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July Archive

Gluttons

Posted on July 3, 2007

To Winnipeg on a flying visit to eat at Gluttons, the specialty food store and bistro at 842 Corydon Avenue (204-475-5714). It’s an interesting place, on the cusp of suburban Winnipeg and its Little Italy area, housed in a 1919 building that was originally a bank, then a fur storage ,and is now Gluttons, owned by a most hospitable young man called Jameson Watermulder. The real reason for my visit, however, is that the chef there is none other than Makoto Ono who won Gold Medal Plates Grand Finale, the Canadian Culinary Championship in February, beating out such established stars as Mark McEwan and Robert Clark, and I’ve been meaning to pay him a visit for ages.

Crystal Five

Posted on July 9, 2007

I was sitting in the ROM’s new restaurant, C5, late last week, when the mimolette question arose yet again. Properly aged mimolette is one of my absolute favourite cheeses. A whole one looks like a beaten-up stone cannonball until you prize it open. Inside, the paste is dark orange and so firm that it’s better to dig out fragments with a wedge than try to cut it with a knife. The flavour is bizarrely rich, like aged gouda only much more so—like hazelnuts and caramel and condensed milk and salt—incredibly delicious and with a finish as long and intense as Göttedamarung. I think it would be my desert island cheese. Indeed, I have always imagined this was the cheese that Ben Gunn fantasized about and begged for after his sad marooning. The Mimolette Question, predictably enough, is what wine do you serve with this potent Boule de Lille? The classic answer is a dark, tannic Cahors, but it’s very hard to find any Cahors in Toronto, and Argentinian Malbec (same grape, different hemisphere) is too polite to do the trick. I recently tried some other wines with a hunk of the orange god but they gave up completely and disappeared on the palate—even Ontario Baco Noir and a decent Chilean Cabernet Sauvignon that filled my head like blueberry paint but had no answer for the mimolette. Port? Nah. Islay single malt? I poured a dram of Ardbeg which is as pungently phenolic as any spirit known to man—like drinking iodine—but it and the cheese spoke different languages. Save the Ardbeg for an aged cabrales—now that’s a passionate marriage. I’m told that an old sweet Vouvray can charm mimolette but it, like a good Cahors, is not available on the ROM’s rather expensive but as yet not very extensive wine list. So the cheese and I were left to each other’s company, unwined but otherwise happy.

Too much alone

Posted on July 16, 2007

Still eating my way through the 45 pounds of wild salmon I caught. Grilled, poached, roasted, fried, sliced into sashimi, turned into gravlax, don’t have a smoker, diced as tartare, not sure about the milkshake though it was a lovely colour. My blood glows with omega-3 polyunsaturates but I wait in vain for enlightenment. It must be because it’s the wrong kind of salmon, not salmo salar, the leaper, whose blue-green backs once made turbulent the estuaries of the Atlantic. Their silent avatar dwelt in a secluded pool of Ireland’s River Boyne, nourished by the hazelnuts of knowledge as they plopped into the water, the very emblem of philosophical retirement. My fish are the Pacific variety, not as astute, perhaps, but certainly revered by the first peoples of B.C., the currency of commerce and of prayer, welcomed by elaborate human ceremony as the springtime rivers boiled with their ecstatic, suicidal homecoming.

Four entrances and an exit

Posted on July 23, 2007

I went to Amaya on Thursday and enjoyed myself no end. Call the cooking there New Indian or Contemporary Subcontinental—or better yet, don’t. It’s more like the way very good, rather sophisticated Indian friends cook in their homes with fresh textures and subtle spicing. But the facts, the facts…! Amaya is on Bayview Avenue, where JOV Bistro used to be. Derek Valleau (ex Crush) and Hemant Bhagwani (who owns Mantra in Burlington) are the proprietors, working the room as good owners should, and they have brought the brilliant and charming Lynn Stimpson in as manager from Cava (and a great many other places—she’s a career front-of-house star with a CV as long as the Nile). The chef, Dinesh Butola, also comes from Mantra and he knows his stuff. We finally have someone to contend with Vancouver’s Vikram Vij and with the team at Amaya in London, England (no relation—and no comparison, either, since our Amaya is content to woo Leaside while the London version aims to be the sexiest, haughtiest venue ever).

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Categories: Chefs, Openings, General, Closings

Pork and pinot

Posted on July 30, 2007

My daughter has secured a summer job as staff photographer at a camp near Minden. She returns to the city for three days while the cohorts of unruly children change—which is heaven for this doting p. who wants nothing more than to cook for her. After a month of wieners and frozen hash browns, she craves flavour and gorges on gravadlax, roast beef and maki rolls. I send her back with a cache of Tabasco, hoping she’ll use it to brighten her lunches not startle some foe by spiking his milk shake. I never went to camp. We didn’t have them in England. Much to my regret.

James Chatto

James Chatto worked as a dishwasher, actor, waiter, bow tie salesman, choreen, bookseller, nanny, tennis coach, lounge singer, KFC truck driver (fired after 1 day), olive farmer and janitor before moving to Canada in 1987 and becoming a journalist. These days, he writes about food and restaurants for Toronto Life, about wine and spirits for Food & Drink and edits the menswear magazine, Harry. Two of his books are still in print: A Matter of Taste (co-written with Lucy Waverman) and The Greek For Love, a memoir of Corfu. James is married and has two delightful children.

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