Spice of life - Business Events Toronto

food drink
food+drink
Spice of life
If you’re the kind of eater who lives to feel the burn, Toronto’s food scene will stoke your
appetite. Home to Canada’s most diverse array of ethnic restaurants, the city’s selections
will have you breaking a sweat, chowing down on a global heat seeker’s menu: authentic
tom yum goong soup at Linda Modern Thai, habanero-spiked cochinita pibil tacos at El
Caballito, mouth-searing vindaloo at Bindia Indian Bistro, or the slower burn of Cajunstyle jambalaya from Southern Accent Restaurant. Or pair dinner with entertainment at
The Sultan’s Tent, where French-Moroccan dishes like North African piri piri chicken turn
up the heat, especially when accompanied by a live belly-dancing performance.
FOOD & DRINK
Local flavour
Three chefs dish on what makes their cuisine taste like home.
By Gizelle Lau Photography by Geoff Fitzgerald
AUTHENTIC C
Chilies en nogada at Los Colibris
Chef
Elia Herrera
54 • TORONTO 2016
HEF ELIA HERRERA was
raised in Veracruz, Mexico,
where her mother and
grandmother—both
chefs—stoked her love of cooking.
“I grew up in the family business. Our
family has owned a catering company
for over 75 years,” says Herrera. So it
was a given that she’d attend cooking
school in Puebla, Mexico. During
those four years, she spent summers
honing her skills throughout Italy,
Belgium, France and Spain.
After graduating, Herrera worked
in Spain for several years and then
came to Toronto. “The plan was to
explore Canada and then fly away, but
I fell in love with Toronto,” she says.
Her intended one-year stay turned
into 13 years—and she hasn’t looked
back, honing her chops in some of
the city’s best kitchens, like Mistura
and Canoe.
A few years ago, Herrera began
working as a restaurant consultant,
rediscovering her culinary roots in the
process. Around the same time, she
observed newfound opportunities in
Toronto’s expanding food scene.
“When I came to Canada, it was hard
to find Mexican ingredients but now
it’s easy to get everything you need.
It’s incredible,” she says, frequenting
shops like Perola’s Supermarket in
Kensington Market.
In 2014, Herrera helped open
not one but two Mexican restaurants
on King Street West. The casual
El Caballito (elcaballito.ca) offers a
crowd-pleasing menu of tequila,
margaritas and Mexican street food
like guacamole, ceviche and tacos.
Upstairs, the upscale Los Colibris
(loscolibris.ca) focuses on fine dining
and intricate dishes that are a nod
to traditional Mexican cuisine.
As executive chef, Herrera uses
recipes passed down from her mother
and grandmother. One of her signature
dishes at Los Colibris is the chilies en
nogada—pork-stuffed poblano
peppers with a walnut cream sauce
—painstakingly created using 32
ingredients. It’s authentic to Puebla,
and there’s no better place to taste it
than in Toronto, a city where homelands old and new mix deliciously.
FOOD AND DRINK
FUSION
C
HEF NICK LIU describes his
two-year-old restaurant DaiLo
(dailoto.com) as “my story … in a
restaurant.” Liu says the College
Street restaurant’s menu is an expression of
his cultural identity, one that straddles the
Chinese-Canadian line. Though his mom
hails from South Africa and his dad from
India (both are ethnically Chinese), Liu
considers himself Chinese-Canadian.
“Growing up and going to my
grandparents’, we’d always eat Chinese
food. But for me and my brother, we loved it
when my grandmother made Kraft
Dinner—she put hot dogs in it because she
read it in a book somewhere—even though
she always made it too dry,” he reminisces.
Cooking was a natural fit for Liu. “When I
first stepped into a kitchen, it felt right,” he
says of working under chef Brad Long at
360 The Restaurant at the CN Tower. Under
Long’s advice, Liu enrolled at George Brown
College’s Hospitality Centre. Upon
graduation, Liu spent the next decade and a
half working in some of Toronto’s leading
restaurants: Scaramouche, Splendido and
Niagara Street Café. He also travelled
abroad, honing his culinary skills in
restaurants in Italy, England and Australia.
