National Post
September 23, 2006

Small dishes, big names

Ten leading chefs are competing for Olympic-style gold

by Jacob Richler

Think for a moment about a favourite snack. Not something you buy at a store or enjoy at a restaurant, but instead a little dish you make at home when feeling peckish and discriminating, a tried old favourite you trot out to impress favoured guests before a dinner party. Say a timbale of steak tartare set atop a slice of torchon of foie gras with a half quail's egg and a small scoop of ocietra caviar perched on top. And now imagine making 700 of them in half an hour.

"Those gigs are always a bit hectic," says Canoe chef Anthony Walsh, who back in 2004 won the inaugural edition of the Olympic fundraiser dinner Gold Medal Plates with a dish of organic oxtail ravioli plated with morels and wild leeks. "You just have to try and work around it."

Ten top chefs will take up this challenge on Nov. 9 at the Carlu, where with help from a sous-chef or two, each will turn out some 500 to 700 small plates of a dish conceived with a view to impressing the crowd and, more important, a panel of judges led by James Chatto.

For from this illustrious field of 10 (Susur Lee of Susur, David Lee of Splendido, Keith Froggett of Scaramouche, Pascal Ribreau of Celestin, Lynn Crawford of the Four Seasons, Michael Stadtlander of Eigensinn Farm, Mark McEwan of North 44 and Bymark, Jamie Kennedy of the eponymous restaurant and wine bar, Marc Thuet of Thuet Bistro and Bakery and Michael Potters of Harvest in Prince Edward County), one winner will be chosen to carry the Toronto torch onto the eventual finals where he or she will face off with the winners of sister events in Halifax, Winnipeg, Edmonton, Vancouver, Ottawa and Calgary. And then finally, one of them walks off with a Gold Medal plate.

Simply put then, the series was conceived to emulate the sporting nature of the sporting games for which the money is being raised -- albeit with a uniquely Canadian twist. Chef Walsh, who won the Toronto event in 2004 was disqualified from the 2006 event for being, er, a winner.

"It seems to go against the competitive nature of the event," Walsh observes, very correctly.

But baffled as he may justifiably be, he has nonetheless graciously agreed to a role on the sidelines -- making dessert (with the gifted chocolatier and Oliver-Bonacini alumnus David Castellan of Soma) and serving as a judge of the losers he beat last time. And why not -- because after all, the important thing is not the competition so much as the big cheque that will ultimately be handed over to our future Olympians in training for the Vancouver Games in 2010.

That said, mind you, I can tell you with authority that chefs out there have already given the event some considerable thought and come up with a small plate that defies the limitations imposed by cooking on a Bunsen burner on a fold-out table in the open corridors of the Carlu.

"When the f--- is it?" said Marc Thuet, reached at his restaurant. "No, no, don't say that. Say I'm thinking about it, but I cook with the season, and I'm at my best when there is spontaneity in my work."

OK, some chefs have thought about it. At any rate I know that Mark McEwan's dish is ready to go. And that David Lee will be making something that incorporates pork belly slow-roasted on his Big Green Egg barbecue for about an hour, reheated on-site and plated with a small ravioli, filling as yet undetermined.

"If I was doing it at the restaurant it would be bigger; there would be sweetbreads underneath and the ravioli would be stuffed with a raw egg yolk," Lee volunteered. And, of course, while that would be a better dish than anything he could come up with for the Carlu, raw egg yolk raviolis can be prepared at most an hour before service, whereafter the moisture begins to bleed from egg to pasta. And Olympics or not, tossing up 700 of those things on the fly is obviously above and beyond the call of duty.

"I'm not that competitive a person," says Scaramouche's Froggett. "I just want to try and make sure that whatever I make represents what we do here at the restaurant."

Beyond that, Froggett favours poached items at such events, because 300 to 400 plates with sauteed or deep-fried items tend to make a frightful mess of the cooking station and he likes things to look proper. He is at present favouring loin of tuna or veal or maybe some Arctic char.

"Above all, you want to try and enjoy yourself," he says. "It's a bit like cooking at home -- you don't want to come up with something so complicated that you're in the kitchen all night and don't get to chat with your guests."

Right then -- should you choose to buy a pricey ticket, say hi when you see Keith. I promise he is more fun to talk to than the Olympians attending the event, guaranteed to give interminable speeches about what it's like to aim to win and always give 110%. Personally, I think the chefs work harder and for a much better cause -- and most of them even manage it without any steroids, and pay their own way, too. But to come clean, athletes have always made me a little suspicious.