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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.

The Good Fight

Posted on December 18, 2006

Toast’s comments to my November 27 posting resonate more loudly now that Michael Schmidt is on a hunger strike protesting the law that forbids the sale of raw milk.

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.

Many Small Treats

Posted on February 19, 2007

It’s good doing business with people who work on the Danforth because you tend to have meetings and brainstorming sessions at Allen’s. A visit there is always a pleasure but especially right now when proprietor John Maxwell is running his steak festival, an astonishingly brilliant idea that allows customers to order steaks purchased from many different farms and compare them. This is single estate beef and Maxwell makes no bones about the fact that the purpose of the initiative is to prove, once and for all, that Ontario grass-fed steak is superior to U.S. Prime (whatever that is from one month to the next). Had I known about all this before our meeting I would have made arrangements to stay for dinner but as things stood we only had time and room for one item from the special menu. On the advice of Mr. Maxwell, we chose a piece of meat from Barker Farm—grass-fed, corn-finished, Limousin-Angus cross, aged 42 days. Oh Lord, it was good—slightly crusty from the grill, medium rare as requested, the juicy pink, ruby-hearted flesh yielding into tenderness with a toothsome crunch, the flavour sweet and beefy. I believe Allen’s steak festival lasts until February 24. To forego it would be a sin.

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.

The Wine Tasting Challenge

Posted on April 30, 2007

To Via Allegro on Monday for the awards lunch of The Wine Tasting Challenge. It’s an extraordinary competition, created by Via Allegro’s president, Phil Sabatino, in the name of his ever-evolving brainchild, The Renaissance Project (dedicated to “the passionate rebirth of Toronto”), but now administered by the Cool Climate Oenology and Viticulture Institute at Brock University. The lunch was a splendidly dramatic occasion, complete with monsoon, thunder and powercut, though the storm held off until all present had enjoyed chef Lino Collevecchio’s gorgeous lunch.

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.

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.

Chinook thaw

Posted on June 26, 2007

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Just when I thought the little single-prop Beaver sea plane was going to crash into the rocky pine forest that lined the shores, I noticed the inlet. Then we were in amongst the trees, gliding down onto water like a dark mirror, carrying on along the passage to the hidden lodge. A weekend of salmon fishing and sea kayaking had begun.

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.

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.

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.

Coast to Coast

Posted on October 29, 2007

A huge treat this week was the world premiere of a feature-length movie, The Islands Project, written and directed by Michael Stadtländer. The great chef showed it at the Royal Cinema on College Street on Thursday evening to a large and enthusiastic crowd as part of the eco-friendly Planet in Focus film festival. First came a charming, funny and scary short documentary movie, P is for Papaya, by a young filmmaker called Aube Giroux. The story tells of her obsessive love for papayas, a passion suddenly threatened by the discovery that most of the papayas that reach us in Canada come from the U.S. and are genetically modified by the addition of a gene collected from a particular virus. Needless to say, the rest of the world shuns this Frankenfruit, but our beloved government has decided not to tell us about it, so Canadians and Americans continue to gorge. There aren’t many delightful anti-GMO films, but this is one.

Stratford Bound

Posted on November 12, 2007

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Woken yesterday morning at 6:45 a.m. by small black and white cat faces very close to mine, mewing for their breakfast. Grumble, mutter, shuffle downstairs and find no newspaper on the porch. Choking coughs and gurgles of coffee machine announce start of day. Cats crying for the outside world, though I know when I open the back door and the damp arctic air hits them they will race back indoors complaining of my cruelty. Why, then, am I smiling? Because this Ethiopian coffee that I buy from Moonbean in Kensington Market is not the first thing of surpassing excellence to pass the lips this week.

A Tale of Three Cities

Posted on November 19, 2007

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This week was very largely taken up with the Gold Medal Plates travelling folderols—flitting off to Montreal on November 13, to Vancouver the following day and then to Calgary on November 15, staging a dazzling event in each city and raising a dazzling amount of money for Canada’s Olympic and Paralympic athletes. The Calgary auction alone netted $164,950—never mind ticket sales and the pot from the other cities. Our goal of making $1 million this year seems attainable. For me, the kick of being part of it all is tasting food from the leading chefs in each city, linking up with other food writers and critics whose work doesn’t reach Toronto, being a member of a talented and exceptionally friendly team (a novel feeling for a writer who rarely leaves the solitude of his garret) and hobnobbing with some of the world’s best athletes. Then there’s the fun of hearing a live performance by Jim Cuddy of Blue Rodeo at each event and the impromptu duets he performs—with Steven Page in Toronto, Kevin Parent in Montreal and Simon Whitfield (the gold-medal triathlete) in Vancouver. It’s all terrifically good fun.

All That Glisters

Posted on November 26, 2007

Gold Medal Plates streaked across the finish line this week with events in Edmonton and Ottawa. Now we can resume normal programming—at least for this weekend, for I’m heading down to Stratford for three days on Tuesday. Luckily my wife will be at home to feed the guppies. Here are the final reports.

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.

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.

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.

Calling all chefs

Posted on May 6, 2008

Last year, the inaugural Luminato festival of “arts and creativity” was a tremendous success. In a few short weeks, the festival will again kindle the beacon of culture in Toronto, but with one major difference. This time, the art of gastronomy will be included. The event will be called One City, One Table. It takes place on Saturday, June 14, from noon to 9 p.m. in the Distillery District.

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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