A conversation with Odd Bits author Jennifer McLagan.

ODD BITS

Words by MIKA BAREKET
Photography by CHUCK ORTIZ

MIKA: Are you telling us to stop eating chops and sirloin?

JENNIFER: No. I am trying to expand your horizon by giving you more choice. If you limit yourself to chops and sirloin then you will miss out on lots of different tastes and textures.

MIKA: What’s the right balance of common cuts versus odd bits in our diet?  I mean, should we be eating brains all the time?

JENNIFER: Sure you can eat brains for breakfast if you want – they have a similar texture to scrambled eggs – but I doubt you will.
Odd bits are all legitimate cuts and parts of the animal. I think we should eat the whole animal, so the right balance would be the balance that the animal provides.

MIKA: The audience in our Odd Bits class were some of the loudest-mouthed guys I know, and yet they were very quiet, almost silent.  Are people still freaked out about hearts and tongues?

JENNIFER: Perhaps they were quiet because there was so much good information! I think some people are surprised by these cuts, however I find there is lot of interest in how to prepare and cook them, especially amongst chefs and food lovers. For them it is like a new frontier to explore and it challenges them. One chef was wowed when a dish was presented inside a pig’s bladder. This is not new, but a classic French presentation not often seen today except at restaurants like Le Bristol where chef Eric Frechon presents a poulet de Bresse cooked in a pig’s bladder and also a fabulous rendition of tete de veau.

MIKA: In your intro to Odd Bits, you tell us to demand meat that is raised naturally and humanely.  How do we make our demands?

JENNIFER: You must know where your meat is coming from and how it was raised. Shop at a good butcher who knows his suppliers, at farmer’s markets or buy directly from suppliers. Ask questions. If you don’t like the answers, go elsewhere. You have to take responsibility.

MIKA: Without resorting to trickery, how do we encourage our squeamish friends and children to try meat that is outside the box?

JENNIFER: Start children young and expose them to as many different tastes and textures as you can. For your friends, perhaps the best way is to introduce a small amount into a dish, like some heart into a beef stew or make heart kebabs that are a mixture of another cut and heart. I have converted a lot of people to brains with my brain and mushroom ravioli.

MIKA: You divide your time between Toronto and Paris.  Lucky.  How does your cooking change from city to ville?

JENNIFER: Yes I am lucky. I don’t think my way of cooking really changes. I cook daily and shop at least every second day to see what is fresh and in season. I have less freezer space in Paris, so I have to get out in the markets, which I love. I find odd bits so much easier to buy in Paris. Even in the supermarket, where I rarely shop, they have pig’s ears and tails, gizzards and liver.

MIKA: You’ve won the most prestigious awards for writing in your field. Why aren’t you a household name?  I’d imagine that all things the same, you’d be a national hero in France, or Spain, or Italy…

JENNIFER: I doubt I will ever be a household name, which is fine with me. Today in the food world you need to be on television or relentlessly promote yourself, and that is not my thing. I do hope that I can make some people think about what they are eating and realize the importance of having a food culture.

…

Meet Chad Robertson, San Francisco’s very own baker extraordinaire.

SIMPLY OBSESSED

Words by ABBY AINSWORTH
Photography by ABBY AINSWORTH

Some would say Chad Robertson is simply obsessed. As owner and baker of
Tartine Bakery in San Francisco, he is meticulous about finding the perfect
ratios between water to flour, and time to temperature. He pours ingredients
into measuring cups with the precise eye of a chemist; it always has to be
perfect. If it weren’t for his fixation on his product, which borders on
fetishization, it would not be the best.

It is five in the afternoon. The smell of freshly baked bread lingers in the air. There is a line that spans blocks outside 600 Guerrero Street. Customers contentedly wait to buy a taste of Chad’s precision. The loaf itself is a generous size, replicating the dimensions of a flattened rugby ball. It is a sumptuous deep brown with a glossy sheen. There are long linear cracks along the top, which are created from the delicate scores Chad makes before the dough goes into the oven. Once tarred, the bread rips apart with ease and you are left feasting your eyes on a beautifully elastic and sponge-like dough. The taste? Heavenly addictive. Its well-developed yeast/wheat flavour is where you can understand the craftsmanship behind the product.

