Today is the first day of WinterCity, Toronto’s annual festival of outdoor concerts, plays and, most importantly, affordable food at ritzy restaurants. Winterlicious is now on and running until February 12. If you haven’t made a reservation yet, hurry up! Tables go fast. But don’t worry—we’ve selected the 70 best restaurants of the event (all reviewed by Toronto Life) and rounded up their Winterlicious menus for easy perusal. So go check it out.
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Surviving Winterlicious 2009
Célestin
The paper menus. Getting a cramp in your redial finger. Booking first, choosing dining companions after. Eating at Winterlicious is fun, but it’s just not the same as dining out. Instead of being frustrated by the comparisons, we recommend treating it less like a relaxing evening and more like a two-week sport with such events as “spot the regular dish on the Winterlicious menus” and “dodge the filler.” The winner gets great food at a steal; the loser gets a plate full of resentment. Read the rest of this entry »
The detestable, wonderful celebration of brunch
I'll pass on brunch, thanks
“I don’t do brunch.” That’s what I tell people when they ask me if I want to eat out at midday on Sunday. Brunch just doesn’t work for me. Maybe what makes it unenjoyable is that I know what’s involved in getting it on the table. I feel it’s not worth the pain for something so fleeting. It takes too much effort and goes down too fast—it’s just too fragile and sensitive to try to get right on a Sunday. With Monday always coming on fast, people expect so much on such a helpless little day. If the orange juice isn’t sweet enough, the coffee’s too cold. And if the eggs aren’t runny enough, they need more toast, more water, more everything. Throw in a hangover (or a handful of hangovers), and it’s just painful. I have a friend who’s worked her fair share of brunches. She wanted to get a T-shirt that says “Your hangover is not my problem” on the front and, on the back, “But next week, my hangover might be yours.” That pretty much sums it up.
Getting good birds in your kitchen
My brother, Chase, and I dropped by JoAnn the Chicken Lady’s farm last weekend. We were picking up a bird for me to kill, clean, pluck and eat for a photo essay Chase is working on for school. After she picked us out a nice Cornish bird, we started talking about what kinds of ducks to serve at Union. She’s been raising five breeds for the past few years and knows a few things about their characters—and not just how Muscovies, with their darker flesh, are more goosey than Pekin ducks. She has found that they tend to be a bit dumber, too, and a little more vicious with their claws. As she puts it, they are “just not as pleasant company.” Some types of Pekin ducks are like broiler chickens: “Eating machines,” she says. “It’s sad when you get to know them—you can just pick them up and toss them about like turnips.”
JoAnn wants to offer me Silver Appleyard ducks. They sound like they are going to taste really good. They were bred way back when, by an Englishman named Reginald Appleyard who wanted a good eating duck that could also lay a few eggs. JoAnn wants to build the breeding stock back up to the quality of Appleyard’s “old fashioned” birds—that is, to a commercial level, but without having all the survival skills bred out of them.
The lesson here is that by keeping the integrity of the birds’ genes intact, their survival skills, like foraging for food, make for a more balanced bird that has a richer, cleaner flavour. Basically, good genes make for good meat because the ducks can fend off disease on their own without being stuffed with antibiotics. You could say JoAnn is raising and breeding ducks to taste how they used to taste. I am looking forward to serving these sweet, plump, tasty ducks at Union. So when I write about giving Union windows, this is what I mean: cutting away the crap and building relationships with people like JoAnn so that Union, like a good, strong tree, can grow from the core.
The Cornish chicken Chase and I took back to the farm was a beautiful, tasty bird, and the photo essay was a success, too. When the professor asked Chase if this shot was staged, he told him, “No, it’s not staged. My brother just thinks his life is one long Bob Dylan song.”
The first Ontario farmers’ dinner party
The way I see it, I am only as good as my last dinner. Thesedays, however, as I wait for Union to open, I guess I am only as good as mylast blog post. So here goes: I cooked the first farmers’ dinner last Sundayup at the farm, and it was one of the best dinners I have ever made. There issomething special about cooking food for the people who raise and grow theingredients. This was a five-course meal cooked on the wood-burning stovewith everybody sitting around the kitchen table.
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Smoking my way to a unique charcuterie plate
The cold weather makes for good smoking, so I’ve been in the farm’s smokehouse a lot lately with duck breasts and suckling pork bellies from Cumbrae’s. I’ve been experimenting with Union’s future charcuterie plate: curing the duck breast overnight with a mix of coriander seeds from the garden, brown sugar, salt and some chili flakes, then smoking them with plum wood the next day and slowly roasting them afterward with maple syrup. Sliced thinly, it’s a beautiful mix of sweet, spiced fat and subtle smoked breast that is going to be a great addition to the menu. As for the pork bellies, I am still working on them. I was a little overzealous the first time around, and I gave them an unsavoury “campfire” finish. I think the smokehouse will give the meat the uniqueness I am looking for in the charcuterie plate, so I scrapped the efforts to get it from Spain. It doesn’t feel right anymore for Union to search for stuff beyond what is right here. Keep it local and do great things with it—that’s the idea.
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Butchering with the big boys at Cumbrae’s
While Union is being pieced together, I’ve been taking apart whole lambs and pigs at Cumbrae’s. I go in on Wednesdays because it’s the day they get the bodies in—that’s what they call the animals there, “bodies.” I’ve been working mostly on the lambs, which is more intense than cleaning chickens and rabbits and beef tenderloins. The atmosphere in the shop is great—full of happy, patient butchers who don’t mind taking a bit of time to show me how it’s done. The art of butchering is all about knowing where to stick the knife, and then slicing with force and conviction in order to make good, clean, straight cuts. When the knife hits bone, you take the saw and cut right through with long, strong strokes. It takes a while to get a feel for it, or you over-think and the lamb takes you apart instead (and drinking whisky the night before doesn’t help much, either).
