The First Place I Want To Eat At
Plus THE COOKBOOK OF THE SUMMER!!!, tandoori momos, and the Hindi term for “Foods That are Eaten to Simply Fuck Around”
Welcome to issue #1 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:
A follow-up to Brothers, with ridiculous talent at the stove
A couple years into the life of Brothers Food & Wine, the lauded little bistro and wine bar they ran until recently at Bay and Bloor, Chris White and Jonathan Nicolaou were feeling restless.
Brothers’ 30-seat space, with its unfussy, ingredient-focused cooking, its Burgundy-heavy wine list and its convivial vibe, had won best new restaurant nods from enRoute and Toronto Life as well as a glowing review in The New York Times. Having bottled the kind of magic that’s the hardest thing to achieve in restaurants, the partners were getting calls from would-be investors who were keen to extend the Brothers brand.
Yet all that White, who ran the floor, and Nicolaou, who led the kitchen, could think about was how Brothers could be better. The answer, they soon decided, was that their bistro—miniscule by almost any standard—was just too big. “I can’t ever know that 30 people are all having a good time,” White said.
So instead of growing, the partners decided to shrink their business. In July last summer, they shut down Brothers, announcing the closure on Instagram. They planned to pour their energy into the restaurant of their dreams.
That restaurant, called Twenty Victoria, began taking reservations this week for its sidewalk patio; the opening (outdoors-only for now) is planned for June 22. Inside, it’s smaller even than Brothers somehow, the ground-floor space in a grand Edwardian building on Victoria Street north of King. The space is spare but elegant, with the open kitchen up front and a couple of bar tables in the windows. Nicolaou and his brother, a contractor, installed the herringbone wood floor themselves. The dining room, in the back, will have enormous bouquets of fresh-cut flowers but little else in the way of decor.
And as for the size, White and Nicolaou are getting their wish. They plan to serve no more than around 20 customers at any time. That smaller scale will transform the nature of hospitality in their dining room, the pair hope. They’re planning for the pace of service to slow a little, to let people relax, to stay as long as they want to stay. “We won’t be turning tables,” White vowed. “That put way too many grey hairs in my beard at Brothers.
“The business plan is, ‘Hey, you know what we should do? We should not make any money, and if we do that we’ll know what we’re doing is good,’” White laughed. And in the first few months of business at least, there won’t be menus. “I just want to talk to people and then food appears—but not in some pretentious way,” said White.
One other factor encouraged White and Nicolaou to gamble on the new space: the kind of talent that diners can’t ignore. Twenty Victoria will introduce an impeccably trained chef to the city, in Julie Hyde.
“The first time I met her,” White recalled, “I said, ‘What the fuck are you doing chopping onions for us?’”
The Scarborough-raised chef, who turns 34 next week, is effectively unknown around Toronto. She’s spent most of her career in Europe. She’s also got one of the best resumes in town. Among its highlights: two years as chef de partie at the Michelin three-starred Alain Ducasse at The Dorchester, in London, and another two years at Burgundy’s three-starred Maison Lameloise.
The kitchen experience Hyde talks about with the most enthusiasm, though, is the one-star, wife-and-husband spot she cooked at in Burgundy’s Beaune for eight months while waiting for another position to start. There, the brigade was just three cooks strong. They’d meet at 6 am for coffee and croissants then go foraging around the countryside before cooking service in the afternoons. The food was technical and beautiful—Michelin-style, for lack of another term—but also without pretense. They were as likely to serve a knobbly mushroom a forager had shown up with, or a humble offcut made exquisite by intelligent cooking, as the expected truffles and foie gras.
In 2018 Hyde returned to Toronto to lead a planned new restaurant, but the project kept getting delayed. So she came to Brothers every Monday to work as a prep cook. “The first time I met her,’” White recalled, ‘”I said, ‘What the fuck are you doing chopping onions for us?”
It didn’t take them long to realize that Hyde could lead the kind of kitchen they’d been dreaming about.
Where Nicolaou, an OCAD dropout -turned-painter-turned-chef, was largely self-taught (he’d cooked at The Black Hoof and Bar Raval, with a stage at St. John, in London), Hyde showed up with traditional French technique and a deep knowledge of classic dishes. They complemented each others’ skill sets beautifully, they both say. The downside of all Hyde’s classical experience, she said, was that it can become a crutch; it’s easy to fall back on the same canonical ideas. Nicolaou, by contrast, “had his head in the stars,” as White puts it. His method was best defined as creative chaos. That combination worked. “Fuck, that’s brilliant,” Hyde would often tell him. “How did your brain ever take you there?”
Still, Hyde wasn’t available; she already had a job. And then that job—the project she’d come home for—fell apart.
For the last few years, Hyde and Nicolaou have been working on dishes together, finding a language they could share. The foundations: extraordinary local produce with a minimum of what they both call “useless fluff.” They’re bringing in strange but delicious herbs from an experimental chefs’ garden in Jordan Station. There was mention this week of a dish with sturgeon, and another that combined zabaglione, the ethereal egg yolk and sweet wine froth, with asparagus and fermented green tomatoes. Another dish they were talking about combined fried Kusshi oysters with fresh spring peas and marigold leaves.
