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.
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June 19, 2008 | 10:52 am | James Chatto
Chatto's Digest
The Last Post
June 4, 2008 | 11:27 am | James Chatto
Chatto's Digest
Niagara on summer’s horizon
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.
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May 27, 2008 | 8:59 am | James Chatto
Chatto's Digest
Parties
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.
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May 21, 2008 | 11:45 am | James Chatto
Chatto's Digest
Dram after dram
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.
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May 6, 2008 | 12:28 pm | James Chatto
Chatto's Digest
Calling all chefs
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.
April 30, 2008 | 1:52 pm | James Chatto
Chatto's Digest
Making progress
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.
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April 22, 2008 | 10:44 am | James Chatto
Chatto's Digest
Gala gala
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.
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April 15, 2008 | 10:29 am | James Chatto
Chatto's Digest
Hog wild
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.
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April 8, 2008 | 9:26 am | James Chatto
Chatto's Digest
Prize Noggins
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.
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April 1, 2008 | 3:19 pm | James Chatto
Chatto's Digest
Hail Susur. Hail and Farewell
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.
