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All stories relating to Michael Stadtländer

The Dish

Aprons & Icons
May 20, 2009 | 12:26 pm

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Far Niente and Four get new chefs

The interior of Far Niente, ready for the new guard (Photo by Davida)

The interior of Far Niente, ready for the new guard

Sister Bay Street restaurants Four and Far Niente are getting some fresh flavour this spring with the appointment of new chefs de cuisine. Matt Rosen, a former student of Michael Stadtländer, takes over at Four; Colborne Lane veteran Frank Romano does the same at Far Niente. The two will inject some new life into the kitchens of SIR Corp, which owns 45 eateries across Canada (including Jack Astor’s, the home of bottomless garlic bread). These swankier financial district digs belong to the company’s Signature Group, where both cooks will be marking their debuts with all-new menus created in co-operation with executive chef Gordon Mackie.

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The Dish

Restauran-TO
May 9, 2009 | 10:11 am

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Globe Bistro’s Kevin McKenna and Eigensinn Farm’s Michael Stadtländer serve up an epic eat-local dinner

It was gastronomic ecstasy at the elegant “eat local” Globe Bistro Wednesday night, when Eigensinn Farm’s Michael Stadtländer made a guest appearance to heat up the kitchen with his former student, Globe chef Kevin McKenna. A portion of the proceeds from the lavish seven-course wine-paired feast go to the Toronto East General Hospital Foundation. “That’s where I’m going to go after my first heart attack from pork,” owner Ed Ho joked. We were relieved that lamb was the order of the evening.

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The Dish

Aprons & Icons
May 5, 2009 | 2:52 pm

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Rosewater’s former chef, Paul Boehmer, jumps on the Ossington bandwagon with his new restaurant

Ossified: The avenue is changed forever (Photo by Dawn Paley)

Ossified: The avenue is changed forever (Photo by Dawn Paley)

How much more can Ossington take? A lot, it seems. The avenue’s seemingly endless gentrification will take another step this summer when chef Paul Boehmer opens his first restaurant, Böhmer. After considering Queen West and Yorkville, the former Rosewater Supper Club chef set his sights on a 5,000-square-foot single-storey building at 93 Ossington Avenue. “I see a real surge of restaurants on Ossington. It’s bringing the whole street alive, and it’s full every day,” says the chef, whose credits also include Scaramouche, Atlas and, more recently, Six Steps. “If you capture a reasonable market—like, don’t charge $45 for an entrée—and keep it to a price range where people can afford it and hang out, they’ll keep coming back.”

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The Dish

Aprons & Icons
April 8, 2009 | 7:06 am

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Cultivating talent: Michael Stadtländer’s new restaurant goes beyond eco-eats

Singhampton, Ontario is the site of Michael Stan,,,

Singhampton, Ontario, is the site of Michael Stadtländer’s new restaurant (Photo by Bev Currie)

If the farm turned fine-dining restaurant concept of Eigensinn Farm was a radical innovation, Michael Stadtländer’s new project will take the rural revolution one step further. A restaurant, bakery, film school and news network—that’s what the chef has in mind for Haisai, which is set to open in Singhampton (about eight kilometres from his famed eat-in farm) at the end of May. “We’ve been doing Eigensinn Farm for 16 years,” says the chef, “so it’s time for a little change.”

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The Dish

Read All About It
April 1, 2009 | 11:16 am

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Stadtländer’s latest, Charlie’s Burgers mystery, 900 Starbucks closures

Eigensinn gets a sibling (Photo by jembe)

Stadtländer expands (Photo by jembe)

• Good news for fans of Michael Stadtländer’s acclaimed Eigensinn Farm: the cultivator-chef will be launching a new restaurant, Haisai, in a neighbouring town. Like Eigensinn, it is based on the farm-to-table concept, though we hope that it will seat more than 12. [Reuters]

• Pasta making is an arduous process, but it shouldn’t be a perilous one. A man working a machine at a Toronto noodle plant lost an arm when the mechanism snagged him, initiating a workplace safety investigation. [National Post]

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Opening Soon
October 31, 2008 | 11:08 am

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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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Opening Soon
October 24, 2008 | 10:49 am

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Two turkeys, Hank Williams and getting back to the way things should be

I’ve been feeling a little bit stressed and stung lately—full of panic and sharp pains in my stomach—but I had some relief at the farm over Thanksgiving. My brother and I decided to give ourselves a little gut check and kill our own turkeys. I guess we were looking to reconnect with the way things used to be, for a chance to do what our grandmothers used to do. We headed over to the Chicken Lady’s place, JoAnn’s farm, to pick up two birds. When you walk around her farm, an army of turkeys, chickens, ducks and geese follows you around. It can get a little uncomfortable if you’ve got the fear. She raises heritage birds of all types, trying to strengthen their gene pools and get away from the mass-produced broiler birds that, for fattening purposes, have had all their survival skills bred out of them—to the extent that if you don’t control their feed, they will eat until their hearts cease to function. My brother and I picked a couple of turkeys. As the Chicken Lady put them in feed bags with holes cut out for their heads, she said to them, “This will be the only bad day you two are going to have.”

