Left: Robber’s shirt-dress, Chasse Gardée’s sandal, Ella and Elliot’s dishware for kids, Harry Rosen’s cufflinks; Right: Canuck kitsch at the Drake General Store (Image: photographs by Jay Shuster; cufflinks courtesy of Harry Rosen)
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Sales roundup: $30 off Canada Goose apparel, 20 per cent off broadloom, 15 per cent off Club Monaco
EVENTS
BLUSH PRETTY HYDRATION EVENT
Beauty Web site Blush Pretty is hosting an evening of product sampling (brands include Olay, Pantene Pro-V, Dermaglow, DaLish, Cake Beauty and Cover Girl), make-overs, hors d’oeuvre and wine. RSVP to beautymail@blushpretty.com. Oct. 25, 5–9. $20. The Hudson Condominium Party Room, 493 King St. W., blushpretty.com.
COMRADES IN CRAFT (FREE!)
This indie craft fair is an uprising against grandma-style DIY. Forget tea cozies and macramé, these Toronto-area crafters recycle and reuse materials to create pretty and unique handmade art. Keep and eye out for co-organizer Danielle Holke’s bottle cap jewellery, Priya Narasimhan’s botanical bath goodies and Melissa Hamel-Smith’s voodoo dolls. Cash only. October 17. St. David’s Church, 49 Donlands Ave., comradesincraft.com.
CREATIVE SEWING AND NEEDLEWORK FESTIVAL
With knitting, sewing and crocheting supplies moving from brick-and-mortar stores to the Web, this festival gives hobbyists the opportunity to see the goods in person. Shop for equipment, yarn, textiles and just about any crafting supply imaginable. Oct. 16 to 18. $12. Metro Toronto Convention Centre, South Bldg., 222 Bremner Blvd., creativfestival.ca.
At any moment, something great could happen
While I was digging around salvage places looking for the finishing touches for Union (like sinks and mirrors and dishes), I came across some lights that used to hang in an old theatre in Collingwood. My gut told me to buy them and put them above me in the kitchen. I think all the drama, the concrete, the ’hood, the plumbing, the loans and the anxiety that have come with building Union out of an old karaoke dive have made me look at the restaurant in a different way. I now compare the undertaking with building a theatre on a lively street, where a play will run for as long as it can. Union—with its brick walls and barn floors and great lights and horseshoe bar and open kitchen—is going to be a big stage, an opportunity to perform, to dig in a little bit and see where it can go. If building Union had been smooth, easy and on time, I would have missed the chance to understand it this way, to see what it can become. Now I can define it; I can visualize the food and the flow and the acts. I want it to be a place where people perform and lift life up a bit and feel as if they could be anywhere.
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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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When the hood of a stove gives you hope
Today, at the restaurant, I met the guy who sells stove hoods. He said, “Just call me E.T.” There is a small hood at Union now, but I need a bigger one with a better motor. I showed him the plan I had for the kitchen and braced myself for the worst, but in the end he was a welcome change from the doubters and the heavy breathers I was meeting before. He’s a can-do guy, and I left feeling a whole lot better.
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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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This stove better be worth it
I just bought a brand new 48-inch flat-top grill with two ovens underneath. I have never cooked on a flat-top before, which makes me nervous, but if it keeps me from getting bogged down and freaking out waiting for pans to heat up or burners to light in an open kitchen, it’s worth every penny. I figure, at the very least, it will help me keep the food moving and bouncing out of there simple and clean.
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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