When Robertson and his wife Elisabeth opened Tartine Bakery and Cafe in 2002, they didn’t anticipate how popular it would become. All they knew was that they wanted to put out a top-notch product. Both had formal training at The Culinary Institute of America in New York City. After school, Chad had the opportunity to apprentice for Richard Bourdon, the very well known baker and owner of Berkshire Mountain Bakery. Chad says it was during this time that his love for baking was ignited. In his book Tartine Bread, Robertson says that despite the long hours, he would rather work a twelve-hour shift baking than at a busy restaurant.

Now with two cookbooks, praise from The New York Times and Food & Wine, and a James Beard Award, the couple are still as passionate about their product as ever—always expanding their knowledge of bread to make sure it’s the best it can be. Chad is constantly traveling the globe to absorb knowledge from top bakers. Even after all these years, baking still remains a solitary passion for Chad. “Making bread has become a mostly silent meditation for me and I like it that way,” he says.

ACQ: Can you tell me when your love for baking began? When did it turn into your own business?

CHAD: I didn’t really have any plans to become a baker when I visited Richard Bourdon’s bakery. There were a lot of factors that influenced my rather quick decision to shift my focus from cooking to learning to make bread.  For starters, I was young and impressionable, and Bourdon was unlike anyone I had ever met. He was, and still is, a bread-making savant. His approach to baking and fermentation in general is very intuitive and elemental.

After working with Richard for a couple of years, I went to France to work for the bakers that had inspired him many years before. The bakers there used natural leaven and specialized in stone-milled organic grains. When we returned to the US, there were very few bakers working in the traditional ways that I wanted to, so we decided right away to start our own place. Point Reyes California is a tiny town with only a few hundred permanent residents, so we had to take our bread to markets in nearby larger cities to sell enough to make a living.

The Berkeley Farmers Market was a great place for us to take our bread and pastries. The city had long supported organic artisan food producers; restaurants such as Chez Panisse have been supporting family farmers and producers for almost 40 years.

ACQ: Even though you are obviously driven and very fastidious, you seem to be pretty laid back. You mention in Tartine Bread that you love to surf and find baking relaxing. Do you think San Francisco complements your nature, and do you think the location has added to the success of the restaurant?

CHAD: San Francisco is an amazing city. The produce we use from our local farmers is exceptional; it informs and inspires what we make at the bakery. The size and situation of San Francisco definitely informs my working lifestyle, with its ocean beach where I surf and run for three miles along the western edge of the city. Compared to New York City for example, San

Francisco—with its mountains, ocean, and redwood forests nearby—is quite a small city; yet, we have one of the most diverse food cultures in the country.

ACQ: You have been written up in Elle Magazine, and nominated for a James Beard Award in 2006 and 2007 for Outstanding Pastry Chef and Baker. The New York Times was here [at Tartine Bakery and Cafe] a day before me, and everyone advocates Tartine as a must-see dining experience in San Francisco. Did you ever expect to receive this success and such wide reception?

CHAD: No, I didn’t expect the success we have had. For the hard and dedicated work of our entire staff over the years, it’s a welcome, hard-earned, and much-appreciated success. And every day we strive to maintain it.

ACQ: Who do you look to for inspiration? You said you went to Paris recently. What were you doing there?

CHAD: I mostly look to artisans and artists outside of the baking world to inspire indirectly what I am doing. Also, to chefs who are making interesting food. I went to Paris and Brittany recently to work with two bakers. Both of them were making very different bread from each other, and from what I do at Tartine. While I didn’t come home wanting to replicate any of the breads I worked with in France, I was very inspired by the new friends I had made and the effect that a week in Paris has on the soul.

Most recently, I traveled to Copenhagen and Hungary to work with bakers making breads very different from those in France. Again, the friends I made and the two cities gave the inspiration I brought back with me. In Copenhagen, I enjoyed one of the best meals of my life at a restaurant called Relae—a perfect neighborhood restaurant serving exceptional and interesting food and wine. It is incredibly inspiring.

ACQ: When you travel to Europe and come back to America, do you notice a big difference in the techniques? Do you think North America is behind in techniques as compared with France or in Europe in general?

CHAD: There is not much difference between the skill-level of techniques from the good bakeries in the US compared with the same in France. Some of the techniques are necessarily different though, due to the different qualities of the flour. I couldn’t generalize too much here. There are bakers taking a lot of shortcuts and making bad bread in both places. Just as there are dedicated artisans making great bread in both.

ACQ: What is it about France or Paris specifically that differentiates their baking skills? Are we trying to catch up to their standards or is this a misconception?

