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Posts with category ‘Seafood’

Feeling Malpeckish

Posted on April 24, 2006

Five years ago, I wrote a bitter little column in Toronto Life about oyster bars. Starfish had just opened, Oyster Boy was a year old and Rodney’s had settled in to what I still think of as the new premises on King West. All fine spots. The bitterness was because I adored oysters but was violently allergic to them—had been since I ate a bad one when I was 24—and occasional visits to an allergist continued to confirm the affliction. Sitting in her clinic, watching the pin pricks on my arm turn into swollen red welts, I tried to argue that this was only a temporary reaction. After all, I had outgrown hay fever, had learned to live with our cats. Maybe one day I would be able to eat an oyster again. “Carry an epi pen,” was the stern rejoinder.

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?’”

Tundra Lobsters

Posted on August 14, 2006

Attempting, perhaps, to ward off humanity’s cultural extinction, Sutter Home, the venerable Californian winery that gave the world Blush Zinfandel (Thank you. Thank you so very very much), has launched a new initiative that matches wines, recipes and books. To do so, they have partnered with publishers Harper Collins. I have the greatest respect for the team at Harper Collins Canada. They treated me royally when they launched A Matter of Taste (co-written with Lucy Waverman, out in paperback next month), and I have nothing but ground-kissing gratitude to offer to their marketing corps. But maybe Sutter Home isn’t quite the authoritative food-wine matchmaker one would wish for. The suggested pairing for the first book I checked—Bread Alone by Judith R. Hendricks (a novel about the emotional devastation of an abandoned trophy wife)—is Sutter Home Cabernet Sauvignon and “Oma’s Sugar Cakes." I would venture to suggest that Cabernet Sauvignon and sugar cakes might be an unorthodox match—perhaps even disastrous—but then again I haven’t read the novel. Maybe it provides a dazzling sensory bridge between dark, tannic austerity and saccharine gateaux. Harper Collins owns Tolkien’s works and I’m not sure that Elrond, Saruman and the other lads wouldn’t have favoured something a tad more sophisticated than sweet pink strawberry Zin. The company also publishes the dazzlingly brilliant, probably immortal novels of Patrick O’Brian. The protagonists, Aubrey and Maturin, have decidedly grown-up palates, favouring good quality Burgundy (the bottles with the yellow capsules) and such delicious Regency treats as shrub (rum infused with Sicilian lemons). Which reminds me that Hart Melvin, the genius behind the Gelato Fresco ice cream company, recently took time out from a family holiday in Italy to dash down to Palermo to ensure that his shipment of the suckably pungent fruit would arrive in Toronto in time for the end of the summer. Keep a weather eye out for G F’s fabulously aromatic Sicilian lemon sorbet, available in individual-sized squeeze-tubes.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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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