Tony Cohen, co-partner of the Thompson Hotel, explains:

It has an upscale feel, for a diner, but the menu has all the typical comfort foods one would expect in a diner. There are the staples, some unique twists, and the menu is for everyone. Also given that it is 24 hours, it will fill a void in Toronto for late-night diners wanting a quality food experience. Aesthetically, people can expect one of the most unique dining environments in the city. They can also expect great food, great value in an exciting environment. From burgers to an all-day breakfast sandwich, great salads and Montreal smoked meat sandwiches, there is a dish for every palate.

Toronto’s other 24-hour food options—Lakeview, Fran’s—are notoriously weak, and yet the diner concept continues to dominate the after-hours market. What might make The Counter one of a kind is upmarket design and culinary prowess. Bent and Gable have given the space a look inspired by the old boxcar restaurants of times past. According to James Chatto, who got a sneak peek at the hotel, Bent has filled The Counter with “banquettes upholstered in pewter-coloured flock, dazzling blue floor tiles and a wall of porcelain figurines.”

If nothing else, The Counter is a welcome addition to a town where there just aren’t enough places to sober up.

• New York in Toronto [Jameschatto.com]

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)

As ownership groups go, this one is remarkably well qualified. Stinson is a top designer with Yabu Pushelberg whose work often takes her to China, Hawaii and the Middle East. Until last fall, Crawford was executive chef at the Four Seasons Hotel in New York City, the most prestigious job in North American hotel cooking. Glamorous Manhattan seems a long way from this stretch of Queen Street East, just a few doors down from Jilly’s strip club and Dangerous Dan’s diner, home of the famous Big Kevorkian burger. A small restaurant like Ruby Watchco shouldn’t be too much of a challenge for a chef used to managing five unionized outlets and a team of 70 cooks and sous-chefs. Then again, this is the first place any of them has ever owned, and that brings special responsibilities.

“We have to do everything ourselves, including trying to get the printer to work,” says Crawford, recalling the teams of experts at her disposal in New York. She waves a piece of paper covered in her handwriting. “These are next week’s menus.”

The list seems remarkably short, but that’s because Ruby Watchco is built on a bold and unusual concept. Crawford and Kirk have dispensed entirely with the notion of choice. Each night, they offer one simple four-course meal—salad, main, cheese and dessert—starring whatever ingredients they are able to source that day from local farmers. The style of food has been described by one of their friends as “souped-up home cooking.” At $49 a head, however, this is no cheap table d’hôte: every dish has to deliver. No doubt, some diners find the take-it-or-leave-it attitude bossy, but Crawford makes allowances for allergies and vegetarians and thinks most people will embrace it. “When you go for dinner at a friend’s house, you don’t ask what the menu is,” she points out. “That’s what we’re doing here—saying, Trust us, it’s going to be delicious.”

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.

Solarik got his start at the age of 17 working in a cigar bar in London, Ontario, listening to gentlemen discuss the relative merits of different tobaccos, cognacs and single malts. He learned high-volume bartending in England in the 1990s and then refined his technique at Tocqueville in Manhattan. He really began to explore the possibilities of his profession when he returned to Toronto in 2001 and found work at Rain, Luce and finally Kultura. “That’s where I began doing this kind of mise en place,” he says, glancing down at the potions on the bar. “As an artist, I need to work among my colours, if you see what I mean.”

Barchef’s small but devoted congregation includes superstar chefs Susur Lee, Guy Rubino, Claudio Aprile and Grant Achatz of Alinea in Chicago. Tonight, however, Solarik is freestyling for me, improvising a cocktail to suit the mood and the moment. He finds inspiration in unusual places—the sound of a muted trumpet on Miles Davis’s Sketches of Spain and the scent of his infant son’s cucumber-and-melon bath soap. I just want something to match the charcuterie and cheeses on the bar’s minimal menu. He begins by rinsing a glass with green Chartreuse before taking an ice pick to the massive translucent block of ice on the bar, chopping out chunks for the shaker. Then he reaches for his orange-infused New Amsterdam gin, his house-made coconut bitters, the apricot bitters, a trace of fennel syrup and a dash of Amaro Lucano. Shake and strain. The amber drink shimmers in the glow of the candles. I catch the aromas of orange and spice as the cold, heavy spirits hit my tongue in a swirl of rich, bittersweet flavours—it’s like drinking polarized light. And it’s great with the cheese.

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.

By James Chatto, Photographs by Brendan Meadows and Ryan Szulc, Illustrations by Jack Dylan

Toronto Life

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!

(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.

Read the full story here >>

• Read the full story >>

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.

