When the Thompson Hotel opens later this month on Wellington, it will not only offer the inn crowd a swanky place to sleep and be seen but also give partiers a place to steady themselves after the bars close. The Counter, a 24-hour diner, will be opening on the Bathurst side of the hotel in late June. Designed by Brenda Bent (Susur Lee’s wife) and Karen Gable, the textile experts behind Madeline’s, this new diner appears to be after the affluent hot messes of the King West bar scene.
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The Fixe Is In: James Chatto on Lynn Crawford’s new restaurant, Ruby Watchco
At Lynn Crawford’s new restaurant, customers eat whatever she feels like cooking that day. The concept is bold and bossy, but the celeb chef has the talent and swagger to pull it off
I had to admire their cool. With only four hours to go before the grand opening of Ruby Watchco, the restaurant’s three owners—chef Lynn Crawford, designer Cherie Stinson and her husband, front-of-house veteran Joey Skeir—were showing no sign of nerves. They were just sitting around the lunch table at the back of the restaurant, laughing and swapping renovation stories over a bottle of pinot grigio and an excellent chicken cobb salad made by head chef Lora Kirk. If this were an episode of Restaurant Makeover, the TV show that made Crawford and Stinson celebrities, there would be cussing and tears and all sorts of last-minute nail-biting melodramas to negotiate. But everything was pretty much ready, or would be once the last of the green masking tape was peeled off the front window. Even the tall boughs of quince blossom in a vase on the bar co-operated: all the buds popped open that morning, precisely on cue.
Lynn Crawford (left) and head chef Lora Kirk at their new restaurant, Ruby Watchco, on Queen East (Image: Ryan Szulc)
The Rebirth of Booze
At the hottest restaurants, cocktails are as sophisticated as the food. Bartenders are playing with liquid nitrogen, concocting infusions, and changing the way we drink. It’s the most exciting gastronomic development in years
Smoke and firewater: Barchef, on Queen West, serves a $45 haute manhattan, a mix of whisky, vanilla cognac and bitters that arrives in a bell jar filled with hickory smoke (Image: Finn O'Hara)
There are only two kinds of cocktails—those that are dead and those that are alive—and the only way to tell them apart is to taste them. A dead drink is at best two-dimensional, merely a mixture of liquids; a living cocktail is full of motion as its flavours unfold on the palate. It’s like the difference between a paint-by-numbers canvas and a true work of art. And in this city, the dead outnumber the living by about a thousand to one.
But not for long, thanks to a handful of determined pioneers. Frankie Solarik at Barchef, Moses McIntee at Ame, Jen Agg at the Black Hoof and Bill Sweete at Sidecar make up the new avant-garde, along with Christine Sismondo, the author of the influential book Mondo Cocktail, who is opening her own place on College Street in July, wryly called the Toronto Temperance Society. Each one has a different view of what constitutes a great cocktail, but they all share a single belief: it’s high time the age of the crantini was over.
The most extreme place to observe this revolution is Barchef, the dimly lit temple of mixology on Queen West where Frankie Solarik is the celebrant. Tall, slim and bearded, wearing a black porkpie hat, he works behind a bar crowded with more than 30 spiced infusions and subtle elixirs in various flasks and jars. I’ve never seen such a set-up—like an alchemist’s laboratory, complete with the molecular foams, flavoured airs and gelatinous transubstantiations that are Solarik’s specialty. His masterpiece is a smoked vanilla manhattan, a $45 cocktail set in a bell jar filled with hickory smoke until it smells like a campfire and tastes like heaven. Read the rest of this entry »
Best New Restaurants 2010
This time last year, the future looked awfully grim. We braced for restaurant closures and recessionary menus, but 2009 was surprising. Though we lost some good places (Perigee, Truffles, Alice’s and Gamelle, in particular), and mac-and-cheese quickly wore out its welcome, it was an exciting time to dine out. Anxious restaurateurs dropped corkage fees and slashed wine markups, while chefs cooked up imaginative prix fixe menus. It suited our mood as well as our wallets: these days, Torontonians want informality. We’re still hungry for local produce and nose-to-tail dining, chefs are once again finding inspiration in Italy and Japan, and the city is finally beginning to develop a serious cocktail culture. Most encouraging of all is the number of new restaurants opening. Here, the best of the vintage.
