One of Canada's best chefs just opened a neighbourhood noodle shop
(Score one for Chinatown East.) Also: The absolute dumbest delicious thing I'll ever urge you to buy several of . . .
Welcome to issue #2 of I Heard This Place Was Good, food writer Chris Nuttall-Smith’s highly infrequent (for now) and wildly opinionated (always) look at where and what to eat, drink, cook, read and do around Toronto. If you haven’t managed to subscribe yet, well, here’s your chance to get in on the ground floor:
At Oji Seichi, Hand-Made Ramen and the Griddle-Smashed Shrimp Sando of My Dreams
Mitch Bates was living with his in-laws when he started hoarding high-protein flour. There were 100 kilos one day, from a distributor he'd visited near Kitchener. The distributor insisted on a five-bag minimum, he explained to Caitlin Harrison, his wife. He stacked them in a corner of her mother's living room.
The next day, Harrison recalled, Bates made another visit to another distributor, for a different kind of flour from a different mill. The flour mountain beside the sofa shot up another five bags.
Bates and Harrison were renovating their own home at the time, hence the couch-surfing. They were also in the midst of building a restaurant—the place where all that flour would otherwise have been.
"If you met my mom she's very organized, type A," said Harrison. "She kept asking, 'Is the restaurant ready? Is the restaurant ready?" she said.
Oji Seichi, as that place is called, soft-opened last week after an almost year-long, pandemic-delayed build-out. It's a local ingredient -inspired ramen shop where the noodles are made in-house. Hence all that flour.
Bates, a long-time noodle nerd who was chef de cuisine at Momofuku Ko in New York before leading the kitchens at Toronto's Momofuku Shoto and Grey Gardens, will also be serving hand-made gyoza and fast food -style Japanese sandwiches: tempura maitake, chicken katsu, teriyaki pork and griddle-smashed shrimp. They not called "sandos" here, as they'd be in Japan, but "Sandys" instead, after the anglicized name that one of Harrison's great uncles used to go by. Oji Seichi is very much a family affair.
The idea for the noodle shop first started percolating at the enormous dinners Harrison's mother and aunts often host. Japanese-Canadian by heritage, they'd gather at one another’s houses to eat sushi, noodles, soy -sauced hotdogs they called "shoyu weenies" and buckets of KFC. Bates and Harrison and one of her cousins, named Shawn Irvine, used to joke that they ought to open a restaurant together. That joke evolved over time into a bona fide possibility. A friend of theirs, a designer and creative director named Wilson Duong, soon said he was interested in joining in. Just before COVID hit, they signed the lease for a building on Broadview Ave., in Chinatown East. "There's a bit of each of us in here," Harrison said.
Yet Oji Seichi is more than almost anything a celebration of one extended family's Japanese-Canadian experience. It's an effort to reclaim some of the heritage Harrison and Irvine's elder relatives and grandparents, raised in Vancouver, lost when they were interned by the Canadian government during WWII.
"Growing up, we didn't talk about the fact that my relatives were interned in the war and had these experiences," said Harrison. They didn't teach Japanese to their children or particularly celebrate their heritage. It was only as a young adult that Harrison learned about that chapter in Canadian history, and encouraged her older relatives to open up.
So the noodle shop is both a tribute and a reclamation. Oji Seichi is named for a beloved great uncle of Harrison's, a house painter by trade who'd take his nieces to off-beat trade shows and off-the-cuff museum visits, and who had a reputation for smoking weed in the basement whenever there was a family event. Though he went by Sandy through much of his life, that uncle's actual name was Seichi; Oji-san means uncle in Japanese.
Duong, whose day-job design clients include the Maple Leafs, The Raptors (he helped design the team's head office) and Chelsea Football Club, commissioned a full-wall mural for the restaurant in tribute to Seichi Oji-san. Done in striking blue by the Toronto illustrator Cam Miller, it's a focal point of the Oji Seichi space, right behind the ramen counter. Another touch that resonates: a painting by the artist Kellen Hatanaka of a player for The Vancouver Asahi, a legendary Japanese Canadian baseball team from the pre-war years.
A couple of weeks ago, Harrison invited her mom and dad and aunts and uncles to meet the restaurant's staff. Ten of her family members turned up that day. One of the aunts wore her nicest pearls. As the staff clapped them in, some of them wiped away tears. Others raised their arms in the air and cheered, recalled Harrison. "They were so excited to be included in that way."
Bates, in the kitchen, has been making standout noodles for as long as he's lived in Toronto. At Shoto in its early days, he did beautifully bouncy-chewy fresh spaghetti that'd he'd toss with nori, croutons and lumpfish roe. At Grey Gardens, one of Bates's best dishes combined house-made alkaline noodles—beautifully springy ramen-style spaghetti, essentially, stained black with squid ink—with savoury Chinese sausage and clams and a bit of octopus. It was one of the more delicious plates of pasta that's ever been served around town.
