enRoute Magazine
November 2008
Canada’s Best New Restaurants 2008
Among the great new restaurants that cropped up in Canada this year, 10 are a cut above. Here are the best of this year's bounty.
By Chris Johns
Photos by Frédéric Bouchard
Five weeks, 12 cities, three dozen restaurants and one order of whipped pork fat later, we are proud to reveal our annual list of Canada’s best new restaurants. From a converted dairy in Southern Ontario to a Montreal pleasure dome and a room with a view in Vancouver, we traversed the nation from coast to coast looking for exciting, memorable cooking. We found updated versions of childhood favourites (chicken noodle soup, chocolate chip cookies!), saw Latin flavours employed in ingenious ways and enjoyed local ingredients best when they were served simply, giving us a true taste of each region. Because the overall level of cooking has never been higher, mixologists and maître d’s, sommeliers and servers proved as invaluable to a restaurant’s success as chefs and their kitchen brigades. As much as we want to congratulate the Top 10, we’ll let you in on a little secret. This year’s biggest winner is the person holding the fork: You.
N˚1 Nota Bene
(Canada's Best New Restaurant)
Listen carefully. Where does music like this come from? Those winsome, electronic sounds, never rising above the level of hushed conversation, seem to emanate from some alternate universe where things are a little gentler and more refined. Look closely. Have you ever seen Torontonians so dressed up for dinner? Maybe it’s the recessed spotlights and tall lamps that create a glow so flattering, even that notoriously difficult actress in the corner is happy.
While at first glance such a scene might suggest a “serious” restaurant, the reality is quite different. Where else can you get a lesson from your sommelier in the finer points of rabbit butchery? “My grandmother used to hold them by the leg…” That’s not to suggest that a little awed reverence would be entirely out of place.
Chef David Lee and his business partners Yannick Bigourdan and Franco Prevedello have created a restaurant that is both democratic and elite. A party of heavy-hitting power suits with enviable expense accounts command the private room, devouring nine-inch bone-in aged rib steaks while guzzling decade-old bottles of Quintarelli. Nearby, a young couple, fingers intertwined, are trying boudin noir for the first time and splitting a carafe of Malivoire Ladybug rosé. Taking a cue from roadside diners, the menu offers daily specials - Chump Steak Thursdays, Lobster Wednesdays - that change with the seasons.
The kitchen relies on Asian and Latin flavours for its inspiration, filtering and refining them in the process. Ocean trout, sliced into meaty garnet sashimi, finds its inherent richness intensified by sesame oil, balanced with herbaceous elements (shiso, Thai basil) and heightened by exotic notes (kaffir lime and ginger). A slight gaminess is perceptible in thick slices of hanger steak dusted in ground guajillo peppers. The smokiness of the chilies pairs with the sweetness of caramelized onions, resulting in a chocolatey flavour, while an avocado and tomatillo chutney adds creaminess and acidity to the dish.
In restaurant lingo, the notation “NB” (for nota bene) next to a reservation indicates that the party is to be treated with special care and attention. Here the term applies to everyone.
The rest of the list:
N˚ 2. Le Local, Montreal
N˚ 3. Harbord Room, Toronto
N˚ 4. Chef’s Table, Calgary
N˚ 5. Boneta, Vancouver
N˚ 6. The Only on King, London, Ont.
N˚ 7. Lucien, Toronto
N˚ 8. Fraiche West, Vancouver
N˚ 9. Liverpool House, Montreal
N˚ 10. Stage, Victoria
enRoute Magazine's Mandate
Each year, enRoute publishes its list of Canada’s best new restaurants that advance the country’s culinary identity. They are all places where we deem that the overall dining experience will have a lasting and significant impact on our restaurant culture. The restaurants considered for this year’s survey, which all opened between July 2007 and July 2008, were chosen with the help of our coast-to-coast panel of foodies.
enRoute Magazine's Foodies
Introducing the cross-country panel that tabled the contenders for Canada’s Best New Restaurants:
Mary Bailey publishes Edmonton’s City Palate and founded the city’s Slow Food convivium.
Stéphanie Bois-Houde, the food critic for Le Soleil in Quebec City, has just published Solutions Restos, a guide to Quebec City’s best restaurants.
Linda Bramble is a Niagara-region wine educator and journalist who writes on wine and food travel.
Jillian Brown edits Ciao!, a Winnipeg food, fashion and home magazine.
Rémy Charest, an editor at Le Soleil in Quebec City, has been writing about food and wine for over 10 years and blogs with abandon on winecase.wordpress.com.
Cinda Chavich is a journalist and author whose food, wine and travel reporting appears in The Globe and Mail and Avenue magazine and on CBC Radio.
Jennifer Cockrall-King publishes the culinary newsletter The Edible Prairie Journal and freelances from her home bases of Edmonton and Naramata, B.C.
Ron Eade, the food editor at the Ottawa Citizen, shares his passion on his blog, Omnivore’s Ottawa, at ottawacitizen.com.
Liz Feltham, a former professional chef, is the long-time food writer for The Coast: Halifax’s Weekly.
John Gilchrist reviews restaurants for CBC Radio, writes about food for the Calgary Herald and has written eight guides on dining in the Calgary area.
Gary Hynes founded, edits and publishes British Columbia’s bimonthly EAT magazine.
Pierre Jury, the food columnist for Ottawa’s Le Droit, picks travel destinations based on food rather than beaches or museums.
CJ Katz is the publisher of savourlife.ca, Saskatchewan’s online food and drink magazine, and the culinary host of CTV Saskatchewan’s The Wheatland Café.
Bartley Kives writes about politics, food and travel for Winnipeg Free Press and is the author of A Daytripper’s Guide to Manitoba.
Marie-Claude Lortie, the food critic at Montreal’s La Presse newspaper, is the author of the restaurant guide Solutions Restos.
Philippe Mollé fills the pages of Elle Québec and Saveurs de France with his food writing when he’s not travelling to the world’s best markets for Canal Évasion.
Heidi Noble, the author of Menus for an Orchard Table, and husband Michael Dinn run Joie Wines in Naramata, B.C.
Charlene Rooke is the Vancouver-based editor-in-chief of Western Living, Western Canada’s lifestyle magazine covering travel, food and wine, homes and design.
Amy Rosen, who has eaten her way across Canada twice for enRoute, writes and illustrates the weekly Dish column in the National Post.
Michael Smith, the host of Food Network Canada’s Chef at Home and Chef at Large, is an award-winning cookbook author based in PEI.
Bill Spurr is the restaurant critic for Halifax’s The Chronicle Herald and a judge for Gold Medal Plates and the Canadian Culinary Championship.
Chris Mason Stearns is a Vancouver-based writer and photographer whose work can be seen and read in enRoute, Western Living, Vancouver Magazine and EAT.
Margaret Swaine, whose columns appeared in Toronto Life for 25 years, is the weekly wine columnist at the National Post and the Toronto restaurant critic for Gault Millau.
Karl Wells is the food critic for Newfoundland and Labrador’s daily newspaper, The Telegram, and hosts One Chef One Critic on Rogers TV.
George Wybouw launched the Atlantic Canada World Wine Festival and initiated the Slow Food movement in New Brunswick.
