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(Image: Joel Kimmel)
The primitive pig roast is the latest fad for cottage weekends. Like Lord of the Flies for foodies, it’s the ultimate exercise in communal cooking. With a few friends, a spit and some elbow grease, you can create an unforgettable meal.
(Image: Christopher Stevenson)
Created by The Drake Hotel’s bar manager, Jon Humphrey, the Cucumber Smash is a tight balance of sweet, sour and bitter with a refreshing blast of cool cucumber and ripe honeydew. It’s a perfect counterpoint to salty, slow-smoked barbecue.
Ingredients
5 cucumber rounds, cut ¼-inch thick
4 honeydew melon balls
½ oz. simple syrup
1 oz. freshly squeezed lemon juice
1½ oz. vodka
½ oz. Pimm’s No. 1 Cup
4 dashes Angostura bitters (available at BYOB, 972 Queen St. W., 1-877-989-8980)
Ice cubes
Club soda
A great barbecued hamburger doesn’t taste like chipotle or paprika or horseradish. It tastes like beef. Cowbell chef Mark Cutrara’s burger, made with grass-fed beef from Dingo Farms, is one of the best in the city for good reason: it’s all about the meat. Here’s how he does it.
(Image: Joel Kimmel)
The city’s latest southern-inspired restaurants are serving up smoky, tender, chin-dribbling barbecue. Who cares if it’s not authentic? It’s good
(Image: Jess Baumung)
After two long and selfless weeks of debilitating meat sweats and overconsumption-related shortness of breath, a host of minor but nonetheless traumatic flossing injuries and at least three grossly inopportune bouts of smoky, tangy, disconcertingly succulent belching, the one thing I know for certain is that the GTA, once lamented for its lack of good southern-style barbecue restaurants, has plenty of excellent choices now.
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Barque’s haute-BBQ dining room was designed by the Design Agency (Image: Daniel Barna)
With newish barbecue joints The Stockyards and Hadley’s still going gangbusters and Hardy’s set to open this June, it looks like the Big Smoke is finally starting to live up to its name. Toronto’s newest smokehouse is Barque, a laid-back Roncesvalles spot whose fare is a little lighter than the artery-clogging calorie bombs usually associated with the cuisine of the American South. “There’s no reason why barbecue needs to be heavy,” says chef and owner David Neinstein, as he slathers his homemade rub on a sky-high pile of smoker-ready ribs.
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Apparently this city has not yet had its fill of barbecue joints. Hardys: A Hogtown Brasserie, will open to the public in mid June, assuming the premises of an old Indian takeout joint at St. Clair West and Oakwood—just a few blocks away from the area’s current reigning smokehouse, The Stockyards.
ADDRESS: 64 Forest Hill Road
NEIGHBOURHOOD: Casa Loma
AGENT: Jordan Grosman and Steven N. Wagman, Forest Hill Real Estate Inc., Brokerage
PRICE: $5,995,000
THE PLACE: From the outside, this Casa Loma mansion blends in with the traditional architecture of the neighbourhood, but the contemporary interiors look like something straight out of Dwell magazine: a stark black and white kitchen is warmed up by mocha-coloured hardwood floors; the marble-walled washroom is clean-lined and sumptuous.
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The tender barbecued chicken at Tabülè
This Middle Eastern restaurant is a midtown favourite—the room is already packed when we arrive for lunch. Our order of tawük ($8.95), recommended by an attentive server, features grilled nuggets of naturally raised Mennonite chicken parked next to a mountain of fluffy rice studded with vermicelli and fried onions. Like an ode to the perfect summer barbecue, the breast meat is moist under its light, charred crust and acts as the perfect foil to a large side of fattoush ($1.50 extra)—a refreshing salad of rough-chopped cucumber and tomatoes, sliced red onion and torn, toasted pita chips doused with a tart sumac dressing. We wash everything down with a tall tumbler of orange blossom-spiked lemonade ($3.95) and think of the warm weather to come.
The cost: $19, not including tax and tip
The time: 37 minutes
Tabülè, 2009 Yonge St. (at Glebe Rd. E.), 416-483-3747, tabule.ca.
