Saffron stained top, greenstained leg in shaker fashion, made in Paris twenty years ago. 45 “n diameter, two inserts  , 18″ each, extend table to 80″.   Located in Toronto downtown. Excellent condition. Asking $300.  email gina@ginamallet.com

Under  the Toque: Insider’s Guide to  Dining in Toronto

Ever feel that you’re out of depth in the ever-changing mores of restaurant culture?

Once it seemed so simple. You called, made a reservation, showed up and ate. There was an invisible green baize door between you and the staff. No one talked familiarly about the chef. Who knew his name? Any problems? Forget about it. The customer was always right.

Once in a while a French emigre, used to a sterner protocol, balked. Still remembered is the French chef who ushered a couple out of his Toronto restaurant for lese majeste. He had ordered the tasting menu while she wanted PASTA!

Now of  course eating out is a free-for-all. The authoritative maitre d’ is replaced usually by hostess as therapist. “My you’re looking great tonight”.Waiters are chummy. “How’re you doin?” or “Are you still working on that?”. Chefs are stars. Small plates often replace three courses. Dress codes are rarely enforced.

I enlist Toque, a seasoned restaurateur, to explain the current scene.

1. Google the restaurant to get the mission statement and current menu. At Ruby Watchco, the single prix fixe is posted daily along with Lynn Crawford’s credo “I love people. I love food and I love sharing so if that’s my role and future, then that’s perfect for me.”

“Heavy Petting tonight – all night – with your host and enabler” advertises the Atlantic, along with Jerked free range duck confit.

2. Always Reserve – when you can. Avoid popular times – 7.30 and 8 pm. Service and cooking will be better at either 6 or 8-9 pm.

3. Don’t be a NO SHOW! Call and Cancel Toque cites No Shows as the sulphurating problem for restaurants across North America. No Showers are “overentitled and arrogant.” Restaurants don’t want to alienate diners by charging no-shows the way doctors and dentists do. On the other hand customers who are turned away from a restaurant holding seats are also alienated.

4. By all means ask about gluten free dishes if you’re a Celiac, but don’t  ask for encyclopaedic info.   One restaurateur  told Toque “If I spend more than thirty seconds taking a reservation, I’m losing money.”

5. No substitutions. If a restaurant says so, obey it.  Don’t be over-entitled and think the restaurant is your private chef. He would be much more expensive.

6. Fish. We’re an inland city, touchy about the freshness of fish. ‘When the economy was good” says Toque, “You could get good fish every day. Now fish is delivered less frequently, and specialties like Pompano have to be ordered.”  Toque says “IF it’s on Thursday’s menu, turns up again on Saturday – well, by Monday it won’t be bad but it won’t be your full thirty-five bucks worth.”Advice: be upfront with the waiter. Ask what fish came in fresh today.

7. Don’t ask if the star chef is cooking tonight! You’re eating team food. The test of a great kitchen is consistency,  whether the star is there or not.

8. Best nights for eating out? Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday.

9. Worst Nights: Monday – there’s a Saturday hangover. Saturday is bridge-and-tunnel night when the ‘burbs come to town. Thursday is brokers’ night when the brokers  cash out the week’s winnings with $2,000-$3,000 bottles of wine and have to be poured into cabs. Reconsider if you plan a trade Friday morning.

10. The 45-minute chair. If you become more and more uncomfortable in your chair, you may have the 45 minute chair, one designed to eject customers quickly so the table may be turned.

11. Waiters. It’s been more than a decade since I asked a waiter for a cornichon was was told to talk to the wine waiter.  Waiters have improved mightily in  the last few years. In good restaurants, they’re prepped to explain both food and wine. Don’t be afraid to reveal your inexperience, what is a sweetbread and what should I drink with it. On the other hand, always rate advice against what you do know. Don’t just ask for a wine recommendation, explain the taste of the wine you like.

12. Noise! Go to ginamallet.com for the latest list of Noisiest Restaurants in Toronto.

13. Tipping. On pre-tax total, Toque recommends 16-18% as more than generous and 20% for the tops. Lower tip for poor service. If service is bad, say to manager when you leave  “maybe the waiter was having a bad night.”

