an equally valuable little store where they sell the foods they prepare and give cooking lessons during the quieter months of the year. Gold Medal Plates gave me the chance to shake hands with the Parts once again after all these years by inviting them to compete at the Ottawa-Gatineau event (where they have always performed admirably well), but it isn't the same as having dinner at Loons used to be. I was just starting out as a reviewer back then and was very taken with the restaurant and their cooking. So it was a lovely surprise when they sent me a copy of their book, A Year at Les Fougères. It's published by Chelsea Books (out of Chelsea, Quebec—the same village ou se trouve Les Fougères) and is available in some good Ottawa bookstores, but the easiest way for most of us to get a copy is to buy it online through the restaurant's Web site for $34.95.

The Mother of All Parties

Posted on January 14, 2008

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This blog post, dear reader, is essentially an invitation. An invitation to a three-day gastronomical extravaganza being held on February 7th, 8th and 9th right here in our own backyard. And since you have shown the impeccable taste and good sense to click on this blog, I am delighted to offer you a unique opportunity to take part in the culmination of this amazing weekend at a substantially discounted price.

Dim Sum

Posted on January 21, 2008

About 1,200 years ago, at a time when Anglo-Saxons were still tearing roasts of meat apart with their hands, a family called Zheng left the imperial city of Tang Changan for a trip into the country. During the morning they paused at an inn, and while Madame Zheng retired to a private room, her cook improvised a fashionable meal of a dozen little delicacies. When the food was ready, Madame was summoned, but she told the party to start without her. “Dian xin,” she said. “Ignite your heart.” Which may have been the equivalent of “Knock yourself out,” but more likely meant, “Follow your heart” or “Choose what you like.” The phrase caught on, and in the south, where Cantonese, not Mandarin, was spoken, it was translated as “dim sum.”

Busy like bee

Posted on January 28, 2008

Quelle week, as they say in France—though of course one would always rather be busy and active at this age than morosely, motionlessly wealthy or monotonously toiling away for Matthew and Son. On Thursday, I played guinea pig for a series of new dishes chef Patrick Lin is introducing at the redesigned Senses—fascinating, innovative cuisine and exactly what we have patiently hoped to see from Lin since he came back from Hong Kong. The new menu kicks in once Winterlicious is over, so I’ll wait until then to share the experience in more detail.

Tasting notes

Posted on February 4, 2008

This week, they sent me out prowling the restaurants, bars, bakeries and grill rooms of Ossington Avenue, and there will be much to tell in May’s Toronto Life. But in between all the pho and sucking pig, the tequila-cured salmon and the free-form apple galettes, there was still time to squeeze in some special, extracurricular treats.

Canadian Culinary Championships: The Grand Finale

Posted on February 11, 2008

Three intensely competitive nights, three very distinct occasions. On Thursday evening, the Canadian Culinary Championship began with the black box competition held in the teaching kitchens of George Brown College. We restricted numbers to 65 guests so that the seven chefs could work in relative ease with their sous-chefs, assisted by some of the talented students at the college. GBC maestro John Higgins and I had deliberately chosen challenging items for the black box: flank steak from the brilliant Ontario supplier Top Meadow Farms (who generously sponsored all the black box ingredients), two Georgian Bay whitefish, a celery root, a bag of Ontario peanuts, a honeycomb oozing honey and (the only ingredient from outside the province) a hand of green plantains. The chefs all obeyed the rules, creating two dishes that used every ingredient plus whatever they needed from a communal pantry, and delivered the plates to the judges within the allotted time.

Senses redux

Posted on February 19, 2008

Since Claudio Aprile left Senses in the fall of 2006, the restaurant has seemed to be treading water. It was always going to be tough following Claudio’s act, but I was excited when hotelier Henry Wu brought chef Patrick Lin back from Hong Kong to man the kitchen. Lin had wowed me when he was restaurant chef at Truffles back in the early 1990s and again at Wu’s Metropolitan hotel a decade later. This time around, it seemed as if his heart wasn’t entirely engaged. The food was technically excellent—high-end French dishes of undeniable elegance—but not quite as original or exciting as I had hoped it might be. Lin’s wife and daughter were still in Hong Kong, and he was back and forth a fair bit, which may have had something to do with it. A couple of weeks ago, Lin sent word that he was about to propose a new menu for Senses—dishes he had been working on for a year—and he asked me to come by for a tasting. Delighted, I’m sure.