CHAD: I don’t really think about catching up with Paris. It’s not easy to even find a bakery that makes croissants from scratch in Paris. The baker I worked with there informed me that over 80% of bakeries in Paris use pre-made frozen dough. Christophe Vasseur of Du Pain et Des Idees is making excellent and distinctive breads and pastries using organic stone-ground flour. He is one of the best in France and was named best bakery in Paris a couple of years ago. He strives not only to achieve the highest quality, but also to offer something different from his peers.

I’ve also found that it’s much easier to find good, distinctive bread in the countryside in France than in Paris. Regarding French bakers borrowing from us, this would be unlikely not because we don’t have the innovation they might like to adopt; rather, because the French are very set in their ways with centuries of tradition informing their techniques.

Some of the ways that I work with bread in San Francisco would be considered impossible in France only because the method is completely outside of the French tradition. And in general, French bakers have little to no interest in learning new techniques outside of their own tradition.

ACQ: I have read that your baking philosophy is to keep things simple. Do you think this is why people like Tartine bread so much? Is it because you have gone back to the basics?

CHAD: We are just obsessively dedicated to sweating the details every day on the quality and freshness of the food we make. That’s the simple thing.

ACQ: You explain in your book about using a natural leavening agent instead of the commercial straight-yeast version. Can you explain what the difference is between the two? Why is one better than the other?

CHAD: There is nothing wrong with using commercial yeast; in fact, it’s quite convenient. But the maximum flavor that can be developed through fermentation using commercial yeast is considerably less than what can be achieved using a natural leaven. So, one is not better than the other. But if you are looking to develop maximum flavor, natural leaven is the way to go. We use a blend of locally milled organic wheat flours. The flours are stone-ground weekly for us. The freshness and type of milling gives us the foundation of flavours that we build on using multiple long fermentation stages.

ACQ: I know you are constantly questioned for using a gas oven rather than a wood fire. Do you think people place more importance on wood fire ovens for baking as opposed to gas?

CHAD: It’s a total misconception. No matter how much I try to clear it up, it will never go away. Working with wood is a great pleasure and I enjoyed it for many years. But unless you are grilling directly over a wood fire with food coming in contact with smoke, you are not infusing the food with the flavor of the fire.

ACQ: What do you want people to get out of the experience of eating Tartine bread?

CHAD: A new flavor. I want our bread to taste distinct from other breads out there so that we are adding to the diversity of our bread culture. And ideally, a singularly delicious experience that creates a lasting memory.

ACQ: Do you think that bread has become too commercial and that the art of baking fresh loaves is somewhat lost?

CHAD: True artisan bread is becoming more varied and available across the country. At the same time, artisan ‘style’ bread is becoming more commercial. In my experience, there are a lot of people making great bread these days at home.

ACQ: What makes the perfect loaf of bread in your eyes?

CHAD: There are a few different perfect loaves for me: some made of wheat, rye, spelt, or kamut (or combinations of these grains). They all have a strong contrast between the crust and crumb. The crumb must be exceptionally flavorful and moist; the character formed through a lengthy fermentation—subtle acid balanced by a sweet lactic nature. The flavour of freshly stone ground flour must be there. This is difficult to describe but it is sublime. I prefer the crust to be burnished with the complex flavours and colours of caramelization, to be firm but with a slight cracking give.

ACQ: Do you have any tips for someone who might be hesitant to make their own bread?

CHAD: It’s much easier than you think. Just start the process and you’ll see.

When it comes to Offal cuisine nobody knows it better that Chris Cosentino. We recently got the chance to sit down with him and talk about the progression of this type of cooking and the barriers he has encountered thus far.

There was once a time when German blades were an industry standard and every great chef made no mistake of having one. Those days are gone as Japanese knives are now being used more than ever. Meet the man whose pushing the Japanese Knife movement even further and educating people along the way.

Meet the butcher that is bringing in quality meats and poultry to Kensington Market.

Meet the writer whose words have guided a cities’ food scene for decades.

Meet the man that made his delicatessen a city staple.

R aise your hand if this is a familiar scenario : you walk into your local grocery store, head over to the deli counter and ask for some smoked meat. On your way out you grab a loaf of bread and a jar of mustard. You get home, you finally put the sandwich together, sit down and take a bite and the realization hits, it tastes good but not like it would from a good ol’ deli.