Hard Labour For Few Parts

Are you a sadist or a masochist? Do you like to yell or prefer to be yelled at? Either way, I have just the place for you. Parts and Labour is a new Parkdale restaurant in a gutted Home Hardware store on Queen West. Where once the local DIY crowd  dropped by for a Phillips screwdriver, they now drop in for a Vodka Screwdriver, or two, or three, because Parts and Labour’s decibel count must be at least 85 (dangerous to your health)and thus certain to increase your alcohol consumption – if the latest French study is correct.

Parts and Labour has food too. Long communal tables under bundled fluorescent tubes suggest a canteen for machinists. I look forward to enjoying the crème de la crème of industrial grub – hot dog with petrol-hued pickle, French’s mustard, tomato ketchup,a grilled Kraft cheese sandwich, meatloaf with potato buds. Music? Willie Nelson’s On the Road Again, Dolly Parton’s Here I Come Again…

Dream on. P & L is FauxBo, middleclass slumming, the latest effort by 28-year-old chef Matty Matheson to reconfigure eating-out for his club-crazy cohort.Trained French (La Palette, Le Select) Matheson opened Oddfellows a couple of years ago,with flexible hours, heavy metal grunge and $22 Bison burgers. P & L is a more ambitious effort to put the  posh in prole and challenge the flights of burger on auto-pilot. Gotta be showbuzzy. It was Charlie Chaplin who described the choices necessary to make juxtapositions work. It’s only funny if the man who slips on a  banana peel is wearing white tie and tails. Thus it’s piquant to sip Cristal from a Dixie Cup on a millionaire’s yacht, spoon Beluga from a Whiskas can, but excellent grilled sea bream $28 dumped unceremoniously on a plastic plate doesn’t cut it. Too earnest.

To begin at the beginning. We had reserved on this busy Friday night, but the reservation hasn’t stuck. Still the hostess fits us in without a murmur. Well she may have murmured but we wouldn’t have heard it. P & L with 140 seats has the football stadium wall of noise, sans vuvuzelas, punctuated by full-throated roars when one side scores.

Huddled together at the end of a communal table, lip-reading assiduously, we only hear the waiter when he loses it after we get a mite critical. “I can’t be harassed!”pierces the fog of noise. We’re harassed too. The cheap plonks are sold out and we grumble about the almost 300% markup on the $45 Campo Viejo Crianza. A haunch of beef arrives for our neighbours who offer us a bite. How great. We’d have loved it. The waiter’s lips move “You should have asked” – we are too hoarse to shout that it wasn’t on the menu.

Listen up. Salads are imaginative, wild roots, roasted pumpkin seeds, goat beemster (mild) croutons with buttermilk honey dressing $8, and fingerling purple potato salad, radish, soft boiled egg and a paillard of bacon $13. Beef tartare  $10 is lemony – but for the real thing you have to go to Didier.

We pass up ostentatious trends like fried pig’s face. Puhleeze. Why oh why did a pig appear on the cover of Fergus Henderson’s trendsetting Snout to Tail? As a result the Toronto restocape is littered with fried pig bits. Pigs are only part of Henderson’s primer on restoring the integrity of good British food, notably the unique flavours of animals’ choicer digestive organs, kidneys, liver, sweetbreads. Veal is often favoured because of the calf’s youth. No time to have developed a taste for gin. It will be interesting to sample the liver of those B.C. cows now being fed a flavour-enhancing litre of Okanagan red every day. Now there’s a menu stopper. Drunk Liver.

I order the 10-oz ribeye rare and get sliced enpurpled jelly on a small plastic plate. Scrappy fries mingle well with jus and chive butter. Cornish hen roasted in a cast iron pan, $28, is wonderfully moist but the plate is a deranged mix of chick pea and lardon salad, bitter radicchio.

Desserts are designed for those who missed summer camp – roasted marshmallows, a homemade crunchie bar, lumpy peppermint creams – a sugar hit.

We leave as thoughtful as is possible in a Breughelian rave. This Matty Matheson is  talented. Hope he grows out of clubs.

