In Ottawa a few weeks back, I discovered a food trend I would dearly love to see catch on in our more fashionable urban centres. Expounding on our restaurant options for the evening, a friend of mine suggested Sweetgrass, which bills itself as an “Aboriginal Bistro.” The small room in the Byward Market area has evidently been open since 2003, but is still in such demand that trying for a weekend table without a reservation is close to useless.
Sweetgrass serves “unique seasonal menus that follow the ancient hunting and gathering traditions of North and South America’s many First Nation People.” It is owned and operated by Phoebe and Warren Sutherland: Phoebe is Cree and grew up near Mistassini Lake in Quebec; Warren, her husband and partner, was born and raised in Jamaica. Both were trained at the New England Culinary Institute, and the restaurant’s menu looks, while tasty, a touch heavy on gimmickry (the “Grilled Tatonka,” a 10-oz. bison rib-eye, conjures unwelcome images of Kevin Costner wearing a handlebar moustache, humpbacked, and rooting in the dirt like a senile truffle pig). On the other hand, dishes like Awazibi Maple–glazed roasted wild boar, elk dumplings, and sustainably caught pickerel served with fingerling potatoes and “christophes mushrooms” raise a tantalizing possibility: the popularization of cuisine inspired by the food of Canada’s First Nations peoples. (more…)
Last Sunday was Pizzageddon. This doesn’t mean that cheese and tomato sauce fell from the sky in dollops to crush government buildings and places of worship and all-you-can-eat Pizza Hut buffets, signaling the displeasure of some vengeful Neapolitan god — there is nothing religious about Pizzageddon, or at least not theistic. Rather, Pizzageddon is the ultimate pizza cook-off, at which different teams try to assemble the most delicious pie, and a winner is chosen by secret ballot. It takes place in my kitchen, and the rule this time around — for there have been many Pizzageddons — was that my wife (an ace baker) would supply the homemade dough, but the teams were responsible for all toppings, including sauce.
Pizzageddon is part of a larger custom in my family, which we have given the more modest name of Pizza Sundays, and which simply involves us making pizza, from scratch, every Sunday evening. We often make the immodest joke that Pizza Sundays is the greatest tradition in the history of the universe, and although that may be pushing it a little, it gives our friends and us something to look forward to every week, a good excuse to gather, talk about food, and share a reliably delicious meal.
The Slow Food movement has emphasized the value of taking time to appreciate your food, and to learn what its proponents call “taste education,” which aims “to retrain the senses and sharpen perception” in order to better understand the role food plays in society. The focus is on acknowledging the links between food, place, and culture, with a balance between pleasure and knowledge — of local cuisines, biodiversity, and food’s connection to the environment — and on reintroducing an idea of eating that provides a counterpoint to the mass production, instant gratification, and fat-and-sodium obsession that fuels the fast food industry. One key ingredient in the recipe for conscious eating, however, is much simpler and more intuitive than drawing a flow chart to assess the impact your Thai beef salad has on global ecosystems. It has to do with cooking, and eating, as a ritual. (more…)
What does it mean to provide good service? The definition can change depending on the situation; you don’t go into a meal at Puck N’ Wings with the same expectations you might have for an evening at a Mark McEwan restaurant. Increasingly, though, the typical relationship between customer and establishment, in which meeting the needs of the former is the core of a good business strategy for the latter, is being challenged. These days, it’s becoming trendy for restaurants to tell patrons how it is, and even to purport to school them in certain culinary matters. In this model, it is the expert, as represented by the business, that is always right, and the responsibility of customers to recognize their good fortune at being able to dine someplace sophisticated enough to demand respect.
In Toronto, the most notorious example of this is the Italian restaurant chain, Terroni, which is infamous among food lovers for taking a hard line on condiments, substitutions, and so on. At Terroni, if I want Parmesan cheese on my pasta but the combo doesn’t meet the restaurant’s standards of authenticity, my server will outright refuse me the cheese. The reasoning for their stance is outlined on the restaurant’s website, which states: “There’s a great satisfaction in preparing something that’s been prepared the same way for a hundred years. We respect tradition and work hard to prepare our food as authentically as we can.” (Apparently they don’t like substitutions in matters of vocabulary, either.) In other words, this is the way they do it in Southern Italy, and if you don’t like it, try Pizza Pizza.
Variations on the theme can be found throughout the city. At Pizzeria Libretto, a much-lauded joint on the bustling Ossington strip, it’s a point of pride to be the only place in town that has been certified by the Vera Pizza Napoletana, a.k.a. the pizza police. Libretto’s website (which actually has an “Ideology” section) echoes Terroni’s:
“Libretto aims to be loyal to what real pizza is, invented in Naples using local natural ingredients, cooked in a wood fired oven at extremely high heat to achieve a charred, blistered crust…Pizzeria Libretto makes the only certified Vera Pizza Napoletana in Toronto, using the guidelines set out by the Verace Pizza Napoletana Association and as set out by the Italian Government and the European Union. This strong statement is backed by our commitment to specifically selected high quality ingredients, made in a traditional manner with old world equipment.”