If there is one food concept that has stood the test of time, it’s the delicatessen. For decades, delis have been a neighborhood staple for many families, serving up cured meats, cheeses, sausages, ham, liverwurst, salami, you name it. Each and every major city in North America it seems has its tried and true, go-to deli. New Yorkers go to Katz Deli, Montrealers go to Schwartz. For Torontonians, the smoked meat sanctuary is Caplansky’s.

Caplansky’s has come a long way, from the days at the Monarch Tavern to their new digs on College Street. We had a conversation with founder Zane Caplansky about his journey on the visionary winding road which culminated in this distinct and delicious food reality.

What’s in a name?

Well, one of the names I was originally going to call it was Caplan’s. Then I thought Caplan’s kind of sounds like an appliance store or a furniture store, and also my mother and brother are politicians so in a lot of ways I didn’t want to play on the family name. And then I thought to myself “Caplansky” that just sounds like such a good name and also it gave me an opportunity to rebrand myself, not just the restaurant.

Once a dot com millionaire.

I’ve done so many things, I was a dotcom millionaire back in the ‘90s, I was a consultant for Hewlett Packard and Compaq, I used to work on election campaigns for a living, I was a ski bum, I spent five years backpacking around the world, after working as a waiter, I went to George Brown College for culinary after working as a chef’s apprentice at a restaurant in B.C and I’ve worked in every capacity in the restaurant business.

When I got back to Toronto, the dotcom era went bust and at the time I was married to my business partner so when the bubble burst on the business, the marriage also ended. I had to figure out what I wanted to do with myself and I really did a lot of pretty intense soul searching to decide who I was essentially. There was a book called What Colour is Your Parachute that I had read and did the exercises in. Everything pointed back to food and hospitality. I had worked jobs earning a quarter of a million dollars a year, glamourous and high profile things and I decided I was gonna go take an $11/$12 an hour job as a bench cook. So I started working at restaurants and I really enjoyed it and sort of spent a few years doing that until the idea of doing a deli came to me.

The Schwartz Connection.

Some friends of mine were going to Montreal so I asked them to pick me up a sandwich from Schwartz. They didn’t end up getting it, and I just sat there at midnight waiting for a guy who worked for me, who was supposed to bring me back the sandwich. He never delivered and I thought, why can’t you get smoked meat in Toronto? Why can’t you find this here?

And so I went on eBay and bought a smoker online. I bought a brisket and I googled the process behind smoked meat. Essentially with smoked meat there’s four parts, there’s curing, spicing, smoking and slicing. Curing is scientific, there’s a few ways of doing it but there’s essentially a recipe. The spice flavour was something that I sort of tweaked as I went, smoking as well – like how much smoke do you give it, what kind of smoke do you give it – and slicing was a skill I had to learn.

The Art of Deli.

Somebody earlier today said to me, Who was your guru? Where did you school in the art of deli? and I said you know what, the truth is, I’m pretty much self taught. I knew the flavour I was going for and when I made my first briskets, they were way smokier than anything I ever had before. The spicing was different and at first the texture was amazing but the taste was strong. Everybody else that I gave my meat to try loved it, because they didn’t know what I was trying to get it to taste like. It became clear that my taste was different, it’s my signature flavour and I kinda had to dial back the smokiness a little bit. I tweaked the spicing a bit and the equipment that I’ve used has changed over time as well, but for the most part we got ourselves into a pretty good zone. That’s essentially how it happened. It happened in a pretty organic, holistic way.

Growing Pains.

I brought my new found flavours to the restaurant and gave everyone a taste and they went crazy for it. Then I thought okay well, how should I do this? And I was broke so I thought about a hotdog cart because it’s already cooked, you’re just steaming it, so I could do it on a hotdog cart… but unfortunately the city had a moratorium on hotdog carts because of the a la carte program, which by the way was a total failure, so I thought about maybe doing it like the San Francesco guys, like just a little take out window. And just going “how many sandwiches?” “here you go” “fries? “how many?” “thank you very much”

Even if I would’ve done it that way, I didn’t have enough money for it. Starting out at the Monarch we did it from a totally blank slate. I paid everybody cash, there was no reporting of any kind for the first few months. I had no idea what was gonna happen. Until David Sax wrote the Globe and Mail article before I opened. I opened on Tuesday it came out on Saturday. The article read “Jewish Tradition comes downtown!”. They have me standing there holding my sandwich, all posed ‘cause I wasn’t opened yet. We made up this shot. It was supposed to be buried in the paper; the photographer said to me that the editor intended to put it as just a little article inside. He liked the picture so much that they put it on the front page, full colour, with another picture inside. And it was the very first time that they had used my name as “Caplansky”. It was weird, for 40 years I had said “Caplan”, you know “Hi, I’m Zane Caplan” now It’s Zane Caplansky. It took me a while to get used to it.