*1 and 1/2 Parts & Labour 1566 Queen W.416-588-7750. No wheelchair access. Dinner for two: food plus tax $100

416 588 7750

For the noisiest restaurants in Toronto go to Ginamallet.com

More Scarpettas please.

The original  rock star chef was Auguste Escoffier who with hotelier Cesar Ritz created the first star hotel/restaurant combo.  in the late l9th century,  the pair took London’s Savoy Hotel to dizzying heights. Escoffier was an animateur of cooking, folding it into social and artistic life.  After seeing the soprano Nellie Melba in Lohengrin, he was so bowled over by the swan that he dashed back to the kitchen to create Peche Melba, a fantasy of peaches, raspberry sauce, vanilla ice-cream enfolded in the wings of swan carved from ice.

On a more practical level, even a modest hotel/resto combo -  by virtue of its steady supply of diners- is a great training ground. In Toronto,  Susur Lee started out in the kitchen of pioneering chef Gunter Gugelmeier at the Westbury Hotel.  Jamie Kennedy, Marc Thuet, Gordon Mackie, all did time at Three Small Rooms in the Windsor Arms Hotel, where Joanne Kates had a gig before becoming restaurant critic for the Globe and Mail. Even so, until Scott Conant’s Scarpetta opened recently at the Thompson Hotel,  Toronto never had the kind of star combo comparable to say, Jean-Georges Vongerichten  at New York’s Trump Hotel, Helene Durrozes at London’s Connaught Hotel, Alain Ducasse at Paris’ Plaza Athenee – hotels designed for gastronomes.

For the most part, Toronto  is dominated by the international  businessman-driven chain – gosh how great, the Hilton’s got a Ruth’s Chris! – with serviceable food.  I put this to the test by going to  Signatures at the Intercontinental Hotel on Bloor W.  Visitors paying up to $3,500 a night would, I thought, insure a good restaurant – businessmen being among the keenest diners out.  The result surprised me.

The Intercontinental has the kind of faux elegance of a mall. I enter the almost empty ginger-marble lobby and sniff the air – floral Glade over disinfectant.  The atmosphere is “as restful as an undiscovered tomb” as Henry Higgins sang in My Fair Lady  – Glacial silence continues into  the almost empty Signatures, no welcoming maitre d’ in sight, a curious two-level dining room overlooking the charming courtyard (great lunching place). Without help, I spot my friends who sit in splendid isolation.  Menu intriguingly off kilter.   What is a Euro Bass?  No it’s not the rock group but one of the many many fish called bass. And I see olive rocks are advertised with the salad.

We divide our order, one from the regular menu, the others from the prix fixe, the $35 Sound of Music Menu designed for diners headed across Bloor W. to the popular Telus Centre.

The prix fixe appetizers are good: lemongrass,coconut and ginger soup with chicken, lime, coriander is pungent and hearty. Grilled asparagus is fresh and the Niagara prosciutto chewable but why wasn’t it plated in languid slices?

First  surprise: the regular menu’s  $10 baby lettuce salad. My gastric juices race in anticipation of lettuce as limpid  as the aristocracy, little leaves dissolving delicately in mouth. Oh no, what arrives is a large plate of  coarse greased weeds.  The techno-emotional tricks, lime sheets, lime juice and gelatin pressed into a sheet,  and Olive rocks, tapioca flour and EVOO , disappoint. Th e  Lime sheets look like shrimp puffs and are as tasteless.  Olive rocks turn out to  be olivey breadcrumbs.

The prix fixers are delighted with their entrees. Six ounces  of medium rare Angus beef sirloin is judged perfect and so are the smoked pureed potatoes, bacon, onions, mushrooms and sauteed grapes.  A  filet of herbed Charmulla (a  spicy mix) Euro Bass is poised atop a gallimaufry of summer vegetables including purple potatoes.

Second surprise: I’m eating the vegetarian dish $18, a tower of layered eggplant, courgettes, slabs of undercooked red, green,yellow pepper almost drowned in a bath of watercress sauce and accompanied by a large barely cooked tomato on the vine.

