What’s on the menu at Ficoa, a new spot in Little Italy with an avant-garde tasting menu
Including mushrooms pickled in kombucha vinegar and dry-aged duck grilled over binchotan coals
Name: Ficoa Contact: 585 College St., ficoa.ca Owner: Patricia Toro Chef: Gerry Quintero Accessibility: Not fully accessible
Gerry Quintero, the chef at Ficoa, a cozy new spot in Little Italy serving an experimental Ontario-focused tasting menu, was born in Monterrey. He grew up surrounded by Mexican cuisine’s vibrant flavours and ancient techniques. “By the time I was ten, I was cooking skirt steak and roasting whole goats over open flames with my grandfather,” he says. “I fell in love with cooking very early.” When his family immigrated to Canada, his passion didn’t wane. He worked in the kitchens at Scarpetta, Yours Truly, Rosalinda and Linda Modern Thai, learning animal butchery, dry-aging and fermentation (his favourite) along the way.
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While working at Linda, Quintero realized that his knack for fermentation was marketable. “We had a tea that wasn’t selling,” he says. “I turned it into kombucha, and our customers went crazy for it, so I decided to start bottling the stuff.” Quintero and his partner, Mandy Sou, opened a kombucha side hustle called Alma y Gil, which quickly grew to include produce box delivery and a brunch sandwich pop-up business to rival Big Horton.
Eventually Quintero left the project to Sou. Afterward, he was approached by Patricia Toro, a former restaurant consulting client, about opening a spot where Alma y Gil would serve weekend brunch while Quintero came up with a tasting menu for the evenings. That was the seed of Ficoa, where the chef has designed an unstuffy menu that celebrates Ontario’s micro-seasonal produce. “The idea is to create an individualized dining experience as best as we can,” says Quintero. To that end, the moment a reservation is booked, the restaurant calls the soon-to-be diners to ask about their likes and dislikes. From there, Quintero forms his menu. “If a customer isn’t interested in what the season is offering, then it’s my job to work around it,” he says. “And if I want to throw caviar onto something just because it’s delicious, then I’m going to do that too.”
The food
Both the tasting menu and the à la carte offerings are flavour-focused and funky, and they pull inspiration from Italian, Asian and Latin cuisines. The duck leg, for example, is grilled over binchotan coals and glazed with an umami-rich house ferment of mushroom stock and mole.
The drinks
Familiar libations are livened up in a cocktail card that features ingredients like kombucha and mushrooms. The Pick Me Up, for example, is a refreshing replacement for the now-compulsory espresso martini. It’s a jolt of coffee plus mint, soda, gin infused with yerba mate (a South American species of holly) and yerba mate powder.
The space
The interior is meant to feel like fine dining but in someone’s grandmother’s house. The space is divided into two rooms. The back room, which seats six, is where tasting menu diners receive their opening snacks and welcome cocktail. It’s set up like a living room, complete with a wall of old-school family photos, loungey ’70s-style couches and tables that whisper “TV dinner.” The dining room, where customers migrate for the rest of the meal, is warm and plant-filled with velvet banquettes. An exposed brick wall is covered in a homage to Ficoa, the neighbourhood in Ecuador where owner Patricia Toro grew up.
Erin Hershberg is a freelance writer with nearly two decades of experience in the lifestyle sector. She currently lives in downtown Toronto with her husband and two children.