Starting out, I had a business plan – 2 to 3 sandwiches a day is what my business plan projected I would sell. Who’s gonna know where I am, there’s no sign, I mean, I told a bunch of people so I figured the first day I might have 20 people show up. You know, friends and relatives. 140 people showed up, cleaned us out of the whole first week’s supply. We had to close for a week. This lead to another article, “Caplansky’s opens and closes on the same day!” And I actually called David Sax. I was despondent that I had ran out of meat and I thought I failed. And he was like no, spin it, spin it. He told me, call all the food writers you can think of and apologize for running out of meat and disappointing customers and be there to mark everyday when people show up. And so I started giving out two for one sandwich coupons … and I would say “come back and try it again”.

And when we re-opened, the Globe actually printed the next weekend  “Caplansky’s ran out of meat”. We re-opened the following week and it was twice as bad. I knew by that point what to do. I could see it wasn’t going to be one or two sandwiches a day so I bought a lot of meat, sold a lot of meat and started hiring people too because at first it was just me. I figured on day one I might need a hand, so I got somebody from the Magic Oven from where I was the manager, to come and be my waitress.

When we opened this place (Caplansky’s on College), we hired 60 people. Between 2 shifts, 7 days a week, it takes almost 10 people when the patio’s open. You have 4 servers, a bartender, a host, a cashier, that’s 7 people at a minimum and then 2 shifts – So 14 people and then the kitchen you’ve got at least as many. It’s a very different undertaking and it’s been a very challenging start but like I said,  after the re- opening, we’ve been able to be a little more strategic about how we’ve done things.

Daily Dose of Chaos.

The chaos that you walked into here, that moment, in the first half hour it’s just like that the entire day…Especially on the weekends around here, some days it’s just like 1:30, 2:30 ,3:30, okay its 4:30 and we still have a line-up at the door. When the patio’s going and we’re turning over tables like that it can be a very busy place. We actually did a wedding the second day we were open.

It was on Ward Island. The customer said, go down to the ferry terminal, go across and this is where you walk towards, no problem at all. I thought I knew the whole set-up. There was also a festival that same day on the island, so there’s 1000 people waiting to get on the ferries, the line up was hours long! But the event went well and the couple was very cool. This is what I love about what I do…Everyday is different, everyday has its own challenges, and I really am trying to focus on enjoying it all.

Gourmet.

I’d have to say that the Gourmet Magazine article on us was great. There was Maxim as well; Maxim did the ten best delis in North America and we got a great reference there. I used to be a subscriber to Gourmet Magazine and when the issue was about to come out the author called me and said he had just found out that Gourmet is only gonna publish it online. And I was like, don’t worry I’m still gonna be in Gourmet Magazine. And he was like well, there’s gonna be a little blurb in the print edition, but the whole thing is gonna be online.

So I was driving past a Shopper’s Drug-mart, it was late at night and I wondered if that Gourmet issue was out. So I went inside and I actually went to the back of the magazine, the online blurb is usually on the last two pages and I started flipping through the back … and I’m like no, no ,no and I was almost at the front of the magazine. I was like, well that’s alright, It’s still cool, I’ll still be able to say I was on Gourmet online…
but on page 18 there was a picture of me and the first two words were “Zane Caplansky” with a big ‘Z’ and I think I stopped breathing… To see myself in Gourmet was great. This is the oldest food magazine in the world.

I could imagine what the real chefs in the city say, I mean, I’m a deli guy, I’m not a chef. When the real chef guys in the city saw that article they were probably like.. “Uggggh! Caplansky”. I keep getting all these fantastic opportunities. These are the kinds of articles that when people visit the city they’ll make a point of coming here because they read about it. For the rest of my life I’ll always have that and whether the business succeeds or fails – I mean I’ll do my best to see that it succeeds, but I really feel a proud sense of authenticity and it’s because of all of this press and all of this publicity.

Reflection.

