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The latest restaurant buzz, including what’s opening, what’s closing, and where to eat, drink and be seen
The biggest concern that I’ve heard is noise and smell. I’m saying your neighbour’s dog is noisier and your green bin is smellier.
—Rookie city councillor Mary-Margaret McMahon in a Globe and Mail article, in which Joe Mihevc also points out that hens can go through nine pounds of compost in a month [Globe and Mail]
Riverdale Farm, one of the few locations in Toronto where chickens are permitted (Image: Matt Jiggins)
An end to Toronto’s backyard chicken prohibition could be in sight, depending on the contents of a city staff report expected next year. The report will make a series of recommendations on whether urban chickens, outlawed in 1983, should be allowed to peck and scratch their way back into the city’s backyards. The news came courtesy of councillor Joe Mihevc in an interview with the Toronto Sun (which once again unleashed a torrent of terrible poultry puns).
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Continuing its never-ending quest to make searching marginally easier, yesterday Google introduced the pretty awesome Recipe View. Of course, Google is already the go-to resource for amateur chefs looking for the perfect recipe, but this new feature now refines the search to make it even easier, allowing users to narrow results to show only recipes; this means no more searching for dishes and turning up definitions or other non-food-related sites. On top of that, Recipe View can filter search results based on ideal ingredients, cooking time and calorie count. The filter also includes clearly marked ratings and pictures for each recipe.
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The food world is in high anticipation of a new cookbook by—wait for it—Microsoft’s former chief technology officer, Nathan Myhrvold. Calling it a “book” may be a bit of an understatement, though. As one would expect from a dinosaur-loving, patent-seeking super-nerd, it’s more a compendium of all things cuisine-related than a simple kitchen handbook. Case in point: the 48-pound, six-volume work runs $625 U.S. ($644.14 Canadian), comes with an acrylic case and includes a waterproof kitchen manual.
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Gourmet magazine may have kicked the bucket last October, but its recent death twitches have some wondering if a resurrection is in the offing. First, June saw the launch of Gourmet Live, an iPad app that provides access to recipes, food essays and the like to fans of the foodie rag. Now Gourmet is making a print comeback in the form of three newsstand-only editions, one of which is due to hit shelves next week.
The German chocolate company Chocri caught our eye this week with an announcement that its made-to-order chocolate bars are now being shipped to Canada. Local chocoholics can now design their own confections using Chocri’s Web site createmychocolate.com, which allows users to choose from four types of base—white, milk, dark and mixed milk and white—and over 100 toppings of fruit, nuts, spices, gold flakes and grains. We’ve never tasted the products, but were intrigued since the European company uses only organic, ethically-produced chocolate from Belgium. Seems like a great way to develop either an extremely complicated chocolate fix or a gross-out monstrosity. Current examples on the site include:
“________’s Specialty PMS Bar” (Milk Chocolate with Blueberries, Sour Cherries, Cornflakes and Toasted Hazelnuts)
Nuts and Jolts (Milk and White Chocolate with Coffee, Macadamia Nuts, Bourbon Vanilla, Cocoa Nibs and Roasted Cashews)
It’s a sign of the times. Gourmet, the quintessential foodie digest that died last October, has suddenly been revived, thanks to a new iPad application called Gourmet Live. The free app will be available this fall and will give users premium access to recipes, food essays and tons of delicious photos. In the spirit of new media communities (read: minutiae swapfests), the app will also allow users to share articles via Facebook and Twitter, as well as tag favourites and access popularity rankings.
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When teenagers lie about their age, they are usually trying to get into a club or buy a skull-shaped bottle of vodka. Not the case with a few youngish cooking illiterates in Markham, who fibbed about their birthdates to score some grub from a Toronto Star’s food columnist. Such is the power of Corey Mintz’s tomato sauce—it makes people do crazy things.
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That's all, folks: simply adding rosemary can reduce cancer-causing agents in charred meat (Image: Tambako the Jaguar)
There are still some things that don’t cause cancer (yet), but barbecued meat is not one of them. Charred flesh contains heterocyclic amines (HCAs), a toxic substance that bonds to DNA, causes genetic mutations, and has been linked to pancreatic, prostate, stomach and breast cancers. The good news is that HCAs can be greatly reduced—and flavours can be greatly boosted—by barbecuing old school.
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More details of Marc Thuet’s cookbook are out as he and Biana Zorich prepare to head out west to work on the second season of Conviction Kitchen next month. The Post reports that the surprisingly expletive-free title is French Food My Way and that the book will be released in November. This may be cutting it close in terms of promotion, since the chef is scheduled to shoot a third season of his reality show in the States starting in September. The book includes 100 recipes covering breakfast, lunch and dinner, plus desserts and special meals for get-togethers.
• Celebrity chef Marc Thuet has new cookbook coming: French Food My Way [National Post]
Don't have a cow, man (Image: FotoosVanRobin)
With all the fuss over students struggling to buy food using OSAP funds, it’s easy to miss other victims of Toronto’s high cost of living: expat European investment bankers. One individual has bravely blown the lid off of their plight. On the U.K.-based financial services Web site hereisthecity.com, next to an article called “My Bonus Isn’t Big Enough,” we found (with the help of the Post) Polar Roller’s scathing missive: “The Canadian Rip-Off.” In it, he discusses his horror at having to spend more than $10 for lunch here and takes umbrage at his maid’s paycheque, which, by his reckoning, is a full 20 per cent more than he pays his cleaner back home.
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As part of a protest against the province’s student aid program, five Ontario undergraduate students are entering the annals of martyrdom by budgeting just $7.50 a day for food—apparently this is what the Ontario Student Assistance Plan (OSAP) allows them. The students will be stringently frugal for three weeks in the name of the Ontario Undergraduate Student Alliance’s Food for Thought campaign, intended to highlight the fact that OSAP doesn’t provide enough income for students. “OSAP assumes students should live below the poverty line, and that’s not good,” one student told the Star.
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The food printer: ASCII seems like a distant memory (Photo courtesy of MIT)
Hungry nerds are rejoicing over the invention of two graduate students at MIT: a three-dimensional food printer. This strange next step in food technology, dubbed Cornucopia, resembles a mutant toaster oven that, in theory, mixes up liquid flavours in canisters, heats or cools the mixture, then “extrudes” the ordered dish at the press of a button. Its inventors extol such virtues as “ultimate control” over a dish’s origin, yet something tells us 100-mile dieters won’t trust goop from a canister.
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Poutine: breakfast of champions (Photo by JoePhoto)
With little more than a week until the 2010 winter games, Americans are apparently stressing out over what to serve at their Canuck-themed Olympic parties. “I remember doing a viewing party for the Beijing Olympics, and we got a bunch of Chinese takeout,” a clueless party planner told the Sacramento Bee. He asked his Canadian friends, the local paper and even the Canadian consulate for help with his menu (since they clearly have nothing better to do).
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Backyard chicken
Since we first reported the story of Toronto Chicken, a local renegade who illegally keeps backyard hens, her struggle has galvanized pro-pullet movements across the country. Her notoriety has made it as far as Washington, D.C., where The Atlantic ran a Web piece about how fowl keepers in Vancouver and Waterloo have used petitions, public education programs and blogging power to persuade city councils to legislate hen-friendly laws. These are people fuelled most by what Toronto Chicken calls the “broader issues,” like rising food prices, E. coli scares, the local food movement and “nutritionism”—Michael Pollan’s term describing humans’ growing obsession with all that’s nutritious (or not) in their food.
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