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Empire state of mind: Chris Nuttall-Smith takes on Scott Conant’s Scarpetta

Celeb chef Scott Conant opened his third outpost of Scarpetta this summer. Too bad it looks, feels and tastes like a branch plant By Chris Nuttall-Smith

(Image: Lorne Bridgman)

This city’s corps of celebrity chefs has lost some of its swagger in recent years. Lynn Crawford has retreated into what tastes like semi-retirement; Jamie Kennedy’s mismanagement cost him, and the city, his best restaurant (anybody been to Wine Bar lately?); Marc Thuet can’t seem to find a winning formula for his once-vaunted King Street space; and though I’m eager to be proven wrong on this point, Susur Lee is too busy chasing fortunes abroad to give it his best back home.

Scott Conant, on the other hand, is young and hungry, and his Scarpetta, in the new Thompson Hotel, is the first unapologetically expensive and formal room to open here since George, on Queen East, way back in 2004. Conant is also the first U.S. celebrity chef to build a satellite in Toronto. So sure, the city’s gluttonous class got excited: new blood, naked ambition, world-class cooking and all that. One chef even said privately that he hoped Scarpetta’s arrival would force the coasting locals to step up their game.

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The Hype

TIFF Talk

September 13, 2010 | 12:09 pm

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TIFF PHOTO GALLERY: Inside the Amfar party, the priciest ticket at TIFF, with Suzanne Rogers, Galen Weston, Ace of Base and Martha Wash

Musicians Cheyenne Jackson and Kelly Rowland with designer Kenneth Cole at the Amfar party, a Cinema Against AIDS fundraiser at the Carlu (Image: Karon Liu)

Last night’s Amfar party at the Carlu—a stunning, glitzy fundraiser for Cinema Against AIDS timed to coincide with TIFF—was one of the most expensive tickets in town, with tables costing up to $50,000. It was no surprise, then, to see Canada’s ultra-elite, like Suzanne Rogers, Galen and Hilary Weston and Isadore Sharp, in attendance, along with plenty of corporate sponsors. They all came to get a glimpse of the mega star power the event brings out. Martin Sheen hosted the event, and son Emilio Estevez (who got in some good-natured ribbing: “You might recognize Martin from the picket line”) presented one of the auction items. Kelly Rowland, of Destiny’s Child and solo success, helped auction, too, promising to personally serenade the highest bidder before performing an acoustic version of “When Love Takes Over.”

We thought we’d be most excited to see Ace of Base perform, but we weren’t sold on the two new female members singing a disappointing version of “The Sign.” But if that ’90s throwback band isn’t enough to make this party the most eclectic in history, check out the rest of the guest list: Kenneth Cole (fashion designer), Richard and Rana Florida (academic power couple), Caroline Mulroney (daughter of Brian), Julian Schnabel (multimedia artist), Cheyenne Jackson (30 Rock actor), Jason Pomeranc (owner of the Thompson Hotels), Bonnie Brooks (CEO of The Bay), Martha Wash (one of the original singers of “It’s Raining Men”), Susur Lee (local celeb chef), Mag Ruffman (of Road to Avonlea) and Emmanuelle Chriqui (knockout Montrealer from Entourage).

Our pictures from the night, below.

: Actor Martin Sheen, from The Way, with director and son Emilio Estevez at the amfAR party, a Cinema Against AIDS fundraiser at the Carlu (Image: Karon Liu)

: Emilio Estevez, director of The Way, with actor and dad Martin Sheen at the amfAR party, a Cinema Against AIDS fundraiser at the Carlu (Image: Karon Liu)

: Actor Martin Sheen, from The Way, at the amfAR party, a Cinema Against AIDS fundraiser at the Carlu (Image: Karon Liu)

: Emilio Estevez, director of The Way, with his fiancee, writer Sonja Magdevski at the amfAR party, a Cinema Against AIDS fundraiser at the Carlu (Image: Karon Liu)

: Designer duo Colin McAllister and Justin Ryan at the amfAR party, a Cinema Against AIDS fundraiser at the Carlu (Image: Karon Liu)

: Canadian actor Mag Ruffman at the amfAR party, a Cinema Against AIDS fundraiser at the Carlu (Image: Karon Liu)

: Kris Kwaten and actor Ryan Kwaten at the amfAR party, a Cinema Against AIDS fundraiser at the Carlu (Image: Karon Liu)

: Actor Emmanuelle Chriqui at the amfAR party, a Cinema Against AIDS fundraiser at the Carlu (Image: Karon Liu)