It’s been an amazing journey…
When I came up with the idea of why doesn’t Toronto have smoked meat at the same time I thought I’ve been working in restaurants for all these years, I never knew exactly what my thing was gonna be. Actually when I was at George Brown College I developed the idea of a tea house, a modern tea house but it just never clicked.

What I proved was that if you have the passion and the will to do something – it’s very cliche where there’s a will there’s a way – If I wanted people to learn one thing from my own experience it would be just that, even at 40 years old, even with all these things I’ve done with my life, It’s never too late to re-invent yourself and if you’re true to yourself.

For more info on Caplansky’s, check out their website.

Interview & Photography by Chuck Ortiz.
Assisted by Antonio Fernandez.
Transcribed & Edited by Arianne Persaud.

He has his hoof in the door and isn’t about to let up anytime soon.

maller, more specialized restaurants seem to be the popular choice these days, especially in Toronto.  Along with the upward movement towards healthier sustainable menus, is the movement towards unconventional menus.  Enter Grant van Gameren.  He’s on the forefront of offal cuisine and charcuterie in Toronto with his two restaurants ‘Black Hoof’ and ‘Hoof Cafe’. He has garnered so many rave reviews that his place in culinary stardom may not be too far off.  We spoke with Grant on his journey to opening up his restaurants, what keeps him going and why he has some haters.

Everyone knows you as the “new guy on the block” who’s changing Toronto’s food scene for the better. Give us an idea of what your cooking background is like.

Well, in terms of my cooking history, I’ve worked a lot with a chef by the name of Scott Woods and he is the executive chef and part owner at Lucien restaurant right now. I worked with him at Canoe, I worked with him at Habitat and then we opened up Lucien. Along his cooking path, he dived into molecular gastronomy which to most cooks is very intriguing at first and then you either – after a while, really enjoy it and you keep trying to exceed in it and learn new techniques…For me it got to a point where you’re manipulating food so much that, you know it’s just not cool any more, same reason you got into it is the same reason why it turns you off. So we were doing molecular gastronomy, tearing apart beautiful legs of lamb and gluing them back together.  But we were also making house made charcuterie, go figure. And I was in charge of that, taking any meat scraps that we couldn’t glue back together and making salami, you know curing stuff like that, it was just something that really interested me the more I dived into it. I began to hate the manipulation of food and I really enjoyed the tradition and technique involved in taking raw pork, and then adding salt to it, hanging it and not knowing what the outcome’s gonna be for a minimum two months and prosciutto is up to over a year.  That’s when I realized I really wanted to devote my life to that, so I decided to quit.

So you decided to leave an established restaurant and follow this new found love of cured meat. What were the key events leading up to Black Hoof’s creation?

I decided I wanted to open up a charcuterie bar eight months down the road with one of the servers I had previously worked with.  So about a week before I left, I looked on Craigslist for jobs to hold me down and pay me cash.  I came across a post that basically was in capital letters saying “CHARCUTERIE???” I opened the post and basically it said everything I was looking for; “looking for someone passionate who wants to open up a charcuterie bar”. At first I was like ok, this is like a fucking joke from my kitchen staff, ‘cause they all knew I wanted to do that and it was a little bit too odd that a week before I left theres a charcuterie posting which you almost never see.  So I lined everyone up outside in the alley way and I was like “ok which one of you fuckers posted this?”  They know I’m looking at Craigslist so obviously they’re waiting for me to reply so they could have a good laugh.  No one ‘fessed up to it, and so I contacted the post – it ended up being Jen my business partner, and we met for brunch that week.  She told me what she wanted to do and it was essentially the exact same thing I wanted to do but I had this somewhat commitment with this other guy. I had to make this decision and I didn’t completely trust the guy that I had initially planned to open with, I was still feeling him out and I asked myself do I wait, open up the charcuterie bar ten months after this woman does that I just met, or do I jump on the bandwagon, put my all into it rather than wait around for ten months?

So I decided to do it, and she already had the space and within two months of meeting each other we went 50/50, you know probably the worst business decision you can make is going in 50/50 with no contract, no nothing into a business with someone you don’t know.

