“I think on a general level, as a cook, you always want to become a chef and own your own restaurant—so you can have your own thing that you’re doing,” says Aaron Joseph Bear Robe, chef and owner of Keriwa Café, which opened August 10 on the last stretch of Queen Street before Roncesvalles.
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“When you know what you really want, it makes it a little bit easier to get where you want to go,” Matt Blondin tells me over sweating glasses of ice water earlier this week. We’re talking about the gutting and reno of thethat he and business partner Scott Selland converted into Acadia Restaurant & Bar in under three months. They opened their doors for business a few weeks ago.
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Words and pictures by Kelly Jones I have never met a chef like Agave y Aguacate’s Francisco...
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I can’t think of another restaurant in this city that has the same split-level set-up, with the dining area up on the mezzanine (which itself is stacked on top of the space allotted for pulling coffee shots and displaying baked goods). It has a full view of the kitchen, prep area, and a single communal table near the door
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Nathan Isberg has received a lot of attention for the crickets he serves. (In fact, his insurance company tried to quash the idea, but Health Canada found no reason to impose restrictions—“no issues at all, they’re cooked!” he laughs—and the crickets are back on menu.) He breeds them himself, in glass jars on beds of straw.
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Anthony Rose: “Everyone has an opinion about food, and that’s great… But barbecue is one of those, just, ultra-weird, different things that people think they know exactly what it should be.”
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The idea for Bar Salumi, which translates from Italian as “cold cuts” or “charcuterie,” was originally born from the popularity of Local Kitchen and Wine Bar, but it’s also a destination all on its own, thank you very much. “It’s a little place where people can come, have a glass of wine, have something to eat,” says Fabio.
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The locavore menu, too, keeps things simple, and Scott lets the markets determine his weekly changing menu. “If I’d had to come up with a menu for opening day that I was going to have to follow for months, I would have panicked. Instead, I was able to look at what was available that week and I created it around that. Even so, we were doing prep right up until 6PM on opening day, and people were starting to come in to eat dinner!”
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The room, like the kitchen, strives—and succeeds—to make an impact on patrons without actually making an impact on the environment. The collection of reclaimed woods, furniture, and fireplace mantle gives the space a comfortable and low-key feel. Two rows of worn antique metal trays of various shapes and sizes decorate one wall, a mirror another. A long Victorian-esque yellow couch sits at the open window, facing Shaw Street, and runs floor to ceiling, perpendicular to another wall of window on the north side. Hello, sunlight.
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Before the big reveal, Michael asked the room of gastronomic enthusiasts which calf they believed was fed raw milk. (He hadn’t even let Chris in on the secret when he’d delivered them to the restaurant.) Surprisingly, a show of hands found the room was more or less evenly split between Calf A and Calf B, with a confused few—including myself—believing it was a trick question (I preferred the lighter, milder liver of Calf A and the moister loin and terrine of Calf B). Were our inclinations based on actual taste preferences or were we making choices based on familiarity of taste?
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What could be more compelling to an urban foodie than sitting down to a lunchtime salad of fixings that have been pulled from the soil—Toronto soil—just moments before? Tawfik Shehata, chef at Vertical Restaurant in Toronto, along with business partner Jamie McAuley, who runs Weezie’s down the street, make this kind of eating experience possible.
Read Moreby Kelly Jones It’s near impossible to eat entirely locally grown and raised foods in Ontario all year long. But that doesn’t mean that we can’t embrace the locavore movement and make smart and healthy choices about the foods we...
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