Tiring of our exclusive tomb, we take our desserts outside where there is a jolly buzz (no music).Who’s managing this joint? Common sense advises that customers be urged to eat outside where the atmosphere is so much pleasanter.  Dense chocolate layered rum cake  is trumped by cafe au lait blancmange,  a heavier panna cotta. The Rice crispy and caramel Maple Tower  $9 has the not unpleasing consistency of shaving cream but anyone with shaky teeth shouldn’t attempt the sticky base.

Thoughts:  Why the startling disparity between prix fixe and regular menu? Scarpetta’s arrived none too soon. Hope it gooses Signatures  which is about as inert a restaurant as can be imagined.

1 1/2 *Signatures at the Intercontinental hotel 220 Bloor St W. 416-960-5200

wheelchair accessible. Dinner for two, food plus tax $76.

Eating Mittel European Memories

It’s Saturday night at the time machine called The Coffee Mill,  the venerable Hungarian  cafe tucked  into the maze of a mini-mall at 99 Yorkville. As the violinist plays Shostakovich’s Romance, the theme music for Reilly, Ace of Spies, the template for James Bond, I step back a century into the Austro-Hungarian Empire, that Mittel European  tinderbox of the great conflagrations of the twentieth century. This sprawling multi-ethnic territory was the nursery for spies, the tutor in ambiguity, and the cafes the  training camps for the great  game of intrigue and political upheaveal.   When I finally had a cup of coffee mit schlag  at Vienna’s  Cafe Central, I was disappointed to discover that the table where Lenin plotted the Russian Revolution had long since been recycled during a couple of major makeovers, and neither was there anything to remind me that an aspiring artist Adolf Hitler had tried to hawk his paintings there.

As far as I know  nobody has tried to take over the world from a table on the patio at the Coffee Mill while listening to Strauss  – although it’s entirely possible that Conrad  Black’s defence may have been hotly debated  between long time regulars National Post Columnist George Jonas and Black’s lawyer Eddie Greenspan .  But for sure, no one sits silent at  the Coffee  Mill. The Viennese may  be cosy  but Budapesters let it all hang out.  Everyone’s talking as they  nod along with a waltz.  And is it fancy, or is there something conspiratorial about these  groups? About the young couple behind us who are smoking long, thin cigarettes and talking intensely. About the way people table hop.  These must be the Hungarian diaspora, refugees and their families who fled the failed revolution of 1956. Now it seems all  but forgotten by the world,  but for my English generation, the Hungarian revolution aroused emotions akin to the Spanish civil war in the thirties – I had a teenaged boyfriend who smuggled himself into  Hungary in a steamer trunk to throw himself against the Soviet tanks.   It  was a great romantic cause.

The Coffee Mill was opened by Martha von Heczey in 1963 – she’s still running it today -  and immediately became a home from home for a generation of writers and artists, among them  Dora De Pedery Hunt who sculpted Canadian medals,  the writer/performing artist Sonia Dunn,and  Kati Rekai, who wrote children’s guide books,  and who persuaded Heczey to put their photographs on the restaurant walls like they do at Sardi’s in New York.

Do the diners stop talking to eat? You bet.  For 47 years, The Coffee Mill has  been one of the city’s great deals. Not just such faves as iced coffee with whipped cream or hot chocolate with whipped cream, but a menu of  Hungarian specialties drawn from a proud and spicy culture, earthier than the Viennese with its etiolated Hapsburg cuisine.  Think paprika. Not hot, sharp paprika but mild and sweet which is what makes the goulash soup $6.50 so palatable – The Coffee Mill’s  goulash soup is a tasty delicate broth with beef and vegetables.    Kolbasz is Hungarian for sausage and the notable one is Debreceni $8, mildly spicy with potato salad. If it wasn’t such a warm night, I’d have Veal Paprikash $13.50, the rich creamy stew often described as Hungary’s national dish.  Or the Cabbage roll $10.25 which like the goulash soup is b eguilingly subtle.    Instead I settle for the Viennese classic, Wiener Schnitzel $12.25, a huge toasty wing  of the Flying Nun’s cornette, fried, breaded veal  beaten to a faretheewell with a scoop of mashed potato and deliciously sweet and sour coleslaw. It’s certainly the crowd pleaser. For dessert, we have chestnut puree put through a ricer topped with whipped cream and tlimp white pancakes wrapped around apricot jam.  I should add that the menu also includes less exotic fare,  open egg salad sandwiches, melts, crepes stuffed with seafood.    And at this, the least pretentious of restaurants, you can drink a perfectly good no name imported white for $6 a glass.