: Musician Kelly Rowland, who performed later, at the amfAR party, a Cinema Against AIDS fundraiser at the Carlu (Image: Karon Liu)

: Musician Kelly Rowland, who performed later, at the amfAR party, a Cinema Against AIDS fundraiser at the Carlu (Image: Karon Liu)

: Canadian politician Ruby Dhalla at the amfAR party, a Cinema Against AIDS fundraiser at the Carlu (Image: Karon Liu)

: Toronto chef Susur Lee with his son, Levi Bent-Lee, at the amfAR party, a Cinema Against AIDS fundraiser at the Carlu (Image: Karon Liu)

: Designer Kenneth Cole at the amfAR party, a Cinema Against AIDS fundraiser at the Carlu (Image: Karon Liu)

: Entertainment columnist Shinan Govani at the amfAR party, a Cinema Against AIDS fundraiser at the Carlu (Image: Karon Liu)

: Musician Cheyenne Jackson, who performed later, at the amfAR party, a Cinema Against AIDS fundraiser at the Carlu (Image: Karon Liu)

: Musicians Cheyenne Jackson and Kelly Rowland, who performed later, at the amfAR party, a Cinema Against AIDS fundraiser at the Carlu (Image: Karon Liu)

: Outgoing editor-in-chief Ciara Hunt from Hello! Canada at the amfAR party, a Cinema Against AIDS fundraiser at the Carlu (Image: Karon Liu)

: Musicians Ace of Base at the amfAR party, a Cinema Against AIDS fundraiser at the Carlu (Image: Karon Liu)

: Musicians Ace of Base at the amfAR party, a Cinema Against AIDS fundraiser at the Carlu (Image: Karon Liu)

: Musicians Ace of Base at the amfAR party, a Cinema Against AIDS fundraiser at the Carlu (Image: Karon Liu)

: Ellen Rowland with Phil Lind, vice-chairman of Rogers Communications, at the amfAR party, a Cinema Against AIDS fundraiser at the Carlu (Image: Karon Liu)

: Edward and Suzanne Rogers at the amfAR party, a Cinema Against AIDS fundraiser at the Carlu (Image: Karon Liu)

: Dignitas co-founder James Fraser and playwright David Young at the amfAR party, a Cinema Against AIDS fundraiser at the Carlu (Image: Karon Liu)

: Singer Martha Wash at the amfAR party, a Cinema Against AIDS fundraiser at the Carlu (Image: Karon Liu)

: Musicians Cheyenne Jackson and Kelly Rowland with designer Kenneth Cole at the amfAR party, a Cinema Against AIDS fundraiser at the Carlu (Image: Karon Liu)

: Swedish band Ace of Base performing at the amfAR party, a Cinema Against AIDS fundraiser at the Carlu (Image: Karon Liu)

: Swedish band Ace of Base performing at the amfAR party, a Cinema Against AIDS fundraiser at the Carlu (Image: Karon Liu)

: Swedish band Ace of Base performing at the amfAR party, a Cinema Against AIDS fundraiser at the Carlu (Image: Karon Liu)

= Find this story on our Celebrity Sightings Map, where we plot the locations of stars spotted throughout Toronto

The Dish

Opening

July 8, 2010 | 10:37 am

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The latest on Susur Lee’s new restaurant: a name, a hallway and more

After weeks of speculation, we can finally report that Susur Lee’s new restaurant—the one opening in the same space as the original Susur and the short-lived Madeline’s—will be called Lee Lounge. The name may not earn five stars for creativity, but from what we hear, it is less about charting new territory and more about Toronto’s Asian sensation returning to his eastern roots.

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The Dish

Opening

June 21, 2010 | 1:04 pm

7 Comments

Just Opened: Beast. Scott and Rachelle Vivian take over the Amuse-Bouche space

Beastly setting: the dining room at Beast (Image: Lisa Paul)

“I don’t dislike vegetarians, but my style of cooking is heavy on meat,” says chef Scott Vivian. It’s more of a warning than a defence: the Montreal-born chef has just opened a new restaurant with his wife, Rachelle, and it more than lives up to its name, Beast.

The carnivore theme is evident in the changing weekly dinner menus prepared by Scott and Luca Gatti, the sous-chef who came along when Scott and Rachelle left Wine Bar. Starters include such seasonal items as soft shell crab with foie gras, greens and jalapeño ($19), and mains include such meat-heavy dishes as pig’s head pasta with pea shoots, yolk and spaghetti ($16).