Through those experiences, Liu found his
DaiLo’s truffle fried rice
niche: “They opened my eyes to the
subtleties of French techniques with Asian
flavours and ingredients.”
Enter DaiLo, which in Cantonese means
“big brother” or, in slang, “head of the gang.”
Liu bills the menu as “new Asian cuisine,
based on my own journey to dive into my
own culture and learn about it through food.”
The journey has been lifelong, says Liu:
“Growing up as a Chinese kid in Markham—
before it became predominantly Chinese—
we kind of repelled our own culture to fit in
and be more white, more ‘Canadian.’ I feel
like I missed out, so learning about some of
the key dishes of different regions of Asia
gave me a stronger connection to my
culture, and who I am and where my family
has come from.”
One signature dish is the truffle fried rice,
a traditional Chinese fried rice dish that
brings in the French fine-dining flair of
truffles, finished with puffed rice for texture.
“Egg and truffles is one of the best flavour
combinations in the world, so I thought,
‘Why not try it with fried rice?’” explains Liu.
It’s that kind of tinkering—taking traditional
Asian dishes and incorporating fine-dining
technique, local ingredients, and flavours
from around the world—that makes DaiLo
one of the city’s hottest restaurants.
@SeeTorontoNow l
Chef
Nick Liu
Another great example of this is the mapo
“doufu” halloumi, a play on the traditional
mapo tofu dish, where instead of tofu, he
uses halloumi, a Levantine-style cheese from
a local dairy, and stir-fries it up with ground
pork, grilled scallions, black bean chili sauce,
fried chilies and garlic. It’s a global dish that
sums up Toronto in every bite.
VisitToronto
TORONTO 2016 • 55
CANADIAN
W
HEN RESTAURATEURS and chefs
Wayne Morris and Evelyn Wu decided to
open Boralia (boraliato.com), they wanted
to create a menu that, says Wu, could
incorporate flavours of Wayne’s Acadian background
and her Chinese upbringing “without being kitschy.”
Inspired by her experience working for British chef
Heston Blumenthal, who is credited with modernizing
traditional British recipes, Wu and partner Morris began
looking at Canadian history for culinary inspiration.
What they found was lacking, Canada being barely
150 years old, after all.
“Toronto has one of the best ethnic-food scenes of
any city we’ve lived in,” says Wu. “But people are at a
loss when asked about Canadian cuisine and Canadian
restaurants that serve things other than the
stereotypical poutine and peameal bacon. Everyone
knows that Canada is a melting pot of cultures; we
wanted to create a menu that would showcase this
multiculturalism in the form of flavours.”
The duo began delving deeper into Canada’s history
from a multicultural perspective. They researched
Aboriginal history, including recipes and traditional
preparation techniques, as well as recipes from the
settlers and immigrants who came after the English and
French, specifically those from Poland and China.
Boralia’s menu includes dishes like l’éclade, a
recipe that traces back to Samuel de Champlain:
pine-smoked mussels come to your table under a
glass dome that’s lifted so the smokiness wafts into
the air in front of you. The restaurant’s whelk dish is a
tribute to the East Coast’s Mi’kmaq Nation, who
would fish for whelk (part of the snail family) and use
the shell for currency. The whelk are sliced and lightly
grilled, served in a whelk shell, under a seaweed
beurre blanc, atop a bed of sautéed burdock root
and carrot. You’ll also find dishes like chop suey
croquettes and perogies, recipes from the 1800s
(chop suey is believed to have been invented by
West Coast restaurants catering to Chinese railway
workers, and perogy recipes were brought by
Polish immigrants).
Wu sums up that modern take on Canuck cuisine:
“Canadian cuisine is the food of the people who built
this country. It’s the food of the Aboriginal tribes who
know the ins and outs of the indigenous plants. It’s
the dishes that the early English and French settlers
recreated here and adapted with ingredients they
could find in this new land. It’s the flavours of the
immigrants that came after them.” Mindful of history
yet ever evolving, this type of Canadian cuisine is like
Toronto—alive and unlike anything else in the world.
56 • TORONTO 2016 l www.SeeTorontoNow.com
Boralia’s pine-smoked mussels
Chef
Wayne Morris