Toronto Life
February 2007
Sous City
If you’re dining out on a Sunday or Monday night, chances are the sous-chef is cooking—and you didn’t even notice. Meet the culinary stars of the future
By James Chatto
After decades as a restaurant critic’s long-suffering sidekick and date, my wife has grown diffident where dining out is concerned—except, for some reason, on Monday nights. On Monday, at dusk, her dormant appetite rears up and startles us both. “What do you have to review?” she pleads.
“Nothing’s open on Monday.”
“What about a hotel? What about Truffles!” So we ended up at the Four Seasons—this was some months ago—on a quiet Monday night, and settled in to the Truffles experience: the pampering service, the skilful sommelerie, the cooking that always flirts with four stars but hasn’t achieved them for more than a decade. Not in my book, at least. I liked the new menu. It read beautifully, laced with interesting, quietly unconventional pairings of protein and vegetable. As always, the starters were dazzling—lucid flavours, textures just so. It was always the main course that let the side down with some overly rich combination or a heavy hand with the salt. Not that night. My juicy slab of smoked sablefish slid apart into glossy, magnolia-coloured petals, its sweetness matched by that of a golden carrot broth and balanced by delectably bitter braised celery hearts. There was no starch on the plate. None needed. The entire meal was flawless, a cinch for four stars, and, as we lingered over coffee, I asked the waiter whether Lynn Crawford, the hotel’s executive chef, was in the kitchen that night. No, she was out, teaching a class at Dish Cooking Studio. Well, what about the Truffles chef, Lora Kirk? Monday was her night off. That evening, the restaurant—and Kirk’s elegant, unencumbered menu—was entirely in the hands of Carl Baptista, one of seven sous-chefs at the hotel.
There’s a ba-da-bim one-liner attributed to French superchef Paul Bocuse (though another great chef, Roger Vergé, probably said it first). “Who cooks in your restaurant when you’re away?” asks the innocent. “The same people who cook when I’m there,” says Bocuse. It’s not really a joke. Of course, chefs still do their own cooking in smaller establishments, but when a place reaches a certain size and importance, their attention is required at a more exalted and disengaged level. Look through the glass at Mark McEwan on nights when he’s in the kitchen at North 44°. Pan in hand? Not at all. Does a field marshal carry a rifle? When Rob Feenie opens his new restaurant in Toronto (maybe early 2008, he tells me), will he be there or back in Vancouver? Devotees of the Food Network may see celebrity chefs cleaning fish, grilling meat and deglazing pans and imagine that’s what they do for a living. In a real restaurant of any size, the actual cooking is done by others. Line cooks—also known as chefs de partie and demi-chefs de partie—are the artisans who prepare, cook and assemble the components of each dish on the menu, over and over again, exactly as the chef wishes. Leading them, ready to step in anywhere at a second’s notice, ready to run the whole kitchen, come to that, is the sous-chef, the chef’s second-in-command, the unsung hero who works brutal hours and bears enormous responsibility for barely a whisper of glory.
For some, that’s just fine. Carl Baptista, for instance, is a 20-year veteran of the Toronto industry. He’s commanded brigades of his own, most recently as executive chef of Urban and Urban Event Catering. But he was ready for a supporting role when his old friend Lynn Crawford brought him into the Four Seasons fold. Most sous-chefs, however, see the job as a stepping stone. Which adds a spoonful of irony to the situation. Chef promotes promising line cook to sous-chef. Chef teaches and trains, brings him or her to the point of professional polish. Sous finds work as a chef somewhere else. It’s an age-old dilemma, according to Anthony Walsh, corporate executive chef of the Oliver Bonacini organization. “And right now we have a number of good, strong people who are ready to take the next step. That’s one reason why we’re going to open five or six new restaurants in the next few years.”
Walsh and I are sitting at the counter looking in at Canoe’s open kitchen. It’s the start of service on a busy Thursday night, and each one of the 18 uniformed people is focused and intent on final preparations. Chef de cuisine Tom Brodi and sous Markus Bestig are putting the finishing touches to some new dishes that will be on next week’s menu, arranging the garnish and photographing the result. Another sous, Michael Robertson, is in charge of a banquet in the private dining room. “We like to have three sous here,” explains Walsh, “but I had to let one of them go this morning. A question of temperament—a personality issue.”