Best New Restaurants: Toronto Life’s much-anticipated April issue is on newsstands
Toronto Life is proud to announce that James Chatto’s annual list of the city’s 10 best new restaurants is now on newsstands (his five honourable mentions can be viewed here).
The restaurants are ranked as part of “Where to Eat Now,” our 12-page food feature that also notes the trends we love, the trends we hate and the ones with which we have a love-hate relationship.
Newsstand buyers should be pleased to know that the April issue also comes with our guide to dining out in the GTA, complete with 350 star-rated reviews of Toronto Life–recommended restaurants.
Bon appétit!
Best new restaurants 2010: James Chatto names five honourable mentions
(Image: Renée Suen)
Toronto Life‘s annual ranking of the city’s 10 best new restaurants is in our April issue, on newsstands now. Despite the lacklustre economy, it’s been a banner year for eating out. Here, James Chatto picks five more new restaurants are worth lining up for.
Toronto’s most extravagant Japanese dining experience
Masaki Hashimoto’s incredibly arcane kaiseki restaurant is unique in North America. As James Chatto writes, for $300 a head, before booze, tax and tip, it had better be.
Sasha Chapman on the return of the TV dinner
The chatter started months before Mark McEwan opened the doors to his gourmet groceteria last June. The choice of location, which was then a tired strip of Lawrence East, seemed quixotic at best. As boutique shops go, it was cavernously large: at 22,000 square feet, it was 33 per cent bigger than Pusateri’s, which until then had been the first and last word in high-end groceries in Toronto. And then there was the timing. Weren’t we in the middle of a recession? Surely shoppers were trading down, looking for bargains. Would they really pay $12.95 for chicken caesar salad? Or $6.25 for a squat 250-millilitre jar of salad dressing?
David Lee and his chicken cartilage take home top honours at the Toronto edition of Gold Medal Plates
Crisp chicken skin and chicken cartilage: David Lee's winning dish at the Toronto edition of Gold Medal Plates
The bar was raised mighty high last night for the city’s haute cuisine scene with a head-to-head cook-off between some of Toronto’s most dazzling chefs. Mark McEwan (Bymark, One), Jason Bangerter (Auberge du Pommier), John Kwan (Lai Toh Heen) and seven other star cuisiniers battled it out at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre for the Toronto title of Gold Medal Plates—a national fundraiser for Canada’s Olympic and Paralympic Athletes. Held in seven cities across the country, Gold Medal Plates selects, by jury, each city’s top chefs, then asks them to create a medal-worthy meal. With plating assistance from Olympians (like dishy rower Adam Kreek), the meals are then judged by a panel of tough-to-please palates, which included food writer James Chatto (who is also GMP’s National Culinary Advisor) and last year’s Toronto winner, chef Patrick Lin.
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Carman’s Dining Club steak house finally put out of its misery
Carman's Dining Club, 1959-2009 (Photo courtesy of Google)
Arthur Carman’s storied and troubled steak house on Alexander Street went into hibernation this summer, never to wake up. This makes the restaurant—credited with introducing Toronto to garlic bread—the latest Village establishment to disappear in recent months (the list also includes Crews and Tango, Bigliardi’s, Il Fornello and Zelda’s).