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The Dish

Neighbourhoods

June 10, 2010 | 4:00 am

38 Comments

The Danforth Guide: our 21 favourite spots along the east end’s main avenue

The east end’s main thoroughfare has long been known for two things: Greek food and the Taste of the Danforth. Over the past many years, though, homebuyers drawn to the subway line have slowly turned the long strip of two-storey brick buildings into a bustling neighbourhood that has attracted a rich selection of fine shops, independent coffee houses, Thai joints and haute cuisine restaurants. The Danforth has reached a wonderful maturity that we think should be celebrated. Here are 21 of the best reasons to cross the viaduct. By Matthew Hague. Photography by Devin Jeffrey.

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The Dish

Opening

June 7, 2010 | 12:06 pm

4 Comments

The Thompson Hotel’s new 24-hour diner has a touch of Madeline’s

When the Thompson Hotel opens later this month on Wellington, it will not only offer the inn crowd a swanky place to sleep and be seen but also give partiers a place to steady themselves after the bars close. The Counter, a 24-hour diner, will be opening on the Bathurst side of the hotel in late June. Designed by Brenda Bent (Susur Lee’s wife) and Karen Gable, the textile experts behind Madeline’s, this new diner appears to be after the affluent hot messes of the King West bar scene.

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The Hype

From the Print Edition

May 5, 2010 | 10:15 am

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The inn crowd: Toronto’s five new luxury hotels

Over the next couple of years, this city will get five new luxury hotels. It starts with the Thompson, which opens its high-concept doors this month and promises to be ground zero for the beautiful people By Maryam Sanati

If you build it: the Thompson Toronto, on Wellington West, is the first international arm of the New York–based brand (Illustration: Kagan McLeod)

Lately, King West is an urban cloud nine: designer condos, old brick studio spaces, fantastic carpaccio. Only 15 years ago, no one had much reason to venture down here—not for work, not to live, not for a dining scene, because there wasn’t one. There were no ad agencies, no Susur Lee joints, no Spoke Club and certainly no boutique hotels. But now the dozen or so blocks bounded by Spadina and Bathurst, from Adelaide down to Wellington, are a humming, self-sustaining ecosystem—a model of how to retrofit a vintage downtown neighbourhood.

Real estate agents call this part of town King West Village, a handle the locals find too artificial to pass their lips, especially considering the place isn’t yet fully formed. At every turn, there’s a construction site, or a gaping hole in the ground, or a lot with a target on its back, almost all of them bearing the same signage: an artful graphic in lower case letters saying “freed.” It’s not an existentialist statement; “Freed” stands for Peter Freed, the Forest Hill–bred developer who has nine projects on the go in the area. No one has been a bigger catalyst of the evolution of King West, or capitalized on it more, than Freed. His real estate portfolio, mainly condos, is worth $1 billion, and much of it is geared to a highly specific breed: a 35-ish, design-obsessed demographic that wears Japanese denim, listens to Phoenix, works in advertising or banking or consults in high tech, travels often and widely, and stays at properties designed by Ian Schrager, the Manhattan entrepreneur often credited with founding the boutique hotel genre. In King West, Freed has prepared a landing strip for these hipster high flyers (and those who aspire to become them). They’re not rich, necessarily. Their ambition is to be tastefully in the know.

For them, Freed has invested in a crowning achievement, a gleefully anticipated light box on Wellington: the 102-room Thompson Toronto, which is scheduled to open its high-concept doors this month.

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The Dish

From the Print Edition

May 3, 2010 | 2:23 pm

10 Comments

The Rebirth of Booze

At the hottest restaurants, cocktails are as sophisticated as the food. Bartenders are playing with liquid nitrogen, concocting infusions, and changing the way we drink. It’s the most exciting gastronomic development in years By James Chatto

Smoke and firewater: Barchef, on Queen West, serves a $45 haute manhattan, a mix of whisky, vanilla cognac and bitters that arrives in a bell jar filled with hickory smoke (Image: Finn O'Hara)

There are only two kinds of cocktails—those that are dead and those that are alive—and the only way to tell them apart is to taste them. A dead drink is at best two-dimensional, merely a mixture of liquids; a living cocktail is full of motion as its flavours unfold on the palate. It’s like the difference between a paint-by-numbers canvas and a true work of art. And in this city, the dead outnumber the living by about a thousand to one.

But not for long, thanks to a handful of determined pioneers. Frankie Solarik at Barchef, Moses McIntee at Ame, Jen Agg at the Black Hoof and Bill Sweete at Sidecar make up the new avant-garde, along with Christine Sismondo, the author of the influential book Mondo Cocktail, who is opening her own place on College Street in July, wryly called the Toronto Temperance Society. Each one has a different view of what constitutes a great cocktail, but they all share a single belief: it’s high time the age of the crantini was over.

