National Post Toronto
Saturday, May 20, 2006
Victuals:
Summertime and the feastin’ is easy
Seasonal treats from Cheese Boutique, Splendido, Eigensinn
By Jacob Richler
Do not be envious of friends quitting town this weekend to open up their summer cottages, for what they tell you about country life being relaxing is just a myth that they spread to make themselves feel better about all the hard work they are now enduring as you read this in a comfortable urban café, your every request tended to by a fetching young U of T student in a miniskirt.
As everyone sensible knows, the only relaxing thing about cottage life is being invited to someone else’s. So I am especially happy to report that over these next few weeks, while we single-residence city-dwellers are patiently waiting for our future rural hosts to know things into shape out there, and for the weather to improve, there are all sorts of things going on in local restaurants and food shops to keep us happily distracted.
For starters, I recommend a trip to the Cheese Boutique, our No. 1 cheese emporium, and supplier of choice to all the finest restaurants in town. I know, I know, as the weather finally warms, some people no longer find it as necessary as they do in the harsh days of winter to cap off every single four-course weekday lunch with a plate of Epoisses, Roquefort, Selles-sur-Cher and Valençay.
Some people, I hear, actually back away from the cheese course altogether. At any rate, at the Cheese Boutique they tell me that things start to slow down a little at this time of the year, a state of affairs that continues more or less unabated until autumn. Which is why this is a good time for a trip to their shop.
Because with business slowing down just a bit out there, and with top restaurants in town simultaneously witnessing their weekend trade trail off some because of all those absent weekend cottagers, the two get together at this time of year for a little seasonal promotion.
In short, the Big Cheese – that is, Fatos Pristine and his son, Afrim, aide-de-camp in all cheese matters – spend some time working the phones over the winter months, leaning on some some of their most loyal chef customers to come out to do a cooking demonstration for the Cheese Boutique clientele.
“It’s good for the store, and it’s good for the restaurants,” says Afrim Pristine. “Maybe the customer comes out best.”
Quite so, for the food served up on weekend afternoons is completely for free, and of top quality. Last year, for example, I stumbled upon David Lee of Splendido, who was roasting suckling pig on the terrace He was good enough to slip me a plate with some cheek and ear and even some brains on it, and it made my weekend.
This year, he’s come and gone, having cooked on May 6. But if you go out today, you’ll run into the charming Donna Dooher of Mildred Pierce and the Cookworks, and tomorrow the highly talented Lino Collevecchio of the celebrated Via Allegro. And, since the chef’s series has been so successful over its inaugural two years, for its third year they have added long-weekend Mondays to the schedule, so on the 22nd you get Mathew Sutherland of Fat Cat. Next weekend, the lovely Lynn Crawford of the Four Seasons will be paying a visit, and then on Sunday the series wraps up with Pat Riley of Perigee.
But speaking of David Lee, which we were earlier, you should be advised that his restaurant Splendido is also now resuscitating a very successful program from last summer, namely the Exotica Canadiana menu, a celebration of ingredients sourced from across the country in one of the few months that you actually can get them (it starts June 1 and runs until June 30).
The menu begins with a delicate terrine of (local) suckling pig en gelée with foie gras, follows with Nova Scotia lobster in a chilled sweet-pea soup, then local white and green asparagus with hollandaise, and wild sockeye salmon from Copper River prepared sous-vide, a crafty cooking technique involving low temperatures and plastic bags of which Chef Lee is the definitive local practitioner. Then, after a break for some tomato sorbet, comes slow-roasted Dorset spring lamb and a tasting of Niagara berries. The menu is priced at $110 or $165 when paired with wines. Which is not a bad deal, it seems to me.
But then your idea of Canadian exotica may be no valet parking. Perhaps you are a frustrated cottager at hear and in your mind’s eye would prefer a little mud to the traffic on Harbord. Perhaps you would happily do without the window shades and dim lighting if you could only have some black flies and pollen swarming around as you tucked in.
In which case for just $40 extra, you should make tracks for Singhampton and Michael Stadtländer’s incomparable Eigensinn Farm.
For out here on Sunday, June 4, Chef Stadtländer is kicking off the spring season with a six-course tasting menu prepared from genuinely local products of the season, such as freshly foraged ramps, fiddleheads and the like, along with other obvious foods of spring, like lamb suckling pig, all raised on the ground of his farm or in the immediate vicinity. And you get to eat in the great outdoors, alongside the statues and installations that featured in his project for summer 2005, which he called Heaven and Earth.
Yes, they are reactivating the Bacchus statue, and if you’re nice, someone will pour you a glass of wine through his phallus of an upside-down jeroboam dangling between his legs. No work yet, though, on whether the earth mother installation has bread in the oven again, or if it is to be a mere roast trout that will emerge from between her legs, but if I were you, I would expect it all to be fairly memorable. The banquet, to raise money for an as yet unexplained new Stadtländer project called “islands,” runs from 1 to 5 p.m. and it is BYOB. Bring lots – you can always crash at a friend’s cottage on the way back home.
