Note Bene’s David Lee offered Ontario wagyu burgers.

Dufflet Rosenberg’s tiny flourless chocolate cupcakes: perfect for teatime with Barbie.

This year’s Toronto Taste corralled 40 of the city’s chefs—including Mark McEwan, David Lee, Jamie Merieles, Marc Thuet, Keith Froggett and other big names—into a fenced-in space on Cumberland Avenue. The objective was to raise money for Second Harvest. We toured the food stations and met the chefs before the crowd arrived. 

Meatier offerings come from Frank’s executive sous chef Keff Dueck , whose prepared fatty grilled lamb ribs and minted fava bean pesto. 

With his crew from The Heat filming his every move, Mark McEwan prepared garnished seared tuna slices.

Continuing the seafood theme, Chef at Home star Michael Smith offered whimsical square bowls of sustainable shrimp gazpacho—potato strips fried into anchor shapes served as a decoration. “We were up all of last night peeling potatoes,” he explained, adding that he made a thousand of them.

In-season Arctic char was the ingredient of the night. Marc Thuet had a glazed version, while Scaramouche served it raw with a citrus dressing and a fennel salad. Donna Dooher of Mildred’s Temple Kitchen served hers sashimi style (seen here), accompanied by a potato salad for a picnic feel.

Jamie Merieles from Oliver and Bonacini scored points for originality: smoked salmon wrapped around a breadstick and served with an asparagus chaser. He said the veggie conquers the fish aftertaste, though he had a big basket of mints on hand just in case.

Often, we found chefs taking breaks in between service and cooking duties. Marc Thuet and Biana Zorich (seen here) react as though they won the lottery when their sous chef arrives with plates of McEwan’s tuna. Later that night, Scaramouche’s Froggett downed Thuet’s char as helpers dismantled the flower arrangements and handed them out to the ladies in the crowd. 

Desserts were especially ingenious. The YMCA’s culinary skills training program flaunted their molecular gastronomy techniques with samples of white chocolate spaghetti with raspberry sauce and chocolate martini caviar (it tastes like regular pasta but then it slowly and strangely melts into sweet strands of chocolate) and pulled-pork ice cream (tastes more like vanilla) with a beer chaser (served in a test tube, of course). 

Katherine Barrell, as told to Erin Hershberg

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Toronto Taste 2009: A $225 evening of chocolate pasta and Arctic char

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