Kissing the Blarney stone

Posted on March 5, 2008

I love Atlantic Rim cuisine: the dramatically different smoked salmons of Norway, Scotland, Ireland and Nova Scotia; the mighty herring in all its protean manifestations; the other cold sea fish and the crabs and lobsters creeping in the benighted depths; the great arc of oysters that stretches from the shoreline of western France up through England and Galway to the Maritimes. Eating at Starfish (100 Adelaide St. E., at Jarvis St.) always reminds me of this Celtic heritage, and though I’m no more Irish than Patrick O’Brian, I like to run alongside the great cavalcade of all things Erse that trundles through our consciousness every St. Patrick’s Day, claiming a sort of kinship as a Sproule of County Antrim, though I believe our bit of the family only lingered there for a few brief generations en route from Scotland to Australia.

Also rans

Posted on March 10, 2008

It’s one of my personal rites of spring—handing out awards in the April issue of Toronto Life. Sometimes we pattern the event by categorizing superlatives, celebrating the most cowardly chicken or the most patient waiter; in other years it might be a straightforward 10 Best or Top 20 restaurants. Such rankings are entirely subjective, of course, and while some people use the list to choose where they will eat in the coming months, others delight in taking issue with it.

Last spring, the awards concentrated exclusively on new restaurants, choosing 10 good ones that had all opened in the previous year and adding another 10 that didn’t quite soar to the summit. This April, we’re trimming the form to the top 10 only—no more, no less—but not without shedding bitter tears. 2007 turned out to be a very decent vintage with many enjoyable establishments making their debuts. In the spirit of completeness, therefore, and also by way of a lead-in to the April issue, here are four more restaurants that might have made the charts in a less stellar year.

11. Foxley
Cruise Ossington any night of the week and look through the window of Tom Thai’s cozy restaurant: you’ll see people standing waiting for a table or one of the high-tops near the bar. Customers just don’t want to leave. The mood is partly responsible—so warm and relaxed, convivially loud—but mostly it’s the food. Thai came to fame as one of the four chefs at Café Asia and Youki and then starred at Tempo. Avant-garde sushi was his bag, but he has a broader range as owner-chef of Foxley, forswearing sashimi and sushi in favour of more original fusion dishes (and in the process keeping prices down to a reasonable, neighbourhood level). Absolutely not to be missed are the various ceviches on the menu, especially one involving surgically sliced sea bream marinated to order one night with yuzu, shredded shiso, crispy shallots and ground Japanese red pepper or, on another night, with kumquat and sesame. Thai’s flavours are intense and deeply layered, showing the innate balance of salt and acid, spicy heat and cool freshness that is the soul of Southeast Asian cooking. A sophisticated little wine list has been chosen with the food in mind.
207 Ossington Ave. (at Dundas St. W.), 416-534-8520.

12. Cluck, Grunt & Low
Like steak, barbecue is one of those subjects that brings out the pontifical worst in just about everybody—so opening a dedicated Q-shack amounts to breast-baring at an almost masochistic level. Not that start-up chef Paul Boehmer, or his successor, Marc Thuet, is easily crushed by criticism. I would hurry anywhere either one of them was cooking (though next time I won’t wear a pristine white shirt). My first visit was on a hot July evening, and we sat outside on the little sidewalk deck that runs up from the corner of Bloor drinking cocktails from Mason jars and watching the suckling pig on its spit. Thuet slow-cooks the meats in the combi-ovens at Cluck, Grunt & Low’s second location (1620 Bayview Ave.), but the journey to the Annex does them no harm. Not everything on the menu is epiphanic but several items come close: an awesome sandwich of pulled chicken in thyme-spiked barbecue sauce; big fatty beef ribs in a dark sticky glaze; moist, greaseless chicken deeply infused with fruitwood smoke; a simple but perfectly achieved potato salad. I wasn’t so impressed by the bland, honey-glazed lamb ribs or a side order of “Brunswick stew” that was like some kind of runny, slightly oily succotash. Then again, I would like to eat Thuet’s Wild Turkey bourbon ice cream every day for the rest of my life.
362 Bloor St. W. (at Walmer Rd.), 416-962-5050.

13. Jacobs & Co. Steakhouse
Part of the latest steak house revival, Jacobs & Co. tries so hard to be glamorous, stylish and exclusive that you can’t help but hope it succeeds, especially in a troubled Brant Street property that has seen several projects implode in recent years. The partners involved are certainly making maximum use of the building. Customers are guided downstairs, through a piano lounge and then ushered back upstairs to the dining room, passing a meat locker where sides of Pennsylvania USDA prime and Snake River Farm Idaho “wagyu” beef are dry-aging. The menu has a retro self-consciousness, offering such old-time treats as a good, rich but booze-free lobster thermidor or a version of oysters rockefeller. Most fun is the revival of the tableside caesar salad, made from scratch in the classic way with optional Spanish white anchovies. And the meat? Prices change daily but I paid $93 for an 12-ounce “wagyu” rib-eye—richly marbled, beefy, aromatic, delicious. Side vegetables like onions braised in dark stock or roasted tomatoes with feta and herbs were yummy. Frites, however, deep-fried in duck fat, were starchy heavyweights and desserts very disappointing. A place like this needs an energetic, rich, very well dressed crowd to get its engines running smoothly: we’ll see if one can be found.
12 Brant St. (at King St. W.), 416-366-0200.