All this and history too.

And one last thing. The bill is handwritten. What a relief. It’s just  been reported that printed receipts contain BPA Bisphenol  A which can be absor bed by the skin and perhaps damages the digestion!  What next?

All Star Yum for Bucks The Coffee Mill 99 Yorkville 416-920 2108. No wheelchair access.

Dinner: food plus tax $53,

Nuovo  Ragazzo on a very crowded block

Cosa fa? cries Bon Vivant as he enters Scarpetta, the new restaurant in the  Thompson Hotel at Wellington and Bathurst.  “ Another Italian place?” Bon Vivant cannot believe it. Just returned from a spiritual overhaul at an Ashram in New Mexico, he had no idea how Italian restaurants were colonizing Toronto,   not just the usual  pasta and pizza taking over street corners, but  mamma and nonna duelling for kitchens, Puglia and Naples fighting for space. The invasion becomes an imperial progress with Thompson parachuting in Scott Conant, a chef who has already established his brand in both New York and Miami. This is Toronto’s first imported star.  I mean no disrespect to Conant, but we need another Italian joint like a blizzard in winter.  I was kind of hoping for a cuisine we don’t have –  namely Nuevo Latino, Miami’s Doug Rodriguez or Chicago’s Rick Bayless.

Scarpetta  crouches at the end of the airport concourse that is the Thompson lobby , an intriguingly low-slung restaurant.   This must be what a Silicon Valley boardroom looks like – cutely divided between business and play. Dark panelling is softened by clusters of  oversized  Edison lights and when you step into a circular banquette why you could be on a twirligig  at the Ex — only difference, you don’t snap on a seatbelt and get whirled around until you see stars.  What’s this? a dish suddenly appears from behind my shoulder  –  seamless service  to the max.

Forget Mamma and Nonna.  Scarpetta is Italy  by Vogue, a showy and stylish fusion of mostly  Italian foods presented with flair. Several of the dishes have already been acclaimed in the US – and with justification.  We share four  starters and give three of  ‘em  fist bumps, from the translucently fresh raw yellowtail,  with pickled red onion  $16 dotted with pink Hawaiian sea salt, to the absolutely amazing pureed cauliflower soup with poached oysters and crisp shallots $14 which arrives covered with a little Cardinal’s cap. In between I died and went to heaven eating  OTT  polenta as creamy as Joel Robuchon’s pureed potatoes and accompanied by  mouldily fragrant truffled mushrooms.   After this  braised shortribs $14 seem so ordinary despite  the presence of farro – the  ancient wheat which fed the Roman legions -  in the risotto.

Twenty-three bucks for a bowl of spaghetti with tomato and basil! You’ve got to be kidding!  I know that spaghetti and tomato sauce is an historic coupling. After tomato sauce was invented in the 19th century,  Italians, who ate pasta with their fingers, were obliged to turn to forks. Even so, is caviar nestled in the strands? No, and Vergogna!, a big mistake, the spaghetti is fresh-made. As the top Nonna Marcella Hazan advocates , spaghetti is one of the pastas best dried, made in a factory from hard durum wheat. And tonight I understand why.  The fresh spaghetti is overly absorbent.  The result – tomato stodge, pasta sticking to the fork’s tines.

