When I think of French food, I think bistro, a small cozy place in the neighbourhood, family owned, Madame at the cash register. No need to worry over what to have. The menu is always more or less the same – steak frites, onion soup, rillettes, escargots, garlic with everything, panfried calves’ liver, skate and black butter sauce, succulent scalloped potatoes….and in my experience it’s always been good. sometimes better than I expected. Bistros don’t waste money on décor and service, like the menu, is terse. Nobody ever asks you “How you folks doing?” You are accepted as a grown up, able to order a meal for yourself and if you can’t, well as mehitabel said “c’est la vie, archy, toujours gai..”

Plus - there’s no North American existential angst – why am I eating?   more »

Molecular wizard Heston Blumenthal, according to the Daily Telegraph ,"is pushing the envelope of multi-sensory cooking and tonight’s feats include mulled wine that is both hot and cold in the same glass, edible Christmas tree baubles, frankincense tea, and hot sorbet. By his own admission, it’s one of the most remarkable meals he’s ever cooked

It’s Christmas, so this must be an oyster I see before me. A craggy shell lined with slimy green mucous membrane. The things we love to eat. Oyster-insatiable parents introduced me to oysters and without their enthusiasm would I have embraced them? I certainly wouldn’t have believed the oyster could be such an astonishing compendium of tastes, running the gamut from iron ore to melon to fishscales.

The oyster optic may assault an eater’s sensibility but as revelatory taste follows revelatory taste, addiction grips. That’s why I can’t stop eating the gin-and-bitters Totten Tigers at the Starfish Oyster Bed and Grill in downtown Toronto. The reason for oysters’ protean taste is simple if a little off-putting. Like all our natural food, the oyster will taste of what it’s just eaten.

Last thing oysters often eat along a busy shore is human waste. The oyster is the Brita of the ocean, restoring a pristine sea. As I recycled my mother’s ashes in the ocean I couldn’t help wondering how they would affect the taste of local oysters.   more »

Charles Part and Jennifer Warren-Part's A Year at Les Fougeres, their restaurant in Chelsea, has won a Gourmand World Cookbook Award for Best Canadian Cookbook by a Chef.....

The Reely Tricky Resto Review....The National Post's editor Doug Kelly invited the Arts and Breathing Hacks, the best and brightest in the city, to a carb blowout Sunday night. The place -- the Spaghetti Factor where Ed Mirvish's retro restos are recycled in glowing stained glass. Everyone shurely everyone was there from Shinan Govani who interrupted his coverage of the underwater birthday celebrations for the wankster King of Thailand to jet home for the Managers Special, multisauced spaghetti, to editors Sarah Murdoch, toying with lasagna, and Ben Everett who looks like a very tall Yul Brynner, Sheilagh McEvenue ogling manicotti, Book editor Elizabeth Schaal astonished by spumoni , sages Robert Fulford, Robert Cushman talking too much to eat, lifestylists Nathalie Atkinson, Vivian Vassos, Advice Lady Darcy Smart , Foodster Amy Rosen, Food Rebels A. Brouwer and A Wilson.....Conrad? Who He? Extant Posties have forgotten how Conrad smashed the complacency of a Canadian media run by priggish, PC hacks (If it's Monday, what limbless mammal can we martyr to induce maximum guilt?) Oh what you did Conrad when you abandoned your boldest bravest creation for the colonial dream of motheaten ermine and entree to the vulgar nouveau riche...Ok I know Crusty Blatchford was too much....No time for tears, who wants to bet on the sentence? And now the money question. How did you enjoy the food? What food? Back to the Barefoot Red before it runs out and Shinan Govani's laugh, 80 decibels on my noisemeter, clears the room.

What we’re missing in Toronto! When diners head for Manhattan’s Lever House restaurant they must first swallow Brit shockjock artist Damien Hirst’s installation “School: The Archeology of Lost Desires, Comprehending Infinity, and the Search for Knowledge”. The lobby is lined with 15 medicine cabinets filled with thousands of empty boxes and bottles with labels for antidepressants, cough medicine and other drugs, 30 sheep in a series of formaldehyde filled tanks and a giant tank containing two sides of beef, a chair, 300 sausages, a shark, a dead dove and an umbrella.

Hirst describes it as his most mature work to date. Oh I don’t know. I thought he was more avant garde in his resto Pharmacy in Notting Hill where you scribbled on a prescription pad and hoped the burger had uppers in it.

Restaurateur John McDonald is understandably anxious to assure diners that his crispy lamb shoulder is formaldehyde-free, adding thankfully “An avid carnivore can’t be stopped.”   more »

I thought Stollen, the German Christmas Cake, was made from sawdust with a few dried out raisins thrown in for colour. That is to say before I sampled a slice of David's Stollen at All The Best. David had cut a slim slice which showed the cake to be not only full of juicy raisins but with a generous slice of marzipan run through it. Cut a slim slice, stroke it with a butter, and it is uber-good.

The desperate quest to make people love vegetables is reaching absurd heights.

I love Brian Wansink's book Mindless Eating- Why We Eat More than We Think We Do, so I was disappointed to read about his advice about how to gull people into eating more vegetables. "While serving your holiday dinner, don't just plop the green beans on the table. Take a cue from successful high-end restaurant menus and describe them as "succulent, spring-picked green beans." The image enhancement should encourage your family and dinner guests to eat more of them."

Oh pull the other one Dr. Wansink. Eaters aren't dumb. Perhaps yonks ago they fell for succuleet and spring picked on the shiny chain resto menu, where such "image enhancement" is still extant, but once they'd eaten the jaded veg they knew enough never to fall again.

I'm not even convinced by the games played by Dr. Wansink on those eaters in the Cornell Food and Brand Lab cafeteria.

" For example, one day we'd offer simple red beans and rice. Two weeks later, it would reappear on the menu as "Traditional Cajun Red Beans with Rice." One week you could buy the "Succulent Italian Seafood Filet" for $2.90; the next week the generic-sounding seafood filet was available at the same price.

They were the exact same items — the only difference was the addition of one or two descriptive words.

When diners were finished eating they were given a short survey asking them to rate the food. Foods with the fancy descriptive names were rated as more appealing and tastier than the identical foods with the less-enticing labels. The people eating the descriptive foods tended to think the dishes were “fantastic” or “great menu items.”

Consider two pieces of day-old chocolate cake. If one is named “chocolate cake,” and the other is named “Belgian Black Forest Double Chocolate Cake,” people will buy the second. What is especially interesting is that after trying it, people will rate the Belgian cake as tasting better than an identical piece of plain old cake. "

I find this depressing. Ok so the participants can read but I think its the death of good food if they can't taste...

“It is chicken which defines a restaurant’s quality”

Who said that? Someone at my table at Reds, a glittering Bay street eatery. It is said ironically because we know that chicken is the most degraded meat in North America, little more than cheap industrial fodder for Kentucky Fried Chicken franchises. It all comes from taking a French king too seriously. Henry IV wanted every French family to have a chicken in the pot on Sunday and North Americans took the idea and ran with it. But the bird itself! Take one of those pathetic battery-raised creatures home and cry when you see its paltry flesh and gobs of pinkish fat. Even Joel Rebuchon’s amazing Poulet Roti Grand-Maman can’t disguise the sad reality that the battery hen’s flavour is MIA. But then of course Rebuchon would have had access to the AOC Bresse chicken, a great gamey fowl with clear running yellow fat and flesh that obediently yields to a fork. I don’t know whether Torontonians are really up for a gamey meat after so many years of blandness or for that matter, a very expensive bird.   more »