Again, the gist is clear: the average guest obviously doesn’t know what real pizza is, so we’re telling them, and they should be thankful to us for operating at such an exacting standard. (more…)
This is not news – the New York Times and Slate have already been on it – but I’m still astounded at how easy it is to make your own yogurt.
Dairy products that go beyond milk tend to have an air of magic or sorcery about them. Yogurt, in particular, is a little eerie for being alive, and it’s certainly not anything I’d ever heard of my friends or family whipping up at home. Like butter, which I still naively tend to imagine being churned by a Swiss milkmaid in an idyllic meadow somewhere, I always kind of thought yogurt was something that only highly specialized masters could produce – yogurt elves, perhaps, or maybe an Indian yogi who spent all of his time on top of a mountain, meditating in front of a giant lake of milk until fermentation occurred. (more…)
As civil war ravages Sri Lanka and militants approach the capital of Pakistan, do you ever stop to wonder: in the throes of war, who’s making the chapatis?
If it seems as though I’m making light of serious situations, the film Cooking History asks you to consider the gravity of the question. The documentary by Slovak director Peter Kerekes, which picked up a special jury prize at the Hot Docs documentary film festival in Toronto last week, looks at major European conflicts of the 20th century from the perspective of some often-ignored but crucial figures in warfare: military chefs. (more…)
Poor pork farmers. The so-called “other white meat” has enough image problems to contend with on a good day; roughly 1.6 billion people already consider it an unclean and possibly blasphemous foodstuff. Now, with swine flu and attendant swine flu fever (the cultural kind, not the physical one – don’t panic) sweeping the globe, the pork industry is taking a serious hit as consumers avoid pig meat, fearing that their otherwise benign pork chops and ham hocks are harbouring the dreaded Influenza A (H1N1) virus, familiarly known – until now, anyhow – by its porcine handle.
Thing is, say farmers, it’s not possible to get the illness from eating pork, and there’s no evidence to show people are getting H1N1 from physical contact with pigs; therefore, it’s pretty unfair to be calling it “swine flu.” I can certainly see their point. We are afraid enough of food as it is, and giving us an excuse to panic over one particular foodstuff, especially a meat, is like telling a xenophobe that his new Somali neighbour is a witch doctor. (more…)
You may be familiar with the recent advertising campaign in which a man refuses a bite of his female friend’s salad on the grounds that he’s a “Meatatarian.” “Beef, bacon – you know, a Meatatarian? It’s a personal choice,” he says, thoughtfully jamming a Wendy’s burger with six strips of scar-pink bacon and two glistening brown patties into his mouth.
Putting aside just how ugly the word “Meatatarian” looks in print, the campaign gives us the latest interpretation of an interesting quirk in North American culture: the privileged status of meat. The central joke relies on the basic assumption that being a vegetarian is ridiculous and/or fey and/or heretical, and that any reasonable person knows meat is the best food you can eat.
This assumption – widely held by pit jockeys, CEOs and the few dozen cranky old men who had dinner at Fran’s Diner in Toronto before the Willie Nelson show earlier this month, one of whom I sat beside long enough to hear him give a long sermon to his mute wife about how vegetarians are all skinny, pale and sick-looking – is based in a few ideas about meat that ostensibly go all the way back to our caveman beginnings, but that, upon reflection, seem a bit out of touch with current realities. (more…)
It’s strange to think of food as “popular” — you may as well suggest the cool kids are really into breathing these days. Yet it’s inescapable: glance at the bestseller lists, turn on your TV or strike up a conversation over smoked salmon and arugula canapés at a cocktail party, and you’ll inevitably end up in some kind of dialogue with, or about, our collective obsession with food. And not just cooking and eating it, either, but where it comes from, where to buy it, how to eat it without destroying the world, who swears about it best, and what kind of potential there is for various hormone-injected forms of it to evolve into intelligent, malicious beings that will conspire to turn the tables on our consumer/consumable relationship and force us back into a Stone Age situation, in which we all live like nomads, running from cave to cave to escape notice and absorption by our genetically superior Grāpple® overlords. (more…)
Winter. I march down the slush-slick sidewalk, at constant risk of wipeout as my neck cranes sideways to ogle the enticing photos of Korean dishes taped up in all the shopfront windows: ddeok bokki, dalk galbi, bibim bap, bulgogi… I linger on the signs in hangeul, puzzling the clusters of characters into sounds and, sometimes, meanings, timing my reading speed, which is nowhere near instant, but is quick enough now that familiar words only take seconds to snap into place: 은행, bank. 여행, trip. 책, book. 약국, pharmacy. I enter a grocery mart and begin trolling the aisles for the ingredients I’ve come for – gochujang, red hot pepper paste; kuk kanjang, soup soy sauce; yellow packets of Ottogi instant curry mix; long red boxes of Pepero, the Korean version of the chocolate and cookie stick snack, Pocky. At the counter, I pay for my items and mumble a shy Korean thank-you – “Kamsamnida…” – followed by a more confident “Thanks.” English is fine here. It is, after all, Toronto.
