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…)
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...
Sky Goodden: This is startling, refreshing, overdue, and damn good. Thank you, Shary.
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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...
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