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A toothsome feast is a critical part of every wedding—which is why we asked the chefs at Toca, Acadia, Canoe and GwaiLo to design reception-ready dishes that’ll please the most discerning crowd
SHRIMP AND VANILLA RISOTTO
Gihen Zitouni, chef at Toca
Zitouni, who runs the Ritz-Carlton’s fine dining restaurant, makes a risotto as pretty as the bride. She cooks the rice with vanilla-infused butter, then tops it with slivered almonds, two seared shrimp and a cloud of pecorino air.
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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: Canoe, Chantecler and Acadia.
The pickled quail eggs at Skin and Bones (Image: Gizelle Lau)
Quail eggs have two principal virtues that distinguish them from chicken eggs: they’re tiny and they’re cute. They don’t taste all that different (though the yolk-to-white ratio is a little higher), but they make adorable snacks and appetizers, and come in handy when a whole chicken egg would overpower a dish. And while they’re by no means new, they’ve been popping up all over Toronto menus recently—fried, hard-boiled, pickled, smoked and raw. Here’s where we’ve spotted them of late:
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In her introduction to En Route’s latest ranking of the country’s 10 best new restaurants, Sarah Musgrave declares 2012 “the year of Toronto”—and given the frenetic pace of openings in this city, we’re inclined to agree. Musgrave backs up her bold claim by naming six Toronto restaurants to the list, up from just two last year, reserving the top spot for Michael Caballo and Tobey Nemeth’s Edulis, which moved into the former Niagara Street Café space this year. Musgrave fell in love with the restaurant’s quaint, comfortable atmosphere and, like our reviewer, felt that Caballo’s rustic yet adventurous cuisine skirted some of the pieties of the farm-to-table trend.
What the dots mean: We’ve colour-coded Splendido’s kitchen hierarchy and charted the chefs’ rise through its ranks
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The crowd at the Hot and Spicy Food Festival, which takes place this weekend (Image: Tsar Kasim)
Monday, July 16
Back in May, we told you about Patrick Kriss’s decision to leave his chef de cuisine gig at Splendido (where, in addition to running the busy kitchen, he oversaw our writer’s 12-hour stage) to take over the kitchen at Acadia following Matt Blondin’s departure to work at David Chang’s upcoming Momofuku restaurants. Now, over at Toronto.com, Corey Mintz is reporting that Splendido has officially named Kriss’s replacement: Tom McHugh, most recently the sous-chef at the Trump Tower’s Stock, and previously sous-chef at Nota Bene, which, of course, was launched in 2009 by three former co-owners of Splendido. Round, round, round they go. [Eat]
After hearing that Chicago is crazy jealous of Toronto’s annual Luminato festival—and the international tourists it attracts—we got to wondering how Hogtown really stacks up against its similarly sized cousin. We looked at everything from restaurants named Acadia to notable rich guys to talk show hosts extraordinaire (and a whole bunch of other admittedly arbitrary categories). Here’s how the two cities compare in matters gustatory.
(Image: Nico Paix)
Dear Urban Diplomat,
My wife and I recently ate at Acadia, a new restaurant on Clinton Street. The meal was great, but when we asked to have our leftover salmon wrapped up, the server said no, because a) the restaurant didn’t want to be responsible if the food went bad and we got sick, and b) the chef didn’t want our last memory of his food to be of reheated fish. We’d never heard of such a ridiculous rule. We left mad, and without our $23 filet. Are they allowed to do that?
—Leftover Anger, Little Italy
Patrick Kriss at Splendido’s pass (Image: Renée Suen)
If you haven’t heard a lot about Patrick Kriss yet, you will soon. Owners Scott and Lindsay Selland have revealed to Torontolife.com that Kriss will be stepping into the role of chef de cuisine at Acadia when Matt Blondin departs for Momofuku Daisho at the end of the month.
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When Matt Blondin announced (via Twitter, naturally) that he’d be stepping away from Acadia, the molecularly tinged Southern restaurant he helped launch last summer, he set the rumour mill spinning about where he’d land. Yesterday, he put those rumours to rest in an interview with the Star’s Amy Pataki, in which he revealed he has signed up with Momofuku to be the executive sous-chef at Daisho, which will apparently serve communal meals for groups of four or more. He’ll be working under Sam Gelman, who was previously chef de cuisine at Má Pêche, the midtown New York outpost of David Chang’s Momofuku empire. Blondin, it turns out, will be in charge of hiring and training the kitchen staff and overseeing daily operations—no small responsibilities for such a hotly anticipated restaurant. Chang’s praise for Blondin in the Star article was characteristically wry: “He’s well entrenched in the Toronto food scene. He can help with things like, which is the better garbage disposal company?” Read the entire story [Toronto Star] »
This season, we’ll be chatting with each week’s eliminated chef after they get the boot (or, rather, after their boot-getting episode airs—this stuff was recorded months ago).
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After weeks of deliberation, I’d like to announce that my final day at Acadia will be May 31, 2012. Thank you for all of your support.
— Matt Blondin, chef at Acadia, our second best new restaurant of 2012, which opened last July. No word yet on what’s next for the inventive young chef. [Twitter]
Vij’s was named best restaurant in Canada (Image: Mack Male)
Shrewdly piggy-backing on the S. Pellegrino list of the World’s 50 Best Restaurants (which comes out on Monday), new-ish travel site Vacay.ca conducted its own poll to determine the top 50 restaurants in Canada, the results of which were released today. At the top of the list is Vij’s, the much-lauded Vancouver haute-Indian restaurant, followed by Cambridge’s Langdon Hall and Montreal’s Joe Beef. The top Toronto restaurant is The Black Hoof, which took fourth place, followed by Canoe (5), Sushi Kaji (11), Splendido (14), Guu (18), Ruby Watcho (19), Scaramouche (28), Buca (31), Acadia (37), Biff’s (39), Origin (44), Wine Bar (45) and Pic Nic Wine Bar (48). The rankings were determined by the ballots of 15 judges (regular Dish contributors Renée Suen and Gizelle Lau among them), who ranked the 10 best Canadian places they’d dined at in the past 30 months. See the whole list [Vacay.ca] »
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.
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