And right from the get go I would get in early, I was pickling, preserving, curing meats till five in the morning. It was like a two month hustle, to cure meats its gotta be done quickly. So a week or so before we opened, most of the stuff was curing properly ‘cause I was curing it at higher temperatures than a typical fridge which is what you should be doing but you know its somewhat frowned upon by health inspectors etcetera but a nice eighteen degrees instead of four degrees to get them curing everything was going great, we opened the doors. A week before opening though we weren’t even gonna do hot food, just ‘cause we just put a fridge and tables behind a bar and all of a sudden a week before we had two feet of space enough for an electric stove. We didn’t have any money for a stove but we found one on the second floor, brought it down, plugged it in and designed a quick hot menu.  When we opened, the first weekend was just charcuterie and cheese.

When it came down to it, we were like, how really are we gonna be making money if people are just coming in for charcuterie and cheese, you can only make so much. Sure we don’t have to be staffed as much, but people want to come back, they want to start with that(charcuterie) then they wanna have something else. So we designed a small hot menu that I could cook myself and that was it.  The first few months it was just me and when we got reviews I was doing over a hundred customers a night by myself and I was fucking in the shits.  Mind you, I was in there till five in the morning trying to get my mis en place ready for the next day.  We started out small with a little fridge and a little vent that you would have at your house – We had that for like six months and at times we’d be searing portions of foie gras while the smoke just went out and filled the whole restaurant.  Literally at certain points when we’re busy on a Saturday night, at two in the morning and all the chefs are there ordering four orders of foie gras,  it’s just pure smoke.  We end up opening the doors trying to get the smoke out and you could barely see anyone, but that was our thing.  We’ve done pretty much everything, not ghetto but kinda rushed and we just took it as it came and we weren’t expecting to get as popular as we have been, you know.

Black Hoof was your first big jump into the world of charcuterie and cured meats. How was the learning curve for you?

I have never cooked a shitload of offal before opening this place so again, I’m self taught.  I’m well rounded but I don’t have 15 years cooking under primo chefs. I didn’t want to be doing other peoples food, I wanted to be doing my own, creating my own. Bit by bit I’m learning and yeah sometimes I’ll fuck up.  But my guys teach me and I teach them.  Having the staff we have is great, were getting all the best cooks in the city that are tired  of other restaurants and dont want to cook anywhere else, so they come here. It’s like a cemetary for hard ass cooks..thats the way I look at it.  It’s the type of environment where we all learn from eachother.

Online there is a small group of individuals that aren’t taking too well to your cured meats. How do you respond to that?

Some people come in and they don’t appreciate the cured meats, and we see the comments all the time on the internet.  They think they can buy them at Dominion (Metro),  sure, its mass produced pork, everything is in there, there’s lots of chemicals, sure.  We’re  just doing what we’re doing so to any haters out there, and to those people that are jealous that they don’t get the recognition, I’ve been working my ass off because I’m truly passionate, so they can all suck it.

Aside from all the haters, who inspires you to do good food? Who do you like to go to for advice? Do you have any mentors in the industry?

Not really. I don’t mean that in like a cocky way, I mean, I think a lot of guys are doing solid things and I get inspired by various people’s concepts but I think I get more inspired by having bad experiences. Going out and dining and saying like, this service is shit or thats great.  I feed off things, not that I’m a negative person but you start seeing whats wrong with people, what people aren’t offering, and then you kinda do the opposite you know.  I don’t have a lot of time to go out and eat dinner, I don’t read a lot of cook books that have pictures and I don’t try to see what everyone else is doing all the time. Because then you just start copying people and you start becoming one of these chefs that are cookbook chefs that just look at Alain Ducasse’ books and fucking rip it off you know.  I think my biggest inspiration is the cooks we have here because unlike most restaurants its not like I’m the Executive Chef, where these are my workers, I come in and design a menu, they execute it and I get all the credit for it.  I’ve got solid ass cooks that are all the same age, some of them are older, and they’ve all worked at solid restaurants.  They all have different skill sets and different weaknesses and together because everyone’s so passionate you know we feed off each other.

I’m not into baking and pastries, I don’t even touch it because it kinda scares me.  All the measuring, the rising, the baking, that’s why I got guys that do that and then they teach me. So between the two restaurants and the eight guys we have its a huge information exchange on a daily basis. For example, we got Mike….. he’s Italian.  He likes making pasta, he comes up with good stuff so that’s ‘his’ thing and I don’t even need to know what it really is ‘cause I know its gonna be good everytime.  I also got Jeff who’s running the show over here (Hoof Cafe) so I don’t have to worry about things as much because he’s awesome and talented.  Most people come in here and work on their days off, and they all have keys to the restaurant and they all know the code.  They can come in and do whatever they want ‘cause we’re all about learning and you don’t find guys like that at all these other restaurants.  For the most part they work the shift then they want to get the hell out of there.  So I think my guys are my biggest inspiration. Mario Batali is another big inspiration for me.  I love Mario and I think he’s dope. I’ve been in his restaurants…

Which Mario Batali restaurants have you dined at and how was the experience?