At Oji Seichi, Bates has dived deeper still into making noodles with alkaline salts, which give ramen their characteristic colour and bite. He spent a couple of months developing his recipe, using a blend of local flours (white, whole wheat and rye) and experimenting with almost every conceivable variable. (A key: the 48 hour resting time Oji Seichi's noodles get after they're made, to let the gluten relax and the alkaline salts do their textural work.)
Bates imported a Japanese ramen machine, also. It looks like the lovechild of an old-school, floor-standing photocopier and a fine Italian espresso machine. "It's basically a car," he told me. "Fifty G's," Bates said.
Oji Seichi's broth is built on chicken and pork, clams and mussels with either Vancouver Island salt or soy as seasoning. (There's also a miso and mushroom -based vegetarian broth available.) The toppings are your basics: jammy yolked egg, grilled chicken or pork, bamboo shoots, scallion and field spinach, with a bit of fish cake made in Scarborough.
They're doing take-out only for now, with a small patio space in the works. And NB, I haven’t eaten there yet as the place just opened. But I expect it’s going to be very good.
As of this past spring, Bates and Harrison, along with their infant daughter, Ruby, and their "very energetic" Boston Terrier named Randi, are back in their own home, that flour mountain in the in-laws' living room a not-entirely-distant memory, Harrison said.
"My mom will definitely tell people about it still."
Oji Seichi, 354 Broadview Ave. (at Gerrard St. E.), ojiseichi.com
The dumbest delicious thing I’ll ever urge you to buy several bottles of (if you can get it)
We had our first real post(ish) -Covid backyard dinner party the other night and it went super late and was way too loud. We had grilled whole porcinis and wild ducks, so it was a bit of a blowout. I feel like I owe the neighbours a grovelly apology and a bunch of wine, except that we drank all of the wine, which was possibly the entire problem in the first place.
And so at 1 am on Tuesday morning (it was a Monday night dinner party, because what is time really, anyway?), after everybody finally left and it was just me and a splitting head and a tottering stack of dishes, I found myself glugging salty Spanish water from a fancy bottle and having no other thoughts beyond I hope the neighbours don't completely hate us now and wow this water these super-loud friends of mine brought is far more delicious than I knew any water could possibly be.
That water, from a famous spring near Girona, in Catalonia, is called Vichy Catalan. Vichy Catalan is notably salty, which is to say it's got the same minerally backnote you get from, say, Perrier or San Pellegrino, but amped by a factor of 10. Vichy Catalan has more sodium per litre than a Burger King Double Whopper, but slightly less than a Popeye's chicken sandwich, so it’s got that going for it too. Considering they've been bottling the stuff since 1881, I figure it gets some kind of grandfathered-in good-for-you pass.
Somehow, anyway, it's wildly refreshing: both crisp and limpid, savory and quenching, with a tiny bit of bubbliness. It's food water, for lack of a better way of putting it. (Also: I know. And really, I'm sorry.) It makes everything you eat with it better than it otherwise is.
The people who brought it that night have a thing for Spain. It's the first thing they buy, they said, whenever they land in Madrid. Another couple who came that night (also travellers, also food freaks, and also—I swear this is true—not even the slightest bit pretentious) said they'd been buying it by the case to cure their lockdown blues. Then, the next day, another friend dropped by while I was putting out the recycling and his eyes popped enviously when he saw the bottle. “Where did you get that!?” I guess I've been living under a rock all this time.
Fair warning: finding the stuff can be tough at the moment. La Paella, the Spanish restaurant on Queen Street East, has been bringing it in themselves for a while now and though they’d prefer to sell the water to diners of theirs, they’ll part with a bottle or two for walk-up buyers when they’ve got enough stock. That scarcity seems likely to change, though. Marc Gomez, a Spanish foods distributor based in Eastern Ontario, has recently begun selling it to Edulis, Bar Isabel, Mad Mexican and Peter Pan Bistro, among other places, and said this week he’s close to a deal with a major gourmet retailer in the city.
No matter where you buy it, Vichy Catalan goes for upwards of around $7 or $8 a litre. So it isn't cheap exactly, but also, it completely is. (And let's please forget for a moment the carbon cost of shipping glass bottles of water here from Spain.)
What I will say is the day after that late-night rager, I barely had a hangover. Which means this fancy imported Catalonian water isn't just recreational, it's also medicinal. I plan to start buying it, quietly, to quench my newly discovered food water and prophylactic anti-hangover needs. And maybe I'll drop a few bottles at my neighbours' door too.
That’s it for issue two, thanks for reading. If you want to get in touch, I’m at Iheardthisplacewasgood@gmail.com and would love to hear from you. And if you liked this issue of I Heard This Place Was Good, do me a solid and tell a few friends?