And the winners are David Lee (centre), Jonathan Gushue (left) and Anne Yarymowich

This year, the competition was particularly close, with David Lee of Nota Bene just edging past the competition to win gold with his avant-garde “crisp chicken skin and chicken cartilage” dish. It featured a lozenge-shaped piece of chicken skin topped with plum hoisin sauce and sour apple compote, and a piece of white breast cartilage softened to perfection over 24 hours in a pressure cooker. Langdon Hall‘s Jonathan Gushue came in a close second (barely half a percentage point separated him from the gold) with a torchon of rougié foie gras, and Frank‘s Anne Yarymowich took the bronze with a roasted and glazed pork belly from a Tamshire pig.

David Lee’s win secures him a coveted spot in the 2009 Canadian Culinary Championships on November 27 and 28 in Vancouver, where he will face off against other regional gold medalists from Edmonton, Vancouver, Calgary, St. John’s, Montreal and Ottawa.

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).

When we called the restaurant this week, we were greeted with this voice mail message:

This year, Carman celebrated his 50th anniversary in the one and same location. He has decided he will not be reopening after 50 years and thought it was time to say goodbye and to say thank you this fantastically beautiful country of Canada. What he accomplished here he could not have accomplished in the country of his birth at that time. Thank you to the countless number of people who made this possible. Peace begins at home, Carman.

It is a truly sad day those loyal to the landmark restaurant. Toronto Life food writer James Chatto documents eating at the 19th-century mansion in his 2000 memoir The Man Who Ate Toronto, which includes a brief bio of Carman (born Athanasios Karamanos), who immigrated from Greece in the ’50s. Although Chatto describes the restaurant as one of the best in Toronto, recent on-line reviews suggest that the sizzle had gone from the steak house: “Sad to see this formerly packed spot deteriorate so dramatically,” wrote a Chowhounder in 2008. “Once the notoriously garlicky purveyor of hospitality, now it is insipid, unsophisticated and expensive.”

The celebrity clientele once featured on the restaurant’s menu and Web site (no longer functional) included Al Green, Nat King Cole, Lorne Greene and Sammy Davis Jr., a sign that this was a boys’ club hangout for the real Don Drapers, not his modern-day fans. (Sara Waxman once wrote about being the only woman in the place.) The decor, as most people described it, was dark, medieval and, as another amateur reviewer writes, “something out of a vampire movie.”

In the end, 50 years is many lifetimes in the restaurant industry—especially in Toronto. We hope that Carman’s will be remembered as the joyful, high-end steak house with the perpetual aroma of garlic, rather than the relic that was left behind during its neighbourhood’s gentrification.

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 »

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.

Chef Michael Stadtländer at Feast of the Fields 2009 (Photo by Kate Allen)

Why open a new restaurant?
Well, it was meant to be a place for my son, Jonas, who’s a chef, and his wife—an opportunity for them. It was also a chance for me to create something, which is what I like to do—somewhere that would use produce from Eigensinn Farm and would be a place to go after work for a drink. Then, halfway through construction, my son and his wife packed up and went to Japan, so we had to rethink the whole thing.

And now you’re cooking at Haisai. Is Eigensinn closed?
No, it’s still available for private parties on Mondays and Tuesdays. But I can’t dance at two weddings. I’m enjoying Haisai. I kind of like being back in a real kitchen.

So it’s a return to a more conventional operation?
I wouldn’t say it’s more conventional. The room is anything but. And it’s a 12-course tasting menu with everybody coming at the same time—seven o’clock. That’s not conventional, either.

You’re cooking for twice as many people now, with twice as many courses. Is that a challenge?
These are smaller plates with maybe three elements instead of seven or eight, so it’s workable as long as people are on time and we don’t have to start the menu over again in the kitchen.

At Eigensinn, you have always been able to improvise a dish at the last minute.
That’s even more possible now. The dishes are simpler, and I don’t show you a menu.

This is the first Stadtländer wine list since your restaurant Nekah closed in 1990. How did you put it together?
Well, it’s all Ontario, which makes sense since almost all our ingredients are from the farm and the region, so I wanted our wines to reflect Ontario. And people can bring their own wine if they want. The corkage is $30.

That’s also what you charge for a jar of pickles in the bakery.
It seems like a lot of money, but when you open the jar you’ll see about eight huge cucumbers in there, all grown on the farm, so it’s good value. Our breads are organic, and almost all the flours come from Grey County. The pastries, apple strudels and plum cakes use all our own seasonal fruits.

You were always able to close Eigensinn for months at a time and travel. Can you do that with Haisai?
Right now, I don’t want to. I’m having too good a time. And winter is busy up here, with the skiers from Collingwood. Plus, in February and March I’m going to be holding dinners with luminaries from the fields of the arts, science, entertainment, the environmental movement. All sorts of people, from broadcaster Paul Kennedy to conjurer Sheldon Jafine to speakers from the David Suzuki foundation. A good thing to do on long winter evenings.