Tastebuds revive with the arrival of a brilliant dish -  crisp bacon wrapped round juicy halibut with smoked potatoes, morels and asparagus. $28. But  Conant’s talent as a nifty mix’n’matcher flags with the veal tenderloin $33. The meat itself is pinkly irreproachable but the accompanying veal cheeks taste just like braised short ribs. Menus have got too cheeky – the cheek has had its moment and chefs should move on. I mean they’re not the greatest offal- I prefer the neglected kidney.  Moist-roasted capretta $29?  Now goat can be delicious, but it needs  the kind of flavour surgery it gets when curried  at Albert’s Real Jamaican Foods. Here it is cut up and served in a taste-challenged and gooey sauce.   Even the excellent red varietal, a Tolaini Al Passo 2006  $55, chosen for us by a solicitous  maitre d’, can’t rise above it.

The desserts are just fine, all $11.  Nothing but the most expensive chocolate in the world, the Tuscan Amedei made from white translucent beans, will do for the chocolate cake matched with a piquant burnt orange- caramel gelato and espresso sauce. Coconut panna cotta is more modest, set off by guava soup and caramelized pineapple.  An apple crostada, a sugar-glazed pastry casing, is stuffed with cured diced apples, accompanied by raspberry compote, mascarpone gelato.

And now comes the beauty part: Scarpetta is QUIET enough so we can actually have a conversation, about Snooki’s tanning problems if you really want to know. There is music but it’s unobtrusive, blended into the general buzz. Bravo!

**1/2  Scarpetta 550 Wellington St W, 416-601-3590 Wheelchair accessible.

Dinner for two, food plus tax $130

Michael in Southampton in the sixties…..I have a pic somewhere of him cooking but of course can’t find it when I need it…..
Back in the sixties, I shared a little house in Southampton with Michael and Ariane Batterberry and I now feel I lived the early days of a revolution. The sixties were a confused food decade bracketed by Julia Child and Alice Waters with the hugely popular I Hate to Cook Cookbook in between.  In Manhattan, we were in the first fine flush of Julia,not just Mastering the Art of French Cooking, but the even more significant TV show where Julia showed that anyone could cook well if they concentrated, no – if they loved eating well.  She didn’t cook easy food or health food, she cooked the food she liked.  When people say they’re lousy cooks, they usually don’t want to eat for one reason of another.

Michael did all the cooking that summer. At that time, he was a writer, not a professional cook, which is quite a different animal –  I’d call him an instinctive cook, and the greatest compliment, an inspired amateur which means like Julia he cooked the food he liked to eat. If  I’m not eating at Per Se I think eating the food of an inspired amateur is the next high.  While others of us were experimenting with Julia’s recipes for Blanquette de veau, duck a L’orange, even Beef Wellington if you can believe it, Michael was looking ahead to the future of fresh and local. Alternatives to supermarkets  were few even in the farmlands of the Hamptons — The Silver Palate wouldn’t open up until the late seventies.

But every morning Michael drove out to Montauk to buy steaks cut from fresh caught swordfish, fillets of sea bass. He went to the local farmers’ markets for little potatoes to steam and toss in butter and herbs, and ears of corn which tasted of corn and not as they do today, of  cornsyrup. It was a revelation to me. So was his special dessert. He mixed seedless Thompson grapes with yogurt or was it sour cream, topped the dish with demerara sugar crusted under the grill. An unusual mixture, haunting.

And at parties held in the Batterberries’ Hershey Bar coloured drawing room, I first tasted homecured Gravlax, I now remenber.

Michael was impossibly nice, the most generous, least competitive of people – rare indeed in the world of food.  It’s a matter of record how many people he helped and kept helping, me included.  He always had an open mind.  And I never saw him NOT enjoy himself. That was probably because he never lost his sense of humour.  One of our guests at Southampton was a smart guy from Harvard.   Rain fell on Sunday and we played Ghosts, one of those humiliating  word games.  Idea was you had to keep expanding a fragment of a word. Finish it and you were a Ghost. Three Ghosts and  you were out. An altercation broke out when our Harvard guest refused to accept he’d picked up his third Ghost and then abruptly left the house party. Many years later, Michael and Ariane ran into Harvard in Morocco who remembered with INTENSE PLEASURE his weekend in the country.  That says it all about Michael’s ability to charm.

