1999 short list:
The Man Who Ate Toronto: Memoirs of a Restaurant Lover
by James Chatto
published by McFarlane Walter & Ross
Published with permission from the author. This excerpt is copyright protected.
Dining out in Toronto is a much more complex activity than it was when I first came to Canada, twenty-one years ago. The city had an earlier bedtime then, and slept more soundly. Jet-lagged and hungry, I prowled the midnight streets looking for dinner, but all I could find was a vending machine in the underground depths of the Royal York Hotel selling plastic-wrapped submarine sandwiches, clammy, insipid, and indigestible as putty. All this changed in the 1980s, when restaurant-going became the city's favourite pastime. What had been an occasional treat was now a regular, even fanatical recreation. People with money and confidence discovered the glamour of restaurants and began to use them as social venues to a degree that would have astonished their parents. They revelled in the novelty of exotic foods, the names of obscure ingredients, and indulged themselves in shameless games of wineupmanship. Having learned the names of chefs and restaurateurs, they followed them round the town, leaving a large slice of their disposable income in a succession of extravagantly decorated rooms. It was flash, fun, and frivolous, and by the time the recession brought it all to a crudely abrupt halt as the decade ended, restaurants and restaurant-going had changed in this city forever.
I believe it is possible to eat out as well in Toronto as in any other major city in the world. Over the years, I have experienced the most imaginative and delicious cooking of my life here, at Nekah and Lotus, and I could nominate ten more establishments that have matched the quality, professionalism, and consistency of any of European restaurant I know. The achievement is all the more remarkable because it has happened without the benefit (or the constraints) of a rich fine-dining tradition. The pinnacle of our restaurant industry is small, incestuous, and excessively fashion-conscious; it is also fast, complex, and fascinating, a hybrid growth with roots in all the world's cultures. In a single generation, we have evolved from prime rib to sushi of foie gras with icewine jelly, all at a breakneck pace. I count myself lucky to have been along for the ride.
Walking home from a good night's work, footsteps echoing along the city's dark backstreets, my habitual game is to trace the genealogy of the meal I have eaten: where this waiter worked before, where that cook learned his trade, who has started importing such excellent venison into Toronto. I try to relive each texture and flavour and silently recite the professional restaurant-goer's prayer of gratitude: We thank you for the daily resurrection of the appetite, for saving our ties form coulis stains, for letting us steal the menu without an embarrassing scene, for expense accounts. Lead us not into obesity, and deliver us from cholesterol. For thine are the breath mints, etcetera.
Eating out remains an unpredictable adventure. The evening may be wonderful, it may be mediocre; often it will be both. But even when the service is grim and the food inedible, the fascination remains. Going to a different restaurant four or five times a week has not diminished my pleasure in sitting down at a table, be it made of wood, marble, plastic, Formica, of glass, hidden by butcher's paper or draped in stiff white linen. You settle yourself, look up expectantly, and wait to see what will happen next. The waiter approaches. You are in a theatre and the lights are dimming to darkness before the play. He hands you a menu. The curtain rises.