Babbo… and a couple others. you know the experience there is unlike any experience in Toronto.  We’re so behind on everything. Service, it’s like, I was a walk-in, I got a beautiful table, I bought a glass of wine and they didn’t treat me like shit.  It was fucking bang on. Their servers, their bus boys, everyone was spot on and you know the food was spot on and I admire him because I don’t wanna have a shit load of restaurants but I wanna have restaurants where everyone’s doing an amazing job and I don’t have to be there all the time.

Mario’s menu doesn’t change that much and I think people want to have menus like that.  People coming in just trust us for the most part, while others come in and they’re like, I wish this or that was on there,  so we have a couple signature dishes which to me I can’t stand cooking anymore but you know they’re good and people like them and it keeps them coming back, so its a little bit of a give and take…

You are getting alot of attention right now from different publications not just in Toronto but around the world.  You even had famed chef Daniel Boulud in here trying your stuff out.  How satisfying is it to know that you are getting this recognition? And why do you think you’ve been so successful while others have failed?

We’ve always tried to just keep it real, were not trying to impress anyone. We’re cooking the food we want to cook, we making the drinks we want to make. We’re passionate about it and trying to make everything in house. These other restaurants have gotten so big that no one is doing things artisinally any more.  I think most restuarants, especially most of these big ones, not to trash talk them but there’s so many generic menus out there where you walk down the strip and everyone’s serving the same mussels dish. No one is trying to specialize in anything anymore. If you go to New York, you got the donut guy you got the pickles guy, you got all these diverse things and they’re doing it well.  Here, no one is trying to do anything different, everyone is just trying to please everyone.

But then you got restaurants like Fresh that’s busy and is a niche. We’re busy because we are a niche and I’m sure we lose lots of business because we don’t have much vegetables but thats     fine, go down to Fresh.  We are creating an environment and we’re doing things the way we want to do them.  For example if we run out of something we don’t give a shit, take it off the menu board, whatever.  If we don’t have a garnish, no chef is going to yell, I’m not going to yell at anyone.  And the fact that Jen and I as owners, are constantly here shows alot.  Most people get comfortable; business is good so they hire someone to do their shit.  I think anyone other than the owners, truly care as much about every single plate or every single drink. I know that  we have employees that care 99% about them.

I know when I go out to eat I don’t want to go to these big fancy places, I know how much everything costs, I feel ripped off once and a while.  But I’ll head over to Pizzeria Libretto or even Foxley on my way home.  Although there’s alot of people doing great things in the city I also think alot of people could be doing things better.  Not that we were the first ones serving sweet breads but we have people lining up just to have it.  Sometimes we’ll have 20-30 people waiting outside, once we open the doors they start piling in, and its like wow, these people are lining up just to eat pig snout, sweet breads,  heart or tripe.  This stuff isn’t new to the cooking world, you have St. Johns, Incanto in San Francisco, theres places out there but no one was really doing it in Toronto.

Now that you have Black Hoof and Hoof Cafe under your belt. Are there any other ‘Hoof’ ventures in the works?

Absolutely. No one is really curing meats and selling it retail, and I think the city really needs that.  We are making alot of cured meats and salami and we’re just stockpiling right now.  A little hole in the wall retail space close by is in the works.  Even a place where people can come see how meats get cured.  Brandon and the guys are piling up and I think in the next two to three weeks we’re gonna start selling stuff in the restaurant.  I’m trying to find a big cigar box to line in felt and just have like some rows of various things for sale. Its kind of illegal, you’re not supposed to be selling cured meats like that… but…

There’s a way around it no?…

Well its like take-out, take-out charcuterie. So that’s what I’ll do until I get everything else together, I’ll test it out and see how people react.  We’re also importing big barrels of olive oil from Italy so people can come and do refilled olive oils. We’ll also have some tee shirts and hats but we’re not looking to be cheesy and like expand it like crazy.  Overall, we dont want to get too big and sell out. We want to keep things artisinal.

Interview & Photography by Chuck Ortiz.

Transcribed & Edited by Arianne Persaud.