The portions will be smaller than at Brothers; it’ll be more about the story of a meal here, the progression of flavours and ingredients, than any one individual dish, White said. (He was also keenly aware of how pretentious that can sound; it’s a safe bet Twenty Victoria will not be the kind of ego-driven, temple-of-cuisine wank-fest that tasting menu places often become.)
The menu will change every day, if not several times a night. Other than that, they aren’t saying much about the food they’ll cook. Their plan is more or less to make it up as they go.
In spite of the pressures of closing and then opening a new restaurant—not to mention the pandemic’s year-long delay—White and Nicolaou are feeling a little less restless for once.
“We’re just very conscious of wanting to do something beautiful,” White said. “We feel pretty good.”
Restaurant Twenty Victoria, 20 Victoria St. (at King), Toronto. Open Tuesdays through Saturdays, set menus only (with some choice), Reservations: 416-804-6066
I found the PERFECT summer cookbook
Camilla Wynne played in the indie rock band Sunset Rubdown and worked as a pastry chef (WD-50 in New York, Les Chèvres and Laloux in Montreal) before she ever became a master preserver. In 2011, obsessed with “jams, jellies, marmalades, chutneys, pickles, and fruits in syrup in unique flavor combinations,” Wynne launched Preservation Society to sell her wares; by all accounts it developed as cult-like a following as a small-time handmade jam company could ever hope.
But Wynne’s other great skill, beyond jamming with art rockers and confecting the likes of Rhubarb & Amarena Cherry Preserves or Pink Grapefruit and Toasted Almond Marmalade, was the art of teaching. For the last few years, she’s been hosting live (and more recently, online) preserving workshops. Between her skill as a maker and her love of teaching, it’s no surprise that Wynne had a brilliant book under her hat.
I first met Wynne in a food writing class I taught; she was working on a cookbook and had test batch after test batch of pastries and preserves to dispose of, she said apologetically one day. So for our final session she brought in a platter of cakes, cookies and preserves unlike any I’d ever tried.
What made them unique was the flavours she’d created. One of her cookies was a pair of perfect shortbread sandwiching what she called “cherry negroni jam”—a mix of sour cherries, lemon, gin, Campari and Sweet Vermouth. She’d coated those little sandwiches in a potently delicious gin glaze and topped each of them with half an amarena cherry. It was a perfect, trompe-bouche cocktail in cookie form. It was also (and still is) the single-greatest cookie I’ve ever tried.
Jam Bake, as Wynne’s new book is called (Appetite by Random House) brings the art of preserving into the modern era. It’s both totally contemporary (Wynne’s “Streamlined Canning Process” is idiot-proof) and refreshingly inventive (Raspberry Lambic beer jam, anybody?) Jam Bake has recipes not just for jams and jellies, but for the sweets you can make with them—baba au rhum with marmalade and whisky syrup, for instance—too.
It’s the rare cookbook of any genre whose recipes are eminently doable and galaxies better than anything you can buy in the store.
Any week now, the city’s farmers’ markets (remember those?) will start bursting with baskets of sour cherries and plums, gooseberries and black currants, sweet cherries, peaches, Coronation grapes, apricots and apples. (A totally attainable life goal of mine right now: to make Wynne’s coffee-infused blueberry jam called “Bleu Matin.”)
Thanks to Wynne, I’ll be the shopper elbowing his way to the front.
Jam Bake: Inspired Recipes for Creating and Baking with Preserves, by Camilla Wynne (Appetite by Random House), $32
Yup, there’s a term in India for “Foods That are Eaten to Simply Fuck Around”
I love, love, love this essay by Sharanya Deepak, about New Delhi’s tandoori momo craze. It’s from vittles.substack.com, which is very much worth checking out.
“The last time I was at Hunger Strike was more than a year ago, when the crowds at the shop had surged so much that they had blocked the main road. Cars honked behind customers that stood in the middle of the street, but nobody cared, and a group of people proceeded to sit down exactly where they stood, in the middle of the street. This led to a sort of trance where others started doing the same, eating the classic Delhi ‘2/3’ portions, of two plates of momos between three people. A sort of tandoori momo festival, except on a Tuesday at seven p.m. When we finally got our plates and sat down on the divider, my friend asked that question again, but rhetorically. “Why do we eat this?” he said, eyes shining, double cream, extra mayonnaise, the whole works. “Pagalpan”, he continued, as we began to eat. “This is madness. We must be mad to think this is good food.”
That’s it for this week. Thanks for reading. If you want to get in touch, I’m at Iheardthisplacewasgood@gmail.com. And if you liked this first issue of I Heard This Place Was Good, do me a solid and tell a few friends?
See you next time,
Chris N-S
So happy to see your excellent writing! Looking forward to reading this newsletter, CNS
Hi Chris. Howard Levitt connected me to your blog. What a terrific start! Hope you have been well! Please give my regards to Carol!