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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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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