A scarlet carpet runs from the curb of Yorkville Avenue to the pristine portico of the spiffy new Hazelton hotel. This is the first night of the Toronto International Film Festival and the paparazzi are out in force, poised on the balls of their feet like overweight ninjas. With the fans who lean against the makeshift barriers, they are waiting for actors to hurry out to their tinted-glass SUVs (heads down if they’re stars, pausing to wave and smile if they haven’t had a hit in a while). From time to time they turn their heads to the hotel restaurant’s sidewalk patio, hedged off from the street but packed with punters, loud with laughter and gossip. That’s where the action is. To prove the point, the restaurant’s chef-patron appears and the fawning horde parts to let him pass. Just turned 50, Mark McEwan is back in his working whites after months wearing a hard hat and steel-toed boots. His new room, called One, opened only a week ago, but the verdict is already in on the grey cow skin walls, the dark green granite lobby, the fabulous bar. So New York! No wait—at least for tonight, it’s totally Beverly Hills! What a time to make your debut, pre-booked and sold out for the festi­val. “It’s like hell on wheels,” says Mc­Ewan with a rueful smile. “It’s also a hell of a rush. In fact, I’m having more fun than ever before.”

It’s interesting watching our first genera­tion of star chefs circle the big five-oh. I know, it’s the new 40 (it really is), but it’s still a milestone that brings a pause for reflection, for taking stock of the old career. McEwan, Susur Lee, Jamie Kennedy, Michael Stadtländer, Chris McDonald, Keith Froggett, Greg Couillard—these are the guys who have shepherded our tastes for a quarter of a century. Most of them learned their trade under European masters, back when Toronto’s finest restaurants were to be found in hotels, when fresh fish was a rarity and no one had heard of olive oil, balsamic vinegar or arugula. Couillard seems to have finally settled down at his eponymous Spice Room in Hazelton Lanes. Lee and Froggett are models of creative stability, though Scaramouche may be relocating once its lease expires in a few years. McDonald bought himself the chance to relax occasionally by making talented young Doug Penfold a partner and co-chef at Cava. Stadtländer went rural long ago; now Jamie Kennedy is doing the same. With the Restaurant on Church Street absorbed into the Wine Bar and his place at the Gardiner Museum ticking along nicely, he has moved down to his farm in Prince Edward County. Eventually, he hopes to spend only six days a month in Toronto while he turns the old Quaker cider house on his property into a 30-seat restaurant and the equally venerable smithy into a tavern, both set to open in a year or two—or three. Not exactly a Horatian retirement, but a definite change of direction.

For Mark McEwan, however, 50 is no more than a cat’s eye on the autostrada. His two A-list restaurants, North 44° and Bymark, cruise along like finely tuned machines. His catering company, North 44° Caters, pulls in $300,000 in a good month. (“We no longer compete for the $45 banquet gigs,” he told me recently. “I deal with my clients and their big corporate events and social needs. This summer, for example, we did the Bratty wedding with a seven-course plated meal for 350 people, all in Mr. and Mrs. Bratty’s backyard.”) He is planning two more seasons of his TV show, The Heat. And, in case you thought he was slacking, come next fall he’ll open a 23,000-square-foot gourmet grocery store in Cadillac Fairview’s new development where the old Don Mills Centre once stood. “I’ve been visiting the great food stores in Italy and Paris and New York,” he explains. “Toronto doesn’t really have anything that approaches that scale and quality, but we’re going to try to achieve it.” And meanwhile, there is One.