But I tell you, there are some beautiful bodies coming into that shop. Last Wednesday, a big Angus came in. Stephen took apart the forequarter (where the prime rib lives) as it was suspended from a swivel hook. The hanging method lets gravity help; the pieces come apart when you find their seams. Stephen makes it look easy. An incision here, a cut there. It’s a beautiful thing to watch. For me, the best part is finally seeing where all the cuts come from—like the bavette, the hanger and the New York. I saw the tenderloin nestled in there, clinging to white fat, and watched the technique used to take it out. I finally understood why every tenderloin I’ve cleaned up has had ridges along its back. They sent me off with a piece of super-aged prime rib to try. I cooked it up at the farm, and the flavour in the aged fat and meat shot my dad back 50 years, to when my grandmother insisted that the butcher hang her stuff as long as he possibly could. I can’t wait to get back in there.
• Watch a video on the dry-aging process (and a number of other meat-related subjects) on Cumbrae’s TV.
A taste of the food to come
My last stint in Italy was in Siena. I got into town at 3 p.m. and found a dingy little hotel room, then stopped at an enoteca (wine bar). I had brought my A game, so I was talking to everybody in there like it was my birthday or something. I was just so damn happy to get out of that lonely hotel in Alba where I was working and living up in the storage room with a leaky roof and a hose for a shower. By dinnertime, I had drunk enough brunello to kill a small deer, so I asked for the bill, but the bartender charged me nothing because she said I had done her job for her. Then she quickly declined when I asked her to come for dinner with me. My mother had told me about a slow food restaurant called Osteria le Logge, so I drifted there by my weaving, weary self. The place looked like a library inside, with big old shelves full of books. The kitchen was beautiful and glassed-in and had all the stoves and ovens set in an island that the chefs worked around. I wasn’t looking forward to eating on my own, but luckily an Italian couple that I had just met earlier at the enoteca spotted me and invited me to their table. The guy, Francisco, has his own vineyard, and the woman was a tree farmer. They were both nice and had their hands in the earth. We talked about tree farming and wine, and we ate like kings—ravioli and rabbit and a steak that barely fit on the plate—and then we sat with Mirco, one of the owners, till three in the morning, sipping grappa and talking about the restaurant business (by then I was telling the world what I was going to do). He stressed that the big part of the game—half the battle, really—is serving stuff in your place that nobody else has and to keep it simple, “like a good engine.”
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It was Foodstock!
I was at the very first Canadian Chefs’ Congress last month. Its creator, Michael Stadtländer, is a chef, farmer, artist and dreamer; when he gets a yearning, he acts on it and creates. So when he wanted to know what chefs were cooking along the coasts and in the mountains and prairies, he found out by inviting them to his farm and calling it a congress. But it was bigger and more significant than that. It was not just about food and cooking. It was about protection and awareness; it was about how chefs must now be creative and aggressive about keeping things local, organic and sustainable; it was about protecting small farms and artisanal producers; and it was about taking a stand against cooking with harmful genetically modified ingredients. It was art.
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Chicken, splake, stools and Wilford—bringing the farm inspiration to Toronto
I spent the weekend at the farm, smoking chickens for an upcoming dinner—I dry cure them first and smoke them for a day and then barbecue them. They come out looking like Peking chicken, country style. Those smoky, sweet birds are going to be a staple at Union, along with elk tempura sliders, mirin-glazed sardines and some classics, like steak frites and maybe even red veal tartare (something I picked up in Piedmont). But we will see how that goes over. I am also talking to a few bread makers, trying to figure out how to make my own yeast from the apples at the farm; specifically, I want to make a sourdough starter, so that Union can have its own unique bread that gets better and better as the restaurant grows.
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On cooking local
Trying to cook local isn’t always easy. You have to work with what you have in front of you. And when you’re challenged, that is often when the really worthwhile culinary moments are found. When Union really gets going, I am hoping to find the inspiration that will lead to that kind of gut-instinct cooking—the kind that saves your ass when you are beaten down and you don’t think you can pull it off, but then something kicks in and you do.
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Bringing something different to Toronto
Last time, I mentioned how I was going to invite some of the Ontario farmers I’ve met for a meal made with their own food. Events like that are very useful in developing specific dishes—especially now that I have to do it for the menu at Union. For my last year in Paris, I cooked Stadtländer-inspired dinners for the Parisian elite in beautiful apartments all around the Left Bank and Neuilly. I had a really amazing waitress from Sweden named Anna; she would sing “Happy Birthday” in Swedish, and it sounded just like a German marching song. We had a lot of success; we got a couple standing ovations and, one time, after the raw tuna–fried plantain–foie gras burger made its debut, we left the apartment with 10 pissed French people chanting “Teo! Teo! Teo!” You could still hear them from the courtyard.
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Cooking local, eating well
When I think about the food that I want to slide onto the tables at Union, I always come back to the same place: the Rungis market in Paris. I worked there for a while, buying all kinds of birds and big côtes de veau, sweetbreads, mushrooms and vegetables for a company that sent it to restaurants in Dublin. Rungis is the biggest market in the world—it looks like a massive air base with hangars full of vegetables and meat. The best part about it was buying the birds and game, picking supplies from boxes packed with ducks with red ribbons and heads crowned with feathers; unskinned rabbits tucked in rows in boxes; fat, feathered capons; and milk-white Bresse chickens with blue feet and red heads—like the French flag. And right in the middle of all this chaos is an elegant glassed-in café stuffed with bruising French guys in bloodstained white jackets drinking rosy liqueurs and eating steak frites at six in the morning. It’s beautiful.
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