14. Prime
You can imagine the thought process in the mind of George Friedmann, owner of the Windsor Arms: “What this town needs is another pricey steak house with retro flourishes and prime rib on Sundays.” Then he goes and creates it, gussying up the long narrow space that used to be the hotel’s bar, Club 22. I haven’t been in for the prime rib, but I did join the millionaire meat-and-potatoes set one evening to try a 20-ounce Alberta rib-eye (Friedmann and chef Stephen Ricci, ex-Prego Della Piazza, are fans of Canadian beef). It was excellent, barely seasoned with a little kosher salt and pepper, juicy and nicely crusted from the grill. A side of organic baby vegetables and another of pan-fried mushrooms (inexplicably called a fricassee) also hit the honest-to-goodness button on the nose. Other dishes were less successful. I know Calabrian gnocchi are supposed to be heavy and dense, unlike their northern kin, but these were leaden. And what’s a caesar salad with no discernible anchovy or garlic and the parmesan relegated to a crisp? Huge, too-sweet, cream-smothered, retro desserts like apple crisp and key lime pie are presumably intended to appeal to the greedy inner child. The steak is lovely, but the restaurant needs a good editor.
Windsor Arms Hotel, 18 St. Thomas St. (at Bloor St. W.), 416-971-9666.

Sushi and Ushi: The best place for sushi in Canada

Posted on March 24, 2008

I finally got back to Sushi Kaji after far too long an absence and had a meal that confirmed my opinion of the restaurant as the best place for sushi in Canada—including Tojo and Blue Water Café in Vancouver. Mitsuhiro Kaji has recently redecorated, and the serene little room looks much more spiffy than it did (no more glimpses of packing boxes behind curtains). Some clever artist has also repainted the mural of a giant koi behind the sushi bar and written a motto alongside—“each meeting with a fish is precious”—modified from the traditional Japanese proverb, “each meeting with a person is precious.” A new toaster oven has replaced the old beaten-up version that had sat at the right of the bar since the place opened eight years ago.

Hail Susur. Hail and Farewell

Posted on April 1, 2008

Well, it’s finally happened. After, years of rumours, Susur Lee is going to New York. To Manhattan’s Lower East Side, to be precise, where he will be opening a new restaurant in a swish new boutique hotel from the renowned Thompson Group of swish new boutique hotel fame. “My kids are older now,” explains Susur. “They can fly down to see me on their own if they want.” Susur himself will be dividing his time between here and there, becoming something of a fixture with Porter, the ultra-comfy, super-convenient airline that flies out of the Toronto Island airport. He has not yet decided on a name for the new restaurant, which is scheduled to open for New York’s fashion week in September. And though he will be personally running the new place and cooking there, he intends to keep Lee going here in Toronto. Susur, next door, will close on May 31 and the great chef doesn’t yet know what he will do with the property. Meanwhile, we have an opportunity to bid farewell. From April 8 to 19, the menu will focus on white asparagus and “a wild seafood catch.” After that, the card will feature favourite and signature dishes from years gone by. It’s a good opportunity to stock up on Susur experiences, to be cherished and brought out for comparison the next time you’re in New York and find your way to the new restaurant. “A chef has to do new things, have new adventures,” says our Susur. He’s right. But I hope he comes back again some day.

Hog wild

Posted on April 15, 2008

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Chalk one up for the nerds, the diehards, the people who stay to the bitter end of every party. At Pangaea, on Thursday, Michael Tkaczuk of Serrano Imports introduced an extraordinary prize to the city—the famous dry-cured hams of the Ibérico pig (also known as the Pata Negra or Black Foot pig) of southwestern Spain. I remember the night, years ago, when Tkaczuk first brought Serrano ham to Toronto—a soirée at Bouchon. Even then he had his sights set on the superior and world-renowned Ibérico, but it takes time to persuade Canadian bureaucrats of the virtue of foreign delicacies. Now we can taste.

