Pan-fried pork chop from this year's number one restaurant (Photo by Christopher Stevenson)
James Chatto’s eagerly awaited annual ranking of the city’s best restaurants is now on-line. Find it as part of our “Where to Eat Now” package:
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Top 10 restaurants of 2009: The best of the rest
In our April issue, Toronto Life ranks the city’s 10 best restaurants and 10 best new restaurants. But even the most discriminating food critic has difficulty narrowing Toronto’s cornucopia of fabulous eateries to just 10. In two on-line exclusives, James Chatto names the restaurants that might have made the lists if the chosen few weren’t so deliciously deserving:
• “Best Restaurants—The Honourable Mentions”
• “Best New Restaurants—The Honourable Mentions”
Also rans
It’s one of my personal rites of spring—handing out awards in the April issue of Toronto Life. Sometimes we pattern the event by categorizing superlatives, celebrating the most cowardly chicken or the most patient waiter; in other years it might be a straightforward 10 Best or Top 20 restaurants. Such rankings are entirely subjective, of course, and while some people use the list to choose where they will eat in the coming months, others delight in taking issue with it.
Last spring, the awards concentrated exclusively on new restaurants, choosing 10 good ones that had all opened in the previous year and adding another 10 that didn’t quite soar to the summit. This April, we’re trimming the form to the top 10 only—no more, no less—but not without shedding bitter tears. 2007 turned out to be a very decent vintage with many enjoyable establishments making their debuts. In the spirit of completeness, therefore, and also by way of a lead-in to the April issue, here are four more restaurants that might have made the charts in a less stellar year.
11. Foxley
Cruise Ossington any night of the week and look through the window of Tom Thai’s cozy restaurant: you’ll see people standing waiting for a table or one of the high-tops near the bar. Customers just don’t want to leave. The mood is partly responsible—so warm and relaxed, convivially loud—but mostly it’s the food. Thai came to fame as one of the four chefs at Café Asia and Youki and then starred at Tempo. Avant-garde sushi was his bag, but he has a broader range as owner-chef of Foxley, forswearing sashimi and sushi in favour of more original fusion dishes (and in the process keeping prices down to a reasonable, neighbourhood level). Absolutely not to be missed are the various ceviches on the menu, especially one involving surgically sliced sea bream marinated to order one night with yuzu, shredded shiso, crispy shallots and ground Japanese red pepper or, on another night, with kumquat and sesame. Thai’s flavours are intense and deeply layered, showing the innate balance of salt and acid, spicy heat and cool freshness that is the soul of Southeast Asian cooking. A sophisticated little wine list has been chosen with the food in mind.207 Ossington Ave. (at Dundas St. W.), 416-534-8520.
Like steak, barbecue is one of those subjects that brings out the pontifical worst in just about everybody—so opening a dedicated Q-shack amounts to breast-baring at an almost masochistic level. Not that start-up chef Paul Boehmer, or his successor, Marc Thuet, is easily crushed by criticism. I would hurry anywhere either one of them was cooking (though next time I won’t wear a pristine white shirt). My first visit was on a hot July evening, and we sat outside on the little sidewalk deck that runs up from the corner of Bloor drinking cocktails from Mason jars and watching the suckling pig on its spit. Thuet slow-cooks the meats in the combi-ovens at Cluck, Grunt & Low’s second location (1620 Bayview Ave.), but the journey to the Annex does them no harm. Not everything on the menu is epiphanic but several items come close: an awesome sandwich of pulled chicken in thyme-spiked barbecue sauce; big fatty beef ribs in a dark sticky glaze; moist, greaseless chicken deeply infused with fruitwood smoke; a simple but perfectly achieved potato salad. I wasn’t so impressed by the bland, honey-glazed lamb ribs or a side order of “Brunswick stew” that was like some kind of runny, slightly oily succotash. Then again, I would like to eat Thuet’s Wild Turkey bourbon ice cream every day for the rest of my life.362 Bloor St. W. (at Walmer Rd.), 416-962-5050.
Part of the latest steak house revival, Jacobs & Co. tries so hard to be glamorous, stylish and exclusive that you can’t help but hope it succeeds, especially in a troubled Brant Street property that has seen several projects implode in recent years. The partners involved are certainly making maximum use of the building. Customers are guided downstairs, through a piano lounge and then ushered back upstairs to the dining room, passing a meat locker where sides of Pennsylvania USDA prime and Snake River Farm Idaho “wagyu” beef are dry-aging. The menu has a retro self-consciousness, offering such old-time treats as a good, rich but booze-free lobster thermidor or a version of oysters rockefeller. Most fun is the revival of the tableside caesar salad, made from scratch in the classic way with optional Spanish white anchovies. And the meat? Prices change daily but I paid $93 for an 12-ounce “wagyu” rib-eye—richly marbled, beefy, aromatic, delicious. Side vegetables like onions braised in dark stock or roasted tomatoes with feta and herbs were yummy. Frites, however, deep-fried in duck fat, were starchy heavyweights and desserts very disappointing. A place like this needs an energetic, rich, very well dressed crowd to get its engines running smoothly: we’ll see if one can be found. 12 Brant St. (at King St. W.), 416-366-0200.