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Opening Soon
September 5, 2008 | 8:45 am

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Toronto’s restaurant business: The good, the bad and the ugly

I met the nasty edge of the restaurant business the other day. I was at an auction where they sell off all the leftover crap from restaurants, cafés and bars that go out of business. It is a depressing place, selling broken dreams and busted equipment—vultures picking at the last bits of restaurant failures. They sell everything from big Second Cup signs to giant Hobart mixers to espresso machines to refrigerators to stoves to the item the auctioneer described as “a real beauty—a complete mop-and-bucket set!” I was introduced to the auction’s owner, a big Floridian-looking dude who shook my hand and smirked, telling me that my hairs are going to turn grey soon and how he was looking forward to seeing my restaurant turn me into an old man. Then he walked away. This is the dark side of the business, which turns young, happy men into old and bitter men, and sends new chefs off into the night on drunken binges. There was a chef in full outfit there, running around with a bull-like demeanour, as though he was going to run over anybody who got in his way. It doesn’t have to be that way.

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Opening Soon
August 12, 2008 | 10:46 am

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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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Chatto's Digest
May 27, 2008 | 8:59 am

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Parties

There are parties you simply don’t want to miss, but then you do miss them and end up regretting it the rest of your life. Or at least until Tuesday. I was actually invited to Ivy Knight’s sausage party—a riotous assembly of competitive sausage-making, sausage-eating, imbibing and burlesque. Ivy describes it with typically vivid verve (and pictures) on the Gremolata blog. Wish I could have been there.

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Chatto's Digest
November 26, 2007 | 9:37 am

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All That Glisters

Gold Medal Plates streaked across the finish line this week with events in Edmonton and Ottawa. Now we can resume normal programming—at least for this weekend, for I’m heading down to Stratford for three days on Tuesday. Luckily my wife will be at home to feed the guppies. Here are the final reports.

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Chatto's Digest
October 29, 2007 | 10:44 am

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Coast to Coast

A huge treat this week was the world premiere of a feature-length movie, The Islands Project, written and directed by Michael Stadtländer. The great chef showed it at the Royal Cinema on College Street on Thursday evening to a large and enthusiastic crowd as part of the eco-friendly Planet in Focus film festival. First came a charming, funny and scary short documentary movie, P is for Papaya, by a young filmmaker called Aube Giroux. The story tells of her obsessive love for papayas, a passion suddenly threatened by the discovery that most of the papayas that reach us in Canada come from the U.S. and are genetically modified by the addition of a gene collected from a particular virus. Needless to say, the rest of the world shuns this Frankenfruit, but our beloved government has decided not to tell us about it, so Canadians and Americans continue to gorge. There aren’t many delightful anti-GMO films, but this is one.

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Chatto's Digest
October 22, 2007 | 9:39 am

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Cause and Effect

Thursday night saw the spectacular start of the 2007 Gold Medal Plates campaign with a sold-out crowd of over 600 guests at Toronto’s most glamorous venue, The Carlu. Gold Medal Plates, if I may I remind you, raises money for Canada’s Olympic and Paralympic athletes. Our goal this year is a million bucks, and with events scheduled for seven Canadian cities, I believe we can do it. As ever, it’s the goodwill and generosity of the country’s leading chefs that bring in the high-rolling public—plus the chance to hobnob with elite athletes. Never more so than last Thursday. The multitude was in a generous mood during the silent and live auctions, inspired by an extraordinary evening of excellence in Canadian athletics, cuisine, wine and—as a new departure for GMP—music. Jim Cuddy of Blue Rodeo performed three times during the evening and almost stole the entire show when he sang a duet with Steven Page of Barenaked Ladies.

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Chatto's Digest
October 15, 2007 | 9:57 am

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New Beginnings

Much rejoicing in the basement rec room of my brain that England has made it (OK, somewhat implausibly) to the final of the Rugby World Cup. But the breathless tears of joy are nothing compared with the jubilation of 16 front-of-house staff at Mark McEwan’s new restaurant, One. They just found out they won the October 10 Lotto 6/49—total jackpot a rollicking $4,600,201. I’m happy for managerial supremo Tim Salmon and manager Eric McEwan (Mark’s son) who were part of the syndicate; even happier for the food runners and bussers who also take their equal cut. It works out at $287,512 each. And 56 cents. Most inspiring.

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Chatto's Digest
October 1, 2007 | 9:41 am

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Under Canvas

It seems the worst sort of teasing to write about a meal that was available all through September at Splendido, knowing that particular ship will have sailed by the time you read about it. The dinner was a collaborative effort between the restaurant and Stem Wine Group, a wine agency specializing (though not exclusively) in the wines of Italy. Splendido’s sommelier, Carlo Catallo, chose six beauties from Stem’s portfolio then David Lee created a menu to flatter them. It’s something he does extraordinarily well, and the evening was gastronomic nirvana. If I had to pick one of the six courses (weeping and at gunpoint) it would be a rustic little casserole of rabbit soffritto spiked with Tuscan salami and served over orecchiette pasta—pungent, hearty but at the same time quietly elegant in its balance and textural integrity. The wine was a 2001 Brunello from Collemattoni, and it worked brilliantly. It had to because the wine from the previous course was simply terrific—Masciarelli Montepulciano d’Abruzzo “Marina Cvetic,” 2004—maybe the ultimate example of what the often humble M d’A grape can do when coaxed and encouraged.

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