Nine names on everyone's tongues These emerging chefs aren't flashes in the pan. As restaurant critic Gina Mallet writes, they're changing the foodscape of the city Fifteen, even 10 years ago, this story couldn't have been written. Toronto just didn't have an expansive or inclusive enough food culture. Sure, restaurants were on the rise, but Hogtown took time embracing the sensuality of food and drink. Now, of course, restaurants open (and close) all the time, and menus are rich in variety and luxury -- fresh foie gras, dozens of types of oysters, black and white truffles, pork belly, lamb shanks, beef cheeks, roasted sweetbreads. Multicultural influences are no longer marginal but mainstream--even changing its course. That being said, it's both the best and worst of times to be a chef in Toronto. Food and cooking are moving at the speed of light: Like everything, they are Web driven, vulnerable to pressures building in the ether -- the 24/7 news cycle, food scares, health and diets, not to mention the latest demographic spin. And while we have better restaurants and a tribe of foodies (and their credit cards), the industry is ever-changing.   more »

Where’s the Chateau Indage? An Indian wine bar! I love it. I couldn’t wait to go to Tabla Wine Bar to order a Sula Chenin Blanc from Maharashtra or a sparkling Marquise de Pompadour from Chateau Indage, India’s largest winemaker. Indage recently bought Tandou, one of Australia’s top l0 wine producers so it could meet India’s growing demands for wine. I just read a clip that the Hyderabad Wine Club welcomed Napa Valley’s Christopher Creek winemakers who were exploring the Indian wine market. Who would have thunk it? India, once dry,has the potential to be an humungous wine market. Millions drink despite religious and social taboos. Last January in Madrid I met Subhash Arora, who founded the Delhi Wine Club in 2002; he was tasting Spanish wines for his membership. He calls the wine explosion “The Indian paradox.” India is already a food power – will Indian wine be next?    more »

Localvore’s Dilemma After reading how B.C. journalists Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon went on a 100-mile diet for a year as a reproof to global food distribution, I decided to go localvore with my own half-mile diet. I am going to limit my food shopping and eating to within half-a-mile of where I live, thus saving energy. No more car-jaunts to far-off emporia. It’s fine to shop organic but not when I have to travel miles to the St. Lawrence Market or to the Dufferin and Riverdale organic markets. No, local commitment requires I buy where I live. I look forward to changing my expectations of food. I never felt more relaxed about food than when I lived in a small village. Without a car, I had limited choice. Our local market depended on villagers shopping regularly with them, as a result they stocked what we wanted. In turn we paid higher prices for the food but it was worth it in terms of convenience.    more »

The Perfect Dish

The gloves came off last week in the ongoing battle for markets. For as long as I can remember, the civilized world has cowered under the oppression of the 25 demographic, the young and restless with money to burn, willing to spend it forever on extending their sex appeal way beyond the sell by date. But now marketers have cried uncle and acknowledged that the biggest market of all is the sixty-something boomer cohort with trillions to spend and not much time to do it. Not that the natural limits are emphasized. Marketers always emphasize the positive (the mortician’s journal Casket and Sunnyside was thick with tips like “The corpse must be placed in a welcoming position”) The message is still sex  - but coy, exhausted couples giggling as they totter late to the opera after popping Viagra.

And while boomers are health fanatics and sincerely believe they have a fighting chance to make 100, this is balanced by a more realistic taste for luxury. I mean, I’m not going to be offered caviare by the cafeteria in the sky.  Gourmet cruises are up, if it’s Finland, it must be Aland potatoes. Luxury hotels have cooking classes and eatertainment. Last summer I went to a gourmand lunch at Coral Gables’ Biltmore Hotel where several hundred better-than-young people, tanned, fit and choosy were OD’ing  on Nicholas Feuillete Champagne and then sautéing lobster along with a celeb chef.

