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Posts with category ‘Out of Town’

Party Quebecois

Posted on April 3, 2006

To Quebec City for the investiture of restaurant Initiale and Auberge Saint-Antoine (with its own restaurant, Panache) into the Relais & Chateaux fold. “These two are my favourites in the city,” I’m told by Normand Laprise, chef-patron of Toqué! in Montreal, “along with Laurie Raphaël and a bistro I like called Le Café de Clocher Penché.” Local connoisseurs chime in to add L’Utopie and Jean Soulard’s stately Le Champlain at Château Frontenac.

Panini-on-the-Lake

Posted on April 10, 2006

Even not-very-patriotic English people quickly tire of the endless dissing of English food by ill-informed foreigners. It’s true that Boiled Beef and Carrots doesn’t sound all that appetizing, but the dish is sublime when prepared by an expert (my mum, for example). One could debate the matter over many pints but life is really too short for such battles. Better to silence the budding rant by citing the sandwich—nature’s perfect lunch and Albion’s second greatest gift to the world. Even when adopted by Italians and renamed panini, the sandwich exemplifies the best English character traits—practical, compact, private, sensual, mysterious, satisfying, versatile, independent.

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.

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?’”

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.

In London

Posted on July 4, 2006

England basks and fans itself in a heatwave—an extraordinary occurrence during Wimbledon fortnight—and London looks splendid, buffed and busy, the monuments gleaming in the sunshine, the parks and gardens still green in their early summer glory. I’ve been here a week, to launch my book, not really to eat, though eating has taken place—especially on Friday night at Itsu and on Saturday night when kind friends took me to Michel Roux Junior’s Le Gavroche, the 40-year-old temple of French gastronomy on Upper Brook Street. It had been a busy day with the England football team’s shameful, wasteful implosion; a victory by the rude young Scot, Andy Murray, at Wimbledon; London’s Gay Pride march and a Pink Floyd concert in Hyde Park.

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?

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.

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.

Van Inn

Posted on May 28, 2007

The Inn at Manitou has opened for its 34th season up near McKellar and was looking very spiffy in last week’s hot sunshine. The suites that climb up the steep, forested ridge are the most luxurious, their private balconies offering spectacular views down onto glittering Lake Manitouwabing. From there, it’s just a short stroll down to the main building for afternoon tea in a drawing room filled with Chinese antiques or a Negroni out on the terrace. Over on distant court number nine, diehards are getting in a last game of tennis before dinner and the pleasant pok… pok… of ball hitting racket gives a slow pulse to the early evening. Tennis was my first love and it will be my last. For others, it’s golf or canoeing, kayaking, biking and swimming—or going to the spa then lying for hours by the pool. There’s always plenty to do or not do at Manitou.

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.

Great Scott's!

Posted on December 24, 2007

In London, England for Christmas, seeing old friends and relations and staying in my mum’s flat on the Fulham Road, I am overjoyed to catch the last episode of season three of The Mighty Boosh on the television (my son gave me seasons one and two on DVD and they travel with me everywhere). I make my mum watch it and she finds it funny, even though (or perhaps because) its theme is acting and its plot hinges on the thespian rivalry between one of the protagonists (Howard Moon) and an alcoholic crab called Sammy. Meanwhile the other hero, Vince Noir, is trying to fit into a pair of very tight black drainpipe trousers so he can be cool enough to perform with a mod band he idolizes. What an amazing series of coincidences! And I’ll tell you why.

Rabbit showdown in Corfu

Posted on December 31, 2007

To Corfu for a week of monklike solitude. Thanks to the technological marvel that is Olympic Airways, I reached the island three hours late (sometime around 11 p.m.) and decided to stay in Corfu Town at the Cavalieri hotel, a former townhouse of great comfort that still retains the elegant and world-weary mood of the Venetians who built it 300 years ago. The fabulous rooftop restaurant is closed during the winter, but Greeks eat late and I was confident of finding the Rex or the Aegli open for business. Walking down Kapodistriou Street towards one of these restaurants, I was thinking of a piquant stifatho of rabbit braised with sweet baby onions in a dark sauce spiked with vinegar. Yeah, that’s it—a stifatho! The roads were wet but the clouds had moved on and an inquisitive moon peered down over the citadel, smirking a little, I thought, as I stood outside the dark and padlocked restaurants. These nights between Christmas and the New Year are treacherous with holidays. Some of the bars along the ’Spianada’s stately stone arcades were still open. Too crowded. Instead, I ended up in a café with an exclusively Latin American menu; I made do with a no-name chicken quesadilla and a glass of Chilean plonk. Did the world find Greece while my back was turned or did Greece discover the world?

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.

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.

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.

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.

Prize Noggins

Posted on April 8, 2008

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Last weekend, I went down to Niagara to research an article for a food magazine’s autumn issue on the Twenty Valley region. Had myself a ball. Zigzagging hither and thither between Beamsville, Vineland and Jordan, visiting old friends and new, I watched winter suddenly morph into spring, snowbanks melting before my very eyes, glossy green things pushing up through the sodden leaf litter. Breakfast number one at Inn on the Twenty offered views of a winter wonderland, the bushes and trees white with frost clear down to the creek. For breakfast number two, the next morning, everything was dripping and wet, the sky dazzly blue and bam! Spring.

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.

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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