Rob Rossi and Ryan Sarfeld outside the convenience store they’re turning into Bestellen
When Top Chef Canada contestant Rob Rossi quit his job as Mercatto’s head chef for “new and exciting adventures,” many assumed he’d won the competition. He hadn’t—Vancouver’s Dale MacKay beat him out in a close finale. Now, the runner-up and his business partner Ryan Sarfeld are in the throes of preparing their new College Street restaurant, Bestellen (German for “to order”), for a mid-November opening. We stopped by to check out their progress with the space, just a few blocks west of Rossi’s Top Chef Canada buddy Dustin Gallagher’s kitchen at Grace.
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By now the formula is familiar: young chefs set up small, idiosyncratic restaurant in down-at-heels neighbourhood on shoestring budget and compensate for limited chalkboard menu and no-reservations policy with good food and reasonable prices. Damon Clements and Daniel Usher, the chef-owners at Bloordale Village’s new local-focused bistro, just a few doors down from the House of Lancaster strip club, happen to do a better job with the formula than many of their peers. The cooking is outstanding much of the time: superb potato gnocchi with chopped mint, early-season asparagus, creamy, melted mascarpone and grana padano cheese, for instance, or hangar steak that’s gently charred at its edges and busting with beefy flavour on top of a caper brown-butter pan sauce. Desserts are great, none better than the tiny jam pot of chocolate mousse that tastes of expensive cocoa beans. Service is spot-on. Among the quirks here: there is no vodka or gin (the owners loathe generic white spirits). Closed Sunday and Monday. Mains $14–$20.
This friendly and inexpensive new gastropub feels more like an antidote to Bay Street than a part of it. The room is small, with just 50 seats, and the prices aren’t for masters of the universe: you can get a Stoli and tonic for $5 and a 600 mL bottle of Beau’s All Natural beer for $7. Even the wine list has plenty of interesting bottles under $50. But the cooking, by the young chef Graham Pratt, is the clincher. On a good night, The Gabardine serves up some of the city’s best pub food. The umami bomb of a cheeseburger comes topped with intensely savoury oven-roasted tomatoes and old, stinky cheddar. The mac-and-cheese, baked with aged cheddar, provolone, chèvre and parmesan, is creamy, crunchy, salty perfection. The house-smoked trout is carefully balanced and set over celeriac that’s tossed with a just-creamy-enough rémoulade. Even on an off night, the food is well prepared (if not quite so sublime): the cod croquettes that were brilliant on one visit—chunky, meaty, soaked enough to kill the saltiness but retain the flavour—were too salty on another, and the roasted chicken is also marred by a heavy hand with the salt. Mains $13–$23.