Braced by the memory, I slap on Davi’s Le Grand Cru Face, anti-aging cream for vintage skin, made from grapeseeds by winemaker Robert Mondavi, and throw off the yoke of the barhopping finger foodies by dining retro – cooking based on the French classic cuisine. I want to see if cooking can still be an epiphany as it was for MFK Fisher, a wide-eyed Californian who discovered her sensuality at Aux Trois Faisans in Dijon in the 1920s. She traveled through the belly of Ribaudot’s restaurant, seeing, smelling for the first time the hot kitchens, the piles of of raw food, glimpsing the men’s room through a swinging door before she arrived at the orgy that was dinner…”a series of blurred legendary words: pate truffe Charles Le Temeraire, poulet en cocotte aux Trois faisans, civet a la mode bourguignonne……”

My pick for immortality is the unlikely-named Cru which is eco-situated opposite the Royal York subway stop. The Bon Vivant reluctantly agrees to go green on the TTC but says “there really should be a bar car on these long trips.” The space is sparkling Art Deco, originally a Woolworths, and strikingly elegant, caramel trending to earthy Umbrian with huge windows and a high ceiling that baffles noise.

The menu is short but engrossing. We dither over the tartares, either yellow fin tuna with intriguingly, a fillip of gooseberry, or beef with lotus chips but then plump for a cone of fresh crab salad and an enchanting zucchini blossom stuffed with crabmeat floating in crème fraiche and garnished with cucumber.

Excellent, we murmur, a palate teaser, and turn attention to our second choice, fresh sardines with a shellfish sausage.

Silence and serious eating - and then the Bon Vivant and I lay down our forks. Simultaneously we cry “this is it!” The perfect dish.

Surprising, unfamiliar, a knockout. The chef Shane Waite understands what fusion means - not a clash of civilisations but an ability to discriminate among cultures, using the best of each to complement the other. The two fresh sardines, a coarse fish, are encased in tender Japanese tempura, the airy pastry mellowing the sardine’s assertively salty taste. Each sardine is accompanied by a French classic, a boudin blanc, a slim silky sausage of lobster and scallop lapped by an exotic coriander juice. Combining the bristly sardine with the effulgent shellfish creates an intricate fugue of flavours and textures.

We hurriedly scrap our order for a quaffing white and send for the wine list. The perfect dish must have wine to match. Among the whites, one stands out, a Savennieres, Clos de St. Yves 2002, flinty, structured like a McLuhan apercu with a coda of melancholia, the perfect match for sweetish shellfish. Well worth going over budget for. Particularly as we have more shellfish to come.

How to follow up perfection? Anything will seem an anti-climax. But the ricotta gnocchi with lots of rich tasty chunks of lobster stands splendidly on its own, bathed in tarragon,lobster and tomato sauce. Caramelized sable fish (black cod) is good enough – the problem is that fish relies on texture for taste, and black cod flesh tends to flab, unlike such toned hunks as Monkfish, Halibut and Salmon. The accompaniment of Israeli (big) couscous is delightful, so is the white bean puree and the slice of scarlet grapefruit on top is another inspiration, tart without being bitter.

Now we’re up for a grand finish – dessert. Disaster! The desserts are - to put it politely - execrable, hazelnut daquoise is like crumbs and cream cheese, hot rhubarb crumble is topped with a  magenta soggy shape of rhubarb and strawberry. The chef gave us the sun and the moon but now he’s snatched away the stars.

Instead we look for finis among the wines but no luck. Cru has a daily vin ordinaire and a table of bin ends, but no Montbazillac. And come to think of it, the sommelier apparently cut out early. Our Savennieres was served by a charming enthusiast who we learn later from our waiter is a partner in the restaurant. Oh well.We raise a glass of fizzy Moscato to toast a dinner that flirted with greatness.

*** 1/2 Cru. 946 Royal York Rd,Etobicoke. 416 237-1282. Dinner for two with tax $130. Wines by the glass start at $6. Good wine list. BYOB $20. Hours: Lunch: Tues-Fri 11:30am - 2pmDinner Tues-Sun 5pm-10pm. Prix Fixe dinner Mon-Wed $32 for three courses. Wheelchair Access.