While Nick Liu’s fans wait for the opening of his new Asian brasserie GwaiLo, the former Niagara Street Café chef has been showing up at various pop-ups and one-offs. Next up: an Asian Street Market at the Amsterdam Brewery featuring a crew of young Asian chefs calling themselves the Banana Mafia (the name likely does not refer to the fruit). The team is made up of Liu, Robbie Hojilla (Ursa), Jeff Claudio (Yours Truly), Jonathan Poon (Chantecler) and Leemo Han (Swish by Han and Oddseoul, which is presumably the name of the Han brothers’ new Ossington place). The event, which is almost sold out, takes place this coming Monday, May 14, with tickets going for $60 each. Check out the party’s event page for more info.
The comprehensive index of every blog post, magazine story and restaurant review that appears on Torontolife.com
All stories relating to Yours Truly
Enter the Banana Mafia: new posse of chefs to throw Asian Street Market party
Terroir 2012 recap: what we saw, heard and ate at the big annual food industry meet-up
Kevin Gilmour (sous chef at The Drake Hotel) was assisted by his crew at this pork carving station. Hunks of roasted pork were served over a peanut-ginger slaw (Image: Renée Suen)
Last week, 500 members or so of Canada’s food and hospitality industry gathered for Terroir VI at the newly renovated Arcadian Court. The theme for this year’s symposium was “The New Radicals,” a new generation of chefs that have a collaborative and unconventional approach to cuisine despite their conventional training. Symposium chair Arlene Stein had arranged a line up of the industry’s finest from Canada and abroad, assembled on panels featuring restaurateurs, writers and chefs from the old and new vanguard—most attendees agreed this year’s crop was the best yet (before the event we spoke to Australian chef Ben Shewry, as well as sustainable aquaculture champion Barton Seaver and natural wine advocate Alice Feiring.).
Read the rest of this entry »
Where to Eat Now 2012
The sprawling dining scene in Toronto is more diverse and promising than ever. This year, a handful of 20-something chefs who trained at the city’s old-guard establishments broke out on their own with original, low-rent restaurants in Roncesvalles, Bloorcourt Village and Cabbagetown. New Italian places—some quaint and friendly, others opulent and expensive—outpaced bistros by an angel hair. Canada’s heritage was thoroughly and pervasively plumbed for culinary inspiration. (Is there anything that can’t be glazed in maple syrup?) The barbecue craze progressed into a New Age southern food fetish that involves a lot of top-shelf bourbon, house-made pickles and artisanal sauces. Chefs evoked the Mediterranean on seafood-loaded menus downtown, where, after years of casual comforts, fine dining returned, albeit revamped for diners who couldn’t care less about gourmet bravado and epicurean elitism, so long as their trout is perfectly seared (and comes from Lake Huron). Toronto Life’s critics indulged in it all. We ate, drank, debated and finally ranked the 10 spots that surprised us, delighted us and made us grateful to live in this restaurant-obsessed city. See the 10 best new restaurants, four flavours of the year and the 10 biggest trends in dining »
Where to Eat Now 2012: Vote on the 10 trends in dining that we love and hate
We picked out ten trends that helped define dining in Toronto in 2012, and pronounced whether we loved them, hated them or had a love-hate relationship with them. Now you can have your say.
Where to Eat Now 2012: five top renditions of this year’s hot Mexican street food, the tostada
Every chef and his sous found inspiration in Mexican street food this year. Here, five high-piled tostadas that had us ordering seconds. Read the rest of this entry »
Best New Restaurants 2012
Ten spots that surprised us, delighted us and made us grateful to live in this restaurant-obsessed city.
Read the rest of this entry »
Friday Night Bites: tables for two at Yours Truly, Swish by Han and Pangaea
Read the rest of this entry »
It’s 4 p.m. on Friday, and you don’t have a dinner reservation. Still, there’s no need to fret (or waste your night waiting for a table). We just called some of the city’s hottest restaurants and found three that can squeeze in two for dinner tonight. Now it’s up to you to get dialing and snag a table before they’re all gone. Today: Yours Truly, Swish by Han and Pangaea.
Toronto’s impending David Chang–off
In last weekend’s New York Times magazine, David Sax wrote a tiny piece about the impending non-feud between David Chang, who’ll be bringing two of his wildly popular Momofuku restaurants to Toronto this year, and David Chang, a chef at Ossington’s super-buzzy Yours Truly (let’s call them Chang 1 and Chang 2, respectively). It turns out, Chang 2 actually staged at Chang 1’s New York restaurant, although Chang1 only vaguely remembers Chang 2. And while Chang 1 promises to play nice with Chang 2 when he comes up to Toronto, he did fire a shot across the bow at another New York superchef making his Hogtown debut: “Daddy Boulud is gonna be in Toronto, too. That’s who we will be sabotaging.” Read the entire story [New York Times] »
Chef Grant Soto is having a grand old time skewering Toronto foodies—but who is he?
Soto’s Twitter profile pic
Here’s what we do know about “Chef Grant Soto”: he claims he’s bitten Mark McEwan on the shoulder, he says he’s got Paula Deen’s face tattooed on his thigh and, allegedly, he’s had Dan Akroyd call him upset over calling his premium spirit “Crystal Tits Vodka.” What we don’t know is who Soto actually is, because his name is a pseudonym, and all of this (admittedly questionable) information is coming from the Twitter feed that he’s using to poke fun at the Toronto restaurant scene. If you haven’t had the, um, pleasure of following him these last few weeks, he spends a lot of time targeting pretentious chefs and food celebrities, offering now and then some surprisingly sharp media criticism (he called out the way that articles about Yours Truly shamelessly fawned over the chef’s time at New York’s Per Se, about which, well, guilty as charged). There’s plenty of raunchy stuff as well, like talk of sexual favours at Susur Lee’s upcoming restaurant, and a particularly friendly hostess. The Star’s Amy Pataki recently heard from Soto, but she didn’t manage to scrounge up much. He wants to remain anonymous; he’s “been around in the industry”; the Twitter feed isn’t part of some weird marketing campaign; he has a website on the way. And in a Q&A over on Food Junkie Chronicles, the potty mouth has some choice words about, among other things, female food bloggers of Asian descent. If the City Raccoon saga is anything to go by, things will get rather less interesting once he’s inevitably outed. Read the entire story [Toronto Star] »
Introducing: Yours Truly, a new Ossington restaurant and bar with a chef whose resumé includes Per Se, Alinea and Noma (no, really)
A cook does some prep work at the bar before opening (Image: Renée Suen)
Yours Truly, a new restaurant and bar on the still-hot Ossington strip, opened with no great fanfare in mid-December, but now it’s causing quite a stir. Behind the place are ex-Vancouverites Matt Cherkas, Dan Hawkins and Aleem Jamal-Kabani, who found that Toronto put up a less fierce barrier to entry than their hometown did. Initially, they’d planned on opening a little watering hole to call their own with a few bar snacks, but everything changed after they found their new chef, Jeff Claudio. At only 28, Claudio has an impressive pedigree: he’s worked at Thomas Keller’s Per Se in New York, Rockpool in Sydney and the Toronto branch of Scarpetta, where he was chef de cuisine. He also staged at Noma (a.k.a. the best restaurant in the world) and two of Chicago’s best restaurants, Alinea and Charlie Trotter’s. Hence the buzz.
Read the rest of this entry »