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It’s official: gastropubs are the new tapas bars
The new locals: the Queen and Beaver (Photo by Jessica Darmanin)
“Food and pubs go together like frogs and lawn mowers,” wrote the unswervingly provocative British restaurant critic A. A. Gill. “Pubs don’t do food; they offer internal mops and vomit decoration.” He didn’t entirely mean it, of course: the same article ends with a declaration of passionate love for a dish he had encountered in a London pub—a thick potato soup with a large island of pressed foie gras melting in the middle. But as a general observation it seems sound enough, in Canada as well as in England. Anyone who has accidentally ordered a meal in one of our fake Irish or English chain pubs knows the fried snack food and industrial meat pies are as phony and mass-produced as the pissy commercial beer and the Sherlock Holmes decor.
• Read the rest of James Chatto’s column from the November issue of Toronto Life »
Just Opened: Haisai: James Chatto talks to Michael Stadtländer about his new, somewhat straightforward (but still deeply idiosyncratic) restaurant
If you build it, they will come: Michael Stadtländer's new Singhampton restaurant, Haisai (Photo courtesy of Haisai)
Michael Stadtländer, chef, environmentalist, multimedia artist and all-around gastronomical guru, left the world of regular restaurants behind in 1993 when he bought Eigensinn Farm, a 100-acre Grey County property where he’d prepare feasts for a few lucky guests at a time. This September, he’s returned to the fold with Haisai, a 28-seat restaurant and bakery in the village of Singhampton. The new spot shares the same whimsical style; he built all the furniture by hand and spent two years decorating the fairy tale–like rooms (think pebble-encrusted walls, seashell wall sconces, light fixtures fashioned from sawn-off wine bottles and the odd pair of antlers).
Here, we talk to the chef about his latest career move.
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Cookbook fracas: Susur Lee, Marc Thuet and other Toronto foodies displeased as Canadians left out of 100 Emerging Culinary Stars
Backcountry bias: COCO: 100 Emerging Culinary Stars Chosen by 10 of the World’s Greatest Chefs snubs Canuck chefs
The country’s top chefs and food writers are outraged that an upcoming book profiling the world’s 100 most promising chefs does not include any Canadians. The 448-page book titled COCO: 100 Emerging Culinary Stars Chosen by 10 of the World’s Greatest Chefs will also contain recipes by these young, non-Canadian chefs. When Toronto writer Shaun Smith learned that there is still one slot left in the book, he promptly started a letter-writing campaign to the COCO’s British publisher, Phaidon, making the case for squeezing in some CanCon.
The letter (full text below) explains how disappointed the signatories are with the list. It’s an impressive collection of names: 24 of Canada’s top chefs and food writers have thrown their support behind Smith’s campaign, including Susur Lee, Jamie Kennedy, Marc Thuet, Anthony Walsh, Guy Rubino, Anne Yarymowich, Lucy Waverman and Toronto Life’s own James Chatto.
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Carman’s steak house closes for the summer
Carman’s—the ivy-shrouded steak house in the gay village—is closing its doors for three months starting in June. The closure piqued our interest for two reasons: it was announced via radio, and it comes in the middle of the restaurant’s 50th anniversary year. We spoke with one staff member, who said the place has previously shuttered during the summer months and assured us that the scheduled closure isn’t recession-driven—it is meant to “give everyone a break.” Further phone inquiries were met with suspicion and more than one hang-up.
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Cluck, Grunt and Low silenced: The carnivore’s paradise closes rather abruptly
Quiet, you: Cluck, Grunt and Low gets its plug, not its pork, pulled (Photo by Alexa Clark of CheapEatsToronto.com)
The meat lovers among us were surprised and saddened by today’s unexpected news: Cluck, Grunt and Low—the Annex’s go-to ribs palace—will be shuttering for good tonight. Morale at the barbecue pit has been low since Monday, when the staff was notified that the restaurant was closing; but they were not told by either owner Wesley Thuro or the general manager. “I think the owners no longer want to play,” says a frustrated and shocked server who declined to give a name. “Given the way the economy is, April was going quite good. In fact, we were making back the money that we didn’t make during the winter months, when business tends to be slower.”
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