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Kudos are due on two counts today for Montreal meat mecca Joe Beef. Reason No. 1: the operators of this long-lauded restaurant (David McMillan, Frédéric Morin, Meredith Erickson) have penned a volume—The Art of Living According to Joe Beef—that just took first place in the third annual Piglet Tournament of Cookbooks.
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Q&A with Nathan Myhrvold, the author of Modernist Cuisine, 2011’s most talked about cookbook
(Image: Renée Suen)
Unless you’ve been hiding under some kind of rock where no foodies are allowed, you’ve probably heard of Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking, the stunning six-volume, 2,400-page, 50-pound, $625 cookbook that came out early this year. Nathan Myhrvold, who spent five years working on the tome (three-and-a-half of them with a team of 30 in a 20,000-square-foot lab), was in town this week to speak to about 250 food and science nerds at an event hosted by The Cookbook Store at the Isabel Bader Theatre. A staggering polymath, by age 23 Myhrvold had already acquired a pair of master’s degrees (economics and geophysics) and a Princeton PhD (theoretical and mathematical physics), before working with Stephen Hawking at Cambridge, holding the chief technology officer job at Microsoft, running a patent empire called Intellectual Ventures and dabbling in photography, paleontology and, of course, cutting-edge food. We sat with Myhrvold over breakfast to talk about the surprising success of Modernist Cuisine and what the future holds for the project.
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Introducing: Petite and Sweet, a new Summerhill sweet shop and event planning boutique
Sweets counter at Petite and Sweet
What do you get when you put two high-end event planners and a cake decorator together? Petite and Sweet, a new Summerhill boutique specializing in luxe events, with a shop that showcases all their offerings, like specialty desserts, confectionery, flowers, gifts and special occasion accessories. Petite and Sweet is the spawn of two companies: Madison Eight Event Laboratories, corporate event planners, and SweetFix, which provides dessert tables for events, parties, and business meetings. At the centre of both companies is Elle Daftarian, who brought together her business partners, Casper Hydar of Madison Eight and Yolanda Gampp of SweetFix, to create the new store.
In the shop, customers can get a taste of what both constituent companies have to offer. Taking notes from Ladurée in Paris and Chanel’s white-with-black-trim motif, the boutique has a light, contemporary touch. Giant flower arrangements, crystal chandeliers, decorated tiered cakes and two white-buttoned winged chairs line the store. Special event staples like cake stands, silk flower arrangements, cookbooks, ornamental pieces, gift-wrapping and invites are also on display.
At the front of the shop is a contemporary version of a candy shop offering chocolate bars (wrapped in beautiful handmade Japanese paper), gumballs, specialty M+M’s and more. At the back you’ll find “fancy Oreos” ($2.95), dipped marshmallows ($2.75), French macarons ($2.75) and cupcakes ($3.25), as well as croissants and cookies. Italian Hausbrandt coffee and French Fauchon tea are offered, and an outdoor patio is on the way.
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- Outside the store
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- The candy and gumball station
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- Sweets counter at Petite and Sweet
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- Fauchon Tea
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- Cupcakes
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- Croissants
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- Petite and Sweet milk chocolate bars wrapped in handmade Japanese paper
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- Custom designed white chocolate–dipped “Fancy Oreos”
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- Macarons
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- Homemade marshmallow
Petite & Sweet, 420 Summerhill Ave., 647-348-7700, petiteandsweet.ca.
Rosedale-Summerhill Guide: 23 need-to-know places along Yonge Street’s poshest stretch
Yonge Street’s poshest stretch, from Ramsden Park up to the Summerhill LCBO, has two strong suits: food and decor. Locals from the tree-lined side streets keep the shops going during the week, while the weekend brings floods of shoppers from further afield. Here, our list of 23 essential restaurants, food shops, furniture stores, clothing boutiques and beauty parlours along tony Toronto’s main drag.
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Introducing: All the Best Fine Foods—the Rosedale gourmet emporium returns
All the Best’s new 2,500-square-foot home (Image: Renée Suen)
True to its name, All the Best Fine Foods has been offering high-quality ingredients and prepared foods since 1984. The purveyor of gourmet goods is known for its Rosedale home, but restoration work on the heritage building meant taking temporarily residence in a tiny neighbouring trailer for over four years. The reopening of the Summerhill institution has been a long time coming, not just for regulars, but also for the store’s founder and CEO, Jane Rodmell, and COO, Susan Bowman.