All but one of the 15 sous-chefs working at Oliver Bonacini’s six restaurants rose through the company’s ranks. There is nothing remotely haphazard about their progression. OB honcho Todd Clarmo, once co-chef of Canoe with Walsh, shows me why, handing me a five-page document entitled Sous-Chef Development Path. It consists of four phases spread over a year. To become a sous, a person must be able to cook at any station—that’s a given. The first phase is kitchen management—calling the pass, cleaning, managing checklists, log books and ordering. Phase two develops human resources skills—how to give briefings or conduct one-on-one meetings, how to interview and how to fire an employee. Phase three is about administration; phase four is financial. Throughout the text, little details reflect the organization’s famous attention to detail: tick one box if the sous’s toque is properly ironed, another if he or she “puts effort into staff meal.”
Markus Bestig has long since mastered it all. A week earlier he took the helm at Canoe when Walsh, Brodi and Robertson went to New York to cook at the James Beard House. “Yes, he’s ready,” says Walsh. “So is Robert Craig, a sous at Jump. They’ll be the first to move up.” Names to watch for in years to come.
Though the restaurant industry constantly complains about a dearth of personnel, the city’s best places currently seem to be burdened with gifted lieutenants. “We now have so many talented people in high positions at Scaramouche,” says owner-chef Keith Froggett, “that we must open a new place.” Froggett has two sous-chefs. One runs the Pasta Bar’s separate kitchen, and the other is a tournant (a sous who on any night will float from station to station as needed). He also has Boban Mathew, who became a sous at Scaramouche in 1997. A fine cook, solid as a rock and great with people, Mathew could have gone anywhere and governed his own kitchen, but he had no desire to move on and Froggett was loath to lose him. In 2003, he promoted him to chef de cuisine.
Two captains sharing the bridge? It works for Scaramouche. He can spell off Froggett from time to time, expediting, floating around, troubleshooting and coping with special orders. On nights when one sous is off, Mathew steps in, head down on the line, silent with concentration, a perfectionist intent on his game. That has always been the sous’s purpose—to make his chef and restaurant look good, to replicate the chef’s intentions on every dish that leaves the kitchen, to be ready for emergencies. Traditionally, a good chef also allows his or her sous the opportunity to flex some creative muscle, even if it’s only with the specials. “Boban contributes,” says Froggett. “So do both my sous. One of them, Carolyn Reid, came up with an addition last week,” says Froggett. “Quail with bitter greens and pomegranate molasses. Not really a Scaramouche dish, and we only sold two, but I liked it.”
Such free-spirited moments can seem like token gestures in the sous-chef’s pragmatic world. Significantly, there is no mention at all of recipe development on the Oliver Bonacini Sous-Chef Development Path. Indeed, having a sous who is creatively ambitious can be a problem, says Splendido’s chef and co-owner, David Lee. “If he’s always trying to give a dish a little personal edge, you have to rein him in, teach him patience. He’s there to execute my vision, not his own.”
Lee’s right, of course, but his bark may be worse than his bite. His two sous-chefs, Geoffrey O’Connor and Brian Semenuk, are encouraged to contribute. When one of the restaurant’s fish suppliers brings in a bag of New Zealand cockles, just enough to give away as an amuse, Lee challenges them to come up with some ideas. Delegating even that small responsibility has been trying for Lee. Like many young chefs, he has always wanted to do everything himself. It’s only in the last couple of years that he has handed the keys of the kitchen to his sous-chefs on Sunday nights or invited their comments on his own menus and dishes. “I don’t always like what they say,” he confesses, “and I don’t always pay attention to it, but it’s useful. It does make me think.”
A sous-chef’s creativity suddenly becomes of paramount importance when he or she takes the next step, emerging from chrysalid anonymity to flutter those new artist’s wings as a fully fledged chef. Like a writer who tries to work every idea he’s ever had into his first novel, a chef’s first menu can be alarmingly overburdened. I’ll never forget a dish I tasted long ago when young George Betak opened Indulge, on Queen Street West: swordfish sieved and poached as a mousseline, shaped like a sausage, rolled in Cajun spice, then flamed in tequila. It tasted pretty good, but was so strongly seasoned with youthful enthusiasm, with the need to show the world every technique he knew.
The other temptation for a newly minted chef is to rely too heavily on the dishes he has been cooking in someone else’s restaurant. As sous and then chef de cuisine at Centro, David Lee executed Marc Thuet’s menus for years. When he left to open Splendido, he was extraordinarily scrupulous about taking nothing away with him but experience. Months went by before he even offered a tasting menu. It wasn’t a crisis of confidence, just a necessary step in his personal development. “I needed time to find out who David Lee was,” he explains. Few chefs are so careful. Conscious or subconscious borrowing is part of any art form, and it’s hard to ask a craftsman explicitly trained to replicate someone else’s recipes to suddenly show an entirely original oeuvre. There are conventions in place that address the specific problem.
