The Dish

June 2007

Mango Lessons

A new chef brings strange fruit to Senses By Chris Nuttall-Smith



Image credit: Margaret Mulligan

After two decades of cooking at some of Hong Kong’s best restaurants, Patrick Lin, the new executive chef at Senses, thought he’d seen every kind of exotic Asian produce. But it took a grocery run to Toronto’s old Chinatown to find the inspiration for one of his latest creations. Eyeing the usual orange and dark green mangoes along Spadina early this spring, Lin came across a light, jade-skinned, deliciously sour mango unlike any he’d tasted before. He puts all three varieties to novel use on his inaugural menu, wrapping foil- thin slices of the fruit around garlic-, chili- and ginger-inflected tuna tartare. The first piece, rolled in orange mango, plays summertime sublime against the delicate fish; the second, made with the flesh of the dark green fruit, provides a subtle hit of tartness. But it’s Lin’s third roll, enrobed in the puckery jade green mango, that propels the plate to perfection. At once sweet, spicy and sour, it’s a tasty example of what can happen when a chef from the East moves west—stopping, of course, on Spadina along the way.

Senses, SoHo Metropolitan Hotel, 328 Wellington St. W., 416-935-0400.


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