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Q&A with Vikram Vij: the celebrated Vancouver chef on his successes and why he won’t open a restaurant in Toronto
Vikram Vij at All the Best Fine Foods
Vikram Vij, chef and owner of Vancoucer haute Indian restaurants Vij’s and Rangoli, was in town this week for the Canadian Restaurant and Foodservices Association show and a series of meet and greets around the city. His namesake restaurant is well known for its no-reservation policy, long lineups and devoted fans, including New York Times columnist Mark Bittman, who once hailed it as “among the finest Indian restaurants in the world.” Recently, we sat down with the chef, restaurateur and cookbook author to talk about the reasons behind his success and why he won’t expand to Toronto.
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Holiday Gift Guide: 13 edible present ideas
We prefer to pass the holiday season by eating our way through it and forcing loved ones to do the same. So we’ve come up with 13 inventive edible gifts (and not a mini-muffin basket in sight).
See our foodie gift guide now >>
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Marc Thuet closes Conviction for good, but has two new restaurants in the works
Biana Zorich and Marc Thuet at the opening of Conviction in 2009 (Image: Karon Liu)
Just over a year after opening Conviction—the third incarnation of their flagship restaurant—chef Marc Thuet and partner Biana Zorich have closed the restaurant for good. A lapsed lease has spelled the end of team Thuet’s presence on King Street West—and the end of an era, seeing as the couple was among the first to colonize what is now a hot restaurant strip. Now they’re turning their attention to places as close as Rosedale and as far away as Alsace. Anywhere, they say, but King West.
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$644.14 for the world’s “most ambitious cookbook”
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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.
Thuet’s upcoming cookbook now has a title and release date
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]
Best cookbooks of 2009, five tips for dining with kids, Paul Sorvino gets into the tomato sauce racket
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• Lucy Waverman’s list of the top cookbooks of 2009 has (like the Junos) both Canadian and international winners. Canadian authors Jeff Crump and Bettina Schormann score for their locavore tome Earth to Table: Seasonal Recipes From an Organic Farm, though Waverman chastises them for not featuring any Canadian chefs. Prince Edward Islander Michael Smith gets a nod for The Best of Chef at Home: Essential Recipes for Today’s Kitchen. We’re intrigued, considering that Smith is incessantly advocating cooking without a recipe on his Food Network show. Internationally, chef David Chang of Momofuku (the name of his restaurants and book) gets a nod, as does Thomas Keller. [Globe and Mail]
A Toronto DIY cookbook hits the big time
(Image courtesy of authors)
“Haven’t you always wanted to tell someone to bite you?” asks Julie Albert. She is the half of the sibling duo who recently said just that to publishers—metaphorically speaking, of course—and went on to self-publish its own cookbook, titled, of course, Bite Me.
Albert and her sister, Lisa Gnat, are neither chefs nor writers (although they love to throw a good dinner party)—two facts that resulted in their cookbook concept being turned down by a major publisher. But after all the work they put into perfecting their recipes (up to eight hours a day), the pair decided the book needed to be released, so they published it themselves. So far, it has been well received; Bite Me even became the first cookbook to receive a Heather’s Pick designation from Indigo.
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In the testing kitchen with Lucy Waverman
Lucy Waverman and her three squashes (Photo by Karon Liu)
“This is why you can’t say just ‘squash’ in a recipe,” says the Toronto food writer Lucy Waverman as she and her two recipe testers sample vegetables in the kitchen of her Forest Hill home. In front of us are three bowls containing three different varieties: the visually pleasing (but watery and stringy) acorn squash, the smoky (but bland) delicata and the unanimous favourite, the buttery hubbard squash.
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Christine Cushing berates hapless cooks, risks food poisoning
Christine Cushing: "Being Greek, food is life and not just a means of not dying" (Photo by Karon Liu)
Even though Christine Cushing was a Food Network mainstay with three shows, cookbooks and her own line of food products, she vividly remembers her worst moment in the kitchen:
“I was to cook for an Italian commission dinner, and they wanted me to make risotto for 300. Once I got there, I realized it was a chefs’ conference. I needed a plan to get out of there,” she says. “It was crazy because I was in a kitchen that wasn’t mine and it was a satellite kitchen. It was a nightmare. It tasted great, but I wasn’t happy because I thought it was too gluey and it was sitting out for a while. But no matter what situation you’re in, you had to make it work. Still, don’t make risotto for 300 chefs.”
So it’s not surprising that for her new show, Fearless in the Kitchen, which premieres on Saturday, Cushing takes self-professed bad cooks to the extreme by making them cook for hundreds of people at a major event (a wedding, the Shaw festival, etc.).
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