The most extreme place to observe this revolution is Barchef, the dimly lit temple of mixology on Queen West where Frankie Solarik is the celebrant. Tall, slim and bearded, wearing a black porkpie hat, he works behind a bar crowded with more than 30 spiced infusions and subtle elixirs in various flasks and jars. I’ve never seen such a set-up—like an alchemist’s laboratory, complete with the molecular foams, flavoured airs and gelatinous transubstantiations that are Solarik’s specialty. His masterpiece is a smoked vanilla manhattan, a $45 cocktail set in a bell jar filled with hickory smoke until it smells like a campfire and tastes like heaven.

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The Dish

Rumours & Rumblings

April 21, 2010 | 10:50 am

9 Comments

Madeline’s massive make-over: name changes, construction and the return of Susur Lee

Don’t panic at the sight of shuttered windows at Madeline’s. The place closed on April 10 but will re-emerge in early June as Susur Lee’s next Toronto restaurant.

Brenda Bent, Lee’s wife and the person in charge of redoing Madeline’s space, tells us that after Dominic Amaral’s departure last year to become head chef at Zucca Trattoria, it was time to give the place an update—especially since her husband will be cooking in Toronto more often now. Lee’s contracts say that he has to check up on Shang (in New York) only three times a month, Zentan (in Washington) three times every two months and Chinois (in Singapore) about four times a year.

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The Goods

Toronto Fashion Week

April 1, 2010 | 9:39 am

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Toronto society turns out for the Joe Fresh show and celeb model Crystal Renn

Model Crystal Renn (Image: Jenna Marie Wakani)

Joe Fresh Style, as we all know, is the show to see and be seen at each season. And, since it conveniently follows the Pink Tartan show (conveniently designed by Mrs. Joe Fresh, Kimberley Newport-Mimran), most of fashionable Toronto society—Galen Jr. and Alexandra Weston, Lynda Reeves, Tommy Ton, Jian Ghomeshi, Tanya Kim, Trevor Born, Susur Lee and so on—turned up to have their photo taken by George Pimentel, their names bold-faced by Shinan Govani and to pledge allegiance to the Mimran fan club. A big-name model always opens Joe; this year, it was the very gorgeous, very trendy and very famous “plus-size” model Crystal Renn (quotation marks are necessary, since Renn was hardly any larger than the other models) and one of the faces of the ’90s grunge scene, Kirsten Owen. Oh, there were clothes, too (view them in our slide show below), but who goes to Joe for the clothes, anyway?

See all the looks from the Joe Fresh Style show >>

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The Dish

Opening

March 22, 2010 | 12:47 pm

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With a $500,000 renovation and new chef, Centro wants to be “taken seriously”

Centro's main dining room (Image: Karon Liu)

“Centro has always been good, but people have never come here for a gastronomical experience,” says owner Armando Mano as he sits in the newly renovated uptown restaurant. “They haven’t been taking us seriously for the past eight years since Marc Thuet left. We want to change that.” The revamp started in December, but the real work began two weeks ago, when demolition crews stepped in and left nothing untouched. There’s still sawdust on the sheet-covered floors, and the wall fixtures aren’t in yet, but Mano says things are on track regardless of what happens.

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The Dish

Pantry Raid

March 11, 2010 | 10:24 am

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New York considering banning salt in restaurant kitchens—no, really

(Image: TheGiantVermin)

Big Brother is watching, and his name is Felix Ortiz. The New York lawmaker has introduced a bill that would forbid chefs from adding salt to their dishes in an effort to reduce consumers’ sodium intake. Instead, diners would add their own salt at the table. “In this way, consumers have more control over the amount of sodium they intake and are given the option to exercise healthier diets and healthier lifestyles,” Ortiz told Nation’s Restaurant News.

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The Dish

Aprons & Icons

March 9, 2010 | 2:25 pm

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Susur Lee thinks Torontonians are more adventurous eaters than New Yorkers

Toronto will never be like New York, and for Susur Lee, that’s a good thing. The Toronto Sun caught up with Lee—who opened Shang in Manhattan a little over a year ago—to talk about New York’s restaurant biz. Despite the city being filled with rich and powerful foodies, Lee admits that it hasn’t been an easy ride and that diners are still pinching pennies. “It has been a very tough year,” Lee says, adding that he had to lower menu prices. “If I say everything is great, I’m lying to you. In New York, people are still driven by money, and they don’t want to show off their money in expensive restaurants right now. They feel the pressure.”

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