It’s been almost a month since I returned from Korea to this frozen city, and I am naturally drawn to the corridor that runs along Bloor Street from Christie to Bathurst, referred to on the area’s street signs as the Korean Business Area, but more informally called, simply, Koreatown. In this stretch of a few blocks I find a surprisingly thorough concentration of things familiar to me from two years teaching in South Korea – scents and sounds, but also unexpected details. I skulk around a small market called E-Mart, named after Korea’s ubiquitous giant department store chain and boasting the same yellow-and-black colour scheme. Outside the norae bangs, advertised with the more familiar Japanese word KARAOKE, I listen for strains of earnest, soju-fueled caterwauling. Sitting at a 24-hour restaurant called Bu-ong-ee and slurping a bowl of gamja tang – unflatteringly rendered on English signs as “pork bone soup” – I inadvertently tap my fingers to the beat of the K-pop hits that I often wished to escape in Korea, but that here give me an odd sense of comfort, as though I’m ensconced in a sonic helium bubble that can, at any time, rise up and transport me back over the ocean to the breezy shores and pale, gentle sunlight of Jeju-do. (more…)
A local saying lists three things Jeju is famous for: wind, stone and women. The island certainly has all three in abundance — the wind, in particular, is strong enough to tear off your scalp. In truth, though, the thing Jeju is most known for in Korea is tangerines (also known as Mandarin oranges). Winter marks the beginning of tangerine season, and these days it’s hard to drive a kilometre without passing an orchard tucked behind low stone walls, blazing with thousands of bright orange globes.
I once laughed outright at a hapless young American who’d purchased tangerines at the grocery store, and although I’ll admit it wasn’t very nice, my mirth was justified; in tangerine season, almost every social or commercial transaction conducted on Jeju commences or concludes with a gratis exchange of the juicy little devils. Taxi drivers hand them to you as you climb into their cabs; buckets of them sit out in the staff rooms at school; waiters bring trays of them as dessert; and any kind of major purchase — a jacket, say, or a torque wrench — will just as likely as not be augmented with a couple shopping bags bulging with fruit. It’s a friendly time of year, when Jejuites are visibly proud of the island’s most valuable and abundant crop, and the heaps of tangerines making the rounds seem to contain the very nectar of goodwill within their dappled, vivid skins. (more…)
One of my Korean students’ favourite pastimes is pulling on my beard. These days, I can’t blame them — circumstances having forced me into (temporary) bachelordom for the first time in years, I’ve made it a project to accumulate as much hair on my face as possible, and even I will admit that the resulting thicket is eminently tuggable. (It’s when the kids figure they can swing from it that problems arise.)
There’s a lurking belief that Koreans can’t grow facial hair. This is profoundly untrue, as anyone who’s familiar with Korean money can tell you; each of the three denominations of Korean won (the 1,000, 5,000 and 10,000) boasts a likeness of an eminent figure from Korean history, and all of them are rocking killer beards. The most impressive is surely the white mop cascading from the chin of Confucian scholar Yi Hwang on the 1,000, but neither fellow Confucian Yi I on the five nor King Sejong the Great (arguably the most famous Korean of all time, at least within Korea) on the ten have anything to be ashamed of — each sports a missile-shaped goatee and full moustache that would make Tom Selleck’s nose pillow bristle with envy.
It is true, however, that in contemporary South Korea, prominent facial hair is a rare sight. (more…)
Exam testing informs every aspect of life in South Korea, and it doesn’t stop even after you’ve finished university
Last Thursday was test day in South Korea. Traffic stopped. Airplane schedules were altered. The military was told to shut up. The best rice cakes in the land were distributed, consumed, and most likely thrown up in anxiety. For nine hours, the universe froze.
The most stressful test of my life was my fourth-year university Anglo-Saxon exam, which required me to translate a chunk of the original text of Beowulf, and for which I studied hard for maybe three days. The stress stemmed primarily from my desire to protect my ego by way of my final average; ultimately, the exam meant nothing.
In South Korea, tests determine the outcome of every major event in your life, and the nationwide university entrance exam (officially, the “College Scholastic Ability Test”), which takes place annually on the third Thursday in November, is the mother of all tests — the doorway through which kids must pass to transform from mute, bespectacled children whose personality is subsumed by their identical school uniforms into burgeoning adults who can wear and drink and study what they want. (more…)
Legong: I know I am replying to this pathetic, racist statement a little late and the whole ignorant rant probably doesn’t even deserve a reply. Wanhenglo, if we were all to generalise about...
Legong: I know I am replying to this pathetic, racist statement a little late and the whole ignorant rant probably doesn’t even deserve a reply. Wanhenglo, if we were all to generalise about...
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Seenloitering: The “gender analysis” in this article is upside down. Marie Calloway is a threat to the status quo because she threatens the myth that women are morally superior, above...
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Guest: I didn’t want babies or a period any more. I KNEW without a doubt I did not want children so I had been asking for a hysterectomy since I was 19. I finally got it at 39. My...
Djzklj: Pretty interesting article, despite that I don’t wanna make a voyage there
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