Haisai, 794079 Country Rd., RR2, Singhampton, 705-445-2748, haisairestaurantbakery.com.

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.

For the most part, the culinary A-listers say it’s Canada’s penchant for humility that led to the omission. Ame (formerly Rain) chef Guy Rubino told us that “Canadians do not celebrate Canadian talent nowhere near to the extent other countries celebrate their own talent…Books are created to sell books, and publishers/authors are going to feature chefs that will maximize their sales.” Globe food writer Lucy Waverman agrees. “We don’t toot our own horn enough so we miss out on getting included in these food lists. We don’t push what’s good even though we have many up-and-coming young chefs. I don’t know where Gordon Ramsey ate when he was here.”

Anthony Walsh of Canoe was shocked about the list. “If Jamie Kennedy was on the panel we’d get some Canadian contingent,” he says. “[The book has] a broad topic, but they should still do due diligence. It’s complete ignorance.”

Curious about the melee, we contacted the publisher in London. Phaidon’s representative, Aimee Bianca, had this to say:

We understand the disappointment of not being included. However, the decision of who is chosen in the book is not Phaidon’s, rather the 10 noted chefs who curated the emerging talents in the book. That’s what makes this book so special, that they are chefs chosen by their peers, without editorial interference.

That became obvious to us when we looked closely at the list of 99 confirmed chefs. Most of the chosen ones are from the same countries as the panel members. Here’s how the numbers break down:

CHOSEN CHEFS
Japan, six
Spain, six
Hong Kong, five
Australia, five
U.K., 17
France, 11
U.S.A., 21

PANEL OF CHEFS
Ferran Adria (Spain)
Mario Batali (U.S.)
Shannon Bennett (Australia)
Alain Ducasse (France)
Fergus Henderson (U.K.)
Yoshihiro Murata (Japan)
Gordon Ramsay (U.K.)
Rene Redzepi (Sweden)
Alice Waters (U.S.)
Jacky Yu (Hong Kong)

“I don’t know if we were snubbed because it was all personal opinion,” said Mildred’s Temple Kitchen chef and co-owner Donna Dooher, who also signed the letter. “Maybe it’s time to look internally to see what’s wrong with us because we’re the only ones who can really make a change.”

She says it’s great to see the country’s culinary community band together, something she doesn’t see very often, to raise the country’s profile. Still, Dooher isn’t bitter about the exclusion: “I’m a cookbook and food book junkie so I’ll buy it even if there’s no Canadian talent. Boycotting the book isn’t going to solve the problem.”

*This story has been updated. For further developments, click here.

FULL TEXT OF LETTER

The steak house and former club, where most mains are priced above $50, is a bit of an anomaly in its neighbourhood and on the Toronto dining scene. Carman’s golden age was back in the ’60s and ’70s—a heyday memorialized on the menus with grainy photos of Nat King Cole and Lorne Greene posing with then-youthful owner Arthur Carman (who, after 50 years, still runs the place). As a hard-working young chef, Arthur opened the restaurant at its current Alexander Street location in 1959. Accolades from local and American publications poured in. It was one of the few spots in the city that stayed open after theatre performances, attracting a late-night but sophisticated crowd. Toronto Life food writer James Chatto described his dinner as a “delicious, garlic-rubbed, charcoal-broiled strip loin” when he dined there in 1977.

Recently, though, customers’ reviews of the carnivorous cuisine have been mixed, and diners have headed elsewhere for their beef fix, leaving the Victorian-style steak house more a relic of better days amid an ever-changing neighbourhood. Here’s hoping the nostalgic steak house that survived for half a century can get its act together and reclaim some of its former glory when it reopens in the fall.

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.”

The server says that Thuro had been hands-off during the ordeal (on Friday afternoon, Thuro was in Parry Sound on another business venture and unreachable) and that the manager had already been “cut loose.” For the past few days, only the staff has been on-site, trying to hold things together until tonight, “when we run out of food.” The restaurant has been for sale for a while, but despite the prime location and sunny patio, few buyers were attracted during the recession. Rumours, however, indicate that the joint may have changed hands recently and may reopen with a new name but similar menu.

The southern barbecue pit opened to much fanfare just two years ago. It received an honourable mention from James Chatto in our guide to the best new restaurants of 2008, was voted the best place for cheap eats by BlogTO readers last year and, at one time, had two of the city’s top chefs—Marc Thuet and Paul Boehmer (Scaramouche, Opus, Atlas)—as menu consultants. Boehmer left in the restaurant’s first year to be the executive chef of the Rosewater Supper Club, and Thuet left last year to open Bite Me.

Boehmer, who is planning to open his own spot on Ossington this summer, seemed as surprised as our unnamed source to hear the news, saying he had a great experience developing the restaurant’s menu and working with Thuro. We feel his pain but are getting over our shock in order to keep an eye on the story as it develops.