14. Prime
You can imagine the thought process in the mind of George Friedmann, owner of the Windsor Arms: “What this town needs is another pricey steak house with retro flourishes and prime rib on Sundays.” Then he goes and creates it, gussying up the long narrow space that used to be the hotel’s bar, Club 22. I haven’t been in for the prime rib, but I did join the millionaire meat-and-potatoes set one evening to try a 20-ounce Alberta rib-eye (Friedmann and chef Stephen Ricci, ex-Prego Della Piazza, are fans of Canadian beef). It was excellent, barely seasoned with a little kosher salt and pepper, juicy and nicely crusted from the grill. A side of organic baby vegetables and another of pan-fried mushrooms (inexplicably called a fricassee) also hit the honest-to-goodness button on the nose. Other dishes were less successful. I know Calabrian gnocchi are supposed to be heavy and dense, unlike their northern kin, but these were leaden. And what’s a caesar salad with no discernible anchovy or garlic and the parmesan relegated to a crisp? Huge, too-sweet, cream-smothered, retro desserts like apple crisp and key lime pie are presumably intended to appeal to the greedy inner child. The steak is lovely, but the restaurant needs a good editor.Windsor Arms Hotel, 18 St. Thomas St. (at Bloor St. W.), 416-971-9666.
Hot off the barbie
I’m posting early this week to give everyone a chance to participate in the World’s Longest Barbecue on Saturday, August 4th. It is the brainchild—love child?—of our most indomitable culinary activist and all-round gastropatriot Anita Stewart, and the instructions can be found here. As can the details of the grand prize—a Weber Genesis E 310 gas grill valued at $899. I’ll be on Corfu by the time you read this but I will take part, doing my bit by firing up the charcoal barbecue on my terrace (using coarse chunks of olive charcoal burnt by pals in the village) to grill whatever meat is available but finishing it with a very Canadian maple syrup-based barbecue glaze.
Many Small Treats
It’s good doing business with people who work on the Danforth because you tend to have meetings and brainstorming sessions at Allen’s. A visit there is always a pleasure but especially right now when proprietor John Maxwell is running his steak festival, an astonishingly brilliant idea that allows customers to order steaks purchased from many different farms and compare them. This is single estate beef and Maxwell makes no bones about the fact that the purpose of the initiative is to prove, once and for all, that Ontario grass-fed steak is superior to U.S. Prime (whatever that is from one month to the next). Had I known about all this before our meeting I would have made arrangements to stay for dinner but as things stood we only had time and room for one item from the special menu. On the advice of Mr. Maxwell, we chose a piece of meat from Barker Farm—grass-fed, corn-finished, Limousin-Angus cross, aged 42 days. Oh Lord, it was good—slightly crusty from the grill, medium rare as requested, the juicy pink, ruby-hearted flesh yielding into tenderness with a toothsome crunch, the flavour sweet and beefy. I believe Allen’s steak festival lasts until February 24. To forego it would be a sin.
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Treadwell: A Father and Son Match
Many chefs and sommeliers talk of food and wine matching, but it’s always a joy to walk into a restaurant where chef and sommelier actually talk together—and then deliver outstanding matches at the table. Even better when they are a father and son with a genetically linked sense of flavour, and where the chef father has instilled passion for wine in son. It happened Sunday at Treadwell in Port Dalhousie, Niagara as James Chatto and I, along with group of 30 merrymakers, wound up our annual Tour of Niagara. Treadwell was the bon voyage lunch after a 48-hour matching extravaganza, in which we savoured and poked our way through 20 different courses and 46 wines. (There were several other great dishes and wines, some of which are covered in Chatto’s Digest this week.)
Sommelier Summary
April was the coolest month—at least, it was for me, exploring hip downtown restolounges for a future article. Only four out of the dozen visited had food you might ever want to meet again but it was the peripheral observations that proved most entertaining. A chef throwing down the towel and walking out the door when asked to cook a chicken breast for a female customer’s accessory puppy. A suave, very well-dressed couple feeding each other scallops then making out shamelessly on a banquette. A soi-disant “sommelier” who couldn’t pronounce the names of some pretty well-known grape varieties and cheerfully told me he hadn’t actually tasted any of the wines he was recommending. Quite a contrast to last Monday’s gala lunch at Via Allegro where the prizes for the 2005 Wine Tasting Challenge were handed out. The six winners (three pro, three amateur) bagged a total of $30,000 in cash, trips, Spiegelau stemware, free meals and scholarships, making it easily the most valuable sommelier competition in North America. (I think Chicago is next, with a prize of US$8,000.) Click on www.winetastingchallenge.com for the list of winners and to find out how to enter this year. Why not give it a try? The Challenge is open to everyone, a stipulation insisted upon by Felice Sabatino, president of Via Allegro, when he created the competition, which is now conducted under the auspices of CCOVI at Brock University. There’s no entry fee. Toronto Life is a sponsor, I’m proud to say.
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