Executive chefs Tony Glitz (Real Sports Bar and Grill), Robert Bartley (Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment) and Chris Zielinski (Air Canada Centre) (Image: Renée Suen)
Toronto FC’s first home game of the season took place last Saturday against the Portland Timbers (Toronto won 2-0), but fans of the city’s Major League Soccer team have a different reason to cheer at BMO Field: a greater variety of food. The venue already has a reputation for serving some of the better concession choices in North America, but Robert Bartley, Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment’s culinary director and executive chef at BMO Field and the ACC, is adding 11 more options. The new items draw mainly from the ever-popular southern barbecue card, supplementing current selections like chip butty, scotch egg, souvlaki and a Montreal-style smoked meat sandwich. Bartley told us that the food underwent a rigorous development process that included a 40-member focus group and multiple one-handed eating-while-walking trials. We sample some of the new additions after the jump.
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Two neighbourhood restaurants serve up light-handed renditions of our rib-sticking favourites
(Image: Vanessa Heins)
The comfort food revolution has brought us much to be thankful for, including cheaper, more casual restaurants, and the glories of deep-fried mac-and-cheese, but it hasn’t exactly delivered a surge of culinary innovation. Spurred on by a sputtering economy, the comfort trend spawned a wave of barbecue joints, gourmet burger shops, neighbourhood pubs and by-the-book bistros, and it introduced childhood-evoking staples like cookies and milk to scores of restaurant menus where the “licorice root, three ways” used to be. It offered certainty when everything else around us seemed ready to collapse, not only for diners but for restaurateurs, too.
Comfort eating, like love and psychotherapy, is driven by equal measures of longing (for simpler times) and industrial-grade denial (s’mores are less fattening when they’re made with single-estate chocolate from São Tomé), powerful motivators both. So most chefs have been happy to feed our cravings without letting their own high-minded notions get in the way. Read the rest of this entry »
(Image: Lorne Bridgman)
FOR A CINQ À SEPT Read the rest of this entry »
Devoted locavores should head to Beast after work Wednesday through Friday, when former Jamie Kennedy chefs Scott and Rachelle Vivian serve up nose-to-tail small plates—including pig’s head pappardelle for only $4. Lovely Quebec and Ontario beers for pairing are also just $4; a number of wines are $5 a glass. 96 Tecumseth St., 647-352-6000.
The King of Kings is a spicy bowl of pork and ramen (Image: Gizelle Lau)
Does the Annex really need another budget-friendly Japanese restaurant? After all, the strip of Bloor Street is flooded with dozens of spots serving up cheap options for students: $4 all-day breakfasts at Futures Bakery, $6 lunch specials at Sushi on Bloor, pad Thai at Thai Basil… The list goes on.
We say yes, yes it does, and you can forget the 50-plus-item menus, cream cheese maki rolls and mediocre miso soups that characterize the neighbourhood’s dining options. At Kenzo Ramen, owners Daniel and Rose Park (she’s the chef) are perfecting authentic Japanese ramen, a skill that Rose learned in Hokkaido under one of the city’s best-known ramen chefs. It’s their second location; the first is at Dundas and Bay. Unlike most frozen and restaurant ramen, Kenzo uses homemade ingredients and no MSG; Daniel’s allergic—and besides, as he says, “It’s not good for you.”
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Pulled pork (left) and brisket sandwiches
Just in time for the cold weather, the Drake Hotel has opened a barbecue pop-up shop in its old Scoops and Tees space. “In Canada, barbecue is associated with summer, but in the south they do it rain or shine,” says chef Anthony Rose. “I grew up in the south—southern Ontario, anyway. When I was a kid, my mom would start the barbecue in February.”
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Sang Kim teaches the hungry to make sushi (Image: Karon Liu)
While news of the Drake Hotel’s barbecue pop-up shop has been circulating around the city, the hotel’s restaurant has introduced something else that’s equally intriguing: make-your-own sushi. Known as temaki, this process involves a platter of sashimi, vegetables and garnishes presented in front of diners who each have a plate of nori and sushi rice to make their own rolls. “As far as I know, no one else is doing this in Canada,” says Sang Kim, the hotel’s director of food and beverages.
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(Image: Google)
Screw autumn. And long live summer barbecues.
That’s the attitude of the Drake Hotel, which is in the process of transforming its Scoops and Tees shop into the Drake BBQ. Starting October 22, slow-cooked sandwiches will be served in this space, just two doors down from the hotel.
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