Early in his career, for example, the great English chef Marco Pierre White would admit the influence of one of his masters by writing “à la Pierre Koffman” as part of the description of the dish on the menu. Everyone applauded his honesty and good taste, and Koffman was flattered rather than annoyed. It’s only the unacknowledged sorcerer who gets a little huffy when the apprentice starts copying his tricks. Here, too, a code already exists. The phrase used most often by a chef who feels a former sous has ripped off his recipes (coined, I believe, by Rob Feenie) is, “He really should travel.”
I don’t want Michael Steh to travel. Of Slovenian stock, he grew up on a farm near Oshawa and apprenticed under Gordon Mackie at Canoe. By the age of 23, he was a sous-chef at Biff’s—this was back in the days before Oliver Bonacini had committed its guidelines to paper, and also, Steh admits, too early in his career for such responsibility. At 24, he opened a successful place of his own in Collingwood called 27 on 4th and spent a year missing his family, fiancée and Toronto’s fine dining scene. Back in the city, he did a stage at Susur, then worked for two years at Splendido as sous-chef. David Lee remembers him as hungry, ambitious and confident—qualities, I would say, that are appropriate, even necessary in a young chef. Last summer, he left to join Reds Bistro, the SIR Corp. property on Adelaide Street West, as executive chef.
Reds has always been a difficult critter to pin down. The look is simply bizarre: ye olde stone walls, plus etched-glass booth dividers, plus wavy beige ceiling, all on a modern, glass-sheathed mezzanine. But the wine program is impressive—deep list, pricey but intelligently chosen, more than 60 by the glass. Bay Street suits pack the place at lunchtime, and the downstairs wine bar is a zoo after work. The issue is putting bums on the bistro’s newly upholstered brown leather banquettes as evening sets in.
SIR Corp. sees Steh as the solution, and they could well be right. I thoroughly enjoyed my dinner there. A fresh hen’s egg cooked en cocotte, its yolk half-runny, with crispy, salty duck confit standing in for bacon and an invisible but aromatic cloud of truffle hanging over the dish, was as scrumptious as a courtesan’s breakfast. I loved the single, oversized raviolo that oozed liquid egg yolk and sweetly fragrant puréed leek—the base for perfectly crisp little sweetbreads and a rich parmesan froth. And ditto for barely seared Hokkaido sea scallops in a puddle of frothy cauliflower soup, streaked with truffled honey and smothered under enough shaved Istrian truffle (so fresh, so headily perfumed) to bring any appetite to its knees. Cooking like that is a very ambitious proposition in a restaurant as large as Reds, but Steh reckons he can pull it off. I only have one problem with these three dishes. Apart from the ubiquitous addition of truffle, they are all remarkably similar to items on David Lee’s 2005 and 2006 menus at Splendido.
I don’t point this out in an effort to be clever at chef Steh’s expense. It’s just that the guy can certainly cook, and his original dishes (such as superbly tender venison enriched with seared foie gras and thyme, and paired with a gorgeous parsnip gratin served in its own cast iron pot) were delightfully conceived. I await his next menu with real excitement.
Back in the early 1990s, I made a list of the city’s top dozen sous-chefs—eager young talents with names to watch out for in years to come. Only two of those names now ring a resonant bell: Richard Fox- Revett, chef of Boho, on Roncesvalles Avenue, and Joan Monfaredi, executive chef of the Park Hyatt hotel. The rest have either left town or abandoned the industry. Still, two out of 12 isn’t bad. People in the restaurant business are well aware that it’s a prodigious leap from talented sous to successful chef. The general public, however, may not even see the gap.
Can we tell if those cutlets at Canoe were cooked by Anthony Walsh or just to his specifications? Did Keith Froggett drizzle the jus around that yummy Scaramouche venison or did Boban Mathew? Unless you’re eating at a sushi bar and hoping for a master’s touch, I’d argue it doesn’t much matter who fillets the fish, as long as they’re doing it right. There might even be something to learn when a sous-chef is in charge of the kitchen. After all, our culinary destiny is in their hands. They are the people who will be feeding us 10 years from now. Dine out on a Sunday or Monday. You may get a glimpse of the future, a taste of dinners to come.
By James Chatto