Gala gala

Posted on April 22, 2008

Last year, I had the pleasure of watching the culinary team at the Royal Ontario Museum bring the old building into the modern world with a philosophically vibrant cafeteria, a highly accomplished special event schema and a fine restaurant, C5, under the soaring, pointy crown of the Michael Lee-Chin Crystal. Talking to me in a hard hat and steel-toed slippers, Connie MacDonald, the ROM’s senior director of hospitality, restaurant and retail services, told me of her plans to hold special evenings that would bring together chefs, farmers and winemakers in a sort of slow-food symbiosis. Up there on the fifth storey, it seemed like pie in the sky, but this month Connie did it with the first of four monthly events. The featured chef was Jamie Kennedy (an appropriate choice since it was Connie who first recruited him to the museum and helped him create JK ROM back in ze old days) and the winemaker was Norm Hardie, whose Prince Edward County wines have received such excellent press. They are both farmers, too, so I guess that base was covered. It turned out to be a delectable evening with some of the best Jamie Kennedy food I’ve eaten in a while.

Making progress

Posted on April 30, 2008

A tasty young rumour appears to be true—that Gordon Ramsay will be opening a restaurant in Toronto. He is currently in negotiation for space in rather a cool venue: the new condo tower planned for 1 Bloor Street East. Perhaps he’ll also turn the project into a TV show.

Dram after dram

Posted on May 21, 2008

Please forgive the long silence but I have been awa’ in Scotland, exploring a number of my favourite whisky distilleries. It has been a delightful week conducted in the varied but stimulating company of 20 people who bid on this adventure at Gold Medal Plates events across the country last fall. We were invited to rendezvous last Saturday at the premises of the Scotch Malt Whisky Society in Leith, near Edinburgh, a gracious stone building close to the docks with the grand, old-fashioned feel of a gentleman’s club. I was late, alas, thanks to a long delay on my Air Transat flight from Toronto to London Gatwick—some bozo decided to get off the aircraft just as it was pulling away from the terminal so his bag had to be found and removed. The eventual flight would have given some new ideas to Torquemada in terms of induced physical discomfort. By the time we got to Gatwick, I had missed my connection and was keenly aware, as the taxi finally carried me in from Edinburgh airport, that the rest of the group were already enjoying their first drams at the SMWS. They had saved some for me—a generous gesture that was to prove typical of the merry group.

Parties

Posted on May 27, 2008

There are parties you simply don’t want to miss, but then you do miss them and end up regretting it the rest of your life. Or at least until Tuesday. I was actually invited to Ivy Knight’s sausage party—a riotous assembly of competitive sausage-making, sausage-eating, imbibing and burlesque. Ivy describes it with typically vivid verve (and pictures) on the Gremolata blog. Wish I could have been there.

Niagara on summer’s horizon

Posted on June 4, 2008

I should have been a joiner not a writer. Renovating our new house on the edge of Chinatown is completely engrossing. These may be the longest days of the year (almost) but they wax and wane in a moment while I’m busy with screwdriver and taper’s mud. Coming home to do some actual work during the brief hours of darkness I find myself caught between two stools: as an editor trying to persuade tardy and recalcitrant writers to deliver their articles on time, and as a writer summoning ever more elaborate excuses to explain to editors why my own stories are late. It’s like playing both black and white in a game of chess—or reliving those endless whining debates of complaint and accusation with the imaginary sidekick who talks like Peter Lorre and lives inside my brain.

The Last Post

Posted on June 19, 2008

Father’s Day was busy, moving house. Neither bantling materialized, though both sent a telephone message of encouragement. The loins were weary after striding about the Distillery District from noon to nine the day before, bearing witness to One City, One Table—Luminato’s first venture into the art of gastronomy. It was a bold idea, closing Mill Street and putting up a slender, 650-foot-long dinner table dramatically draped in black, backed by a line of chefs and sous-chefs at prep stations, well over 50 by the time the day was done. The public were invited to purchase $5 tickets, each one of which would buy whatever example of imaginative street food any of the chefs had prepared. But would anyone come? We knew which chefs would be there—some personally invited, others volunteering after heeding the call to arms in this very blog. But what about the punters? I lay awake on Friday night, listening to the thunderstorm and the splashing rain. Saturday morning was pretty grey and the radio promised more downpours. But in the end the sun broke through, the afternoon was properly hot (though not quite sweltering) and the turnout was amazing. Half an hour before the event began there was a lineup for tickets and all afternoon the crowds were clamouring for nourishment. The numbers aren’t quite in, but there must have been thousands and thousands of people strolling by, admiring, buying, sitting and eating.

Chatto Bio Pic

James Chatto

James Chatto worked as a dishwasher, actor, waiter, bow tie salesman, choreen, bookseller, nanny, tennis coach, lounge singer, KFC truck driver (fired after 1 day), olive farmer and janitor before moving to Canada in 1987 and becoming a journalist. These days, he writes about food and restaurants for Toronto Life, about wine and spirits for Food & Drink and edits the menswear magazine, Harry. Two of his books are still in print: A Matter of Taste (co-written with Lucy Waverman) and The Greek For Love, a memoir of Corfu. James is married and has two delightful children.

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