A story which Michael loved to recycle when we met was the summer pudding incident. I was cat-sitting the penthouse that my sister and brother in law rented from Judith Jones, Julia Child’s famous editor ,and using the opportunity to have dinner parties on the pretty covered terrace. One evening, we were arguing over the ingredients of the purple summer pudding I’d made and served with lashings of cream.  At the height of the discussion, I dramatically dumped the contents of my plate over the terrace wall.  Soon after Michael went out for cigarettes and returned in stitches. Downstairs on the street a chauffeur was trying to remove summer pudding and cream from a limo’s windshield  with tiny pieces of Kleenex.

I last cooked dinner for Michael a couple of years ago when I was visiting New York. I was stumped: an unfamiliar kitchen, unfamiliar shops. I decided to be simple. Little did I know that I went to the MOST expensive butcher in New York (on Lexington between 63rd and 64th streets) and paid I think fifty bucks for a couple of pounds of ground lamb. It says something about our long friendship that I never thought it inadequate to serve simple Shepherds Pie to Michael. After all he had once defined me with great sweetness as being good at improvisational desserts. And he loved it. Loved even more the bill for the gift wrapped gold plated ground lamb. Laughed like a drain.

Miss him alot already.

The Classic

A few weeks ago a friend mailed from Normandy that she was eating a collection of little cheeses, no brand names, just cheese made in the village from the milk of local goats and cows. They tasted so fresh, so unusual.  So what? I replied. Why I’ve just eaten three amazing little cheeses made from local goat’s milk, no brand names, and by a chef  in my local restaurant in Toronto – A fiery Brie-style, an ashy pungent pyramid and log of  firm glossy paste as tangy as a young St. Maure from the Touraine.

The cheesemaker is Derek Bendig, the chef de cuisine at Pangaea which is co- owned by manager Peter Geary and chef Martin Kouprie. A fixture on Bay and Bloor for the past fourteen years, Pangaea’s image  is as pinstriped as its upscale clientele. But don’t be fooled. Under Pangaea’s discreet charm of the bourgeoisie and silken service  is a poster restaurant for the fast changing taste of the city – fresh’n’local doesn’t cover it. More accurate to say the embrace of  artisan food, of peasant food.    I don’t believe any other restaurant is offering a home-made cheese plate. And Pangaea was quick to jump on the charcuterie bandwagon, to embrace Toronto’s changing palate   from bland to sour, salty, pickled. The great earthy artisan foods, fat melting round cured ham, spicy salamis to make the eyes pop out, cheeses which must be eaten before they stink you out of the house.  A  restaurant can now offer something truly unique because no one cures or smokes or makes cheese quite the same way.  That’s why you won’t sample Bendig’s  Oregano and chili Copa (pig’s shoulder)  a cinnamon and cumin Copa, Bison sopprasatta and a mouth-whinging Spanish Fire, with fiddlehead and morel pickles, anywhere else.

And there’s more. A few years ago, Kouprie sent Bendig to Spain with importer Michael Tkaczuk  to suss out a new USDA-approved factory making Bellotta ham – the el supremo of  ham,  one of the world’s luxe foods, rich, delicate fat marbled flesh that tastes of acorns. Pangaea would become the first restaurant here, and the first restaurant in North America,  to serve it  -$30 for a few unforgettable slivers.

And more.  Pangaea may be upscale but it does superb “Licious” menus. A couple of weeks ago I had a twenty buck Summerlicious  lunch  which included curls of Serrano ham, leg of lamb stuffed with a fresh mint gremolata  and a friend crooned over a little tranche of grilled sirloin on a corn and barley risotto and the three little homemade cheeses.  I save up lunch meetings for  Pangaea’s “Licious” menus.

Pangaea is so established so reliably good that it often seems to be taken for granted. The house style is nuanced. Geary is the kindest least intimidating maitre d’. while Kouprie has kept the lowest of profiles.  A classic style.

Time I think to make a reckoning. Already deciding to order my favourite grilled liver, perfectly medium, $29, I take along an avid gourmand and  prepare to go the whole nine yards.   We start with a sparkling pear shot and a crispy sage fritter.  The charcuterie platter $18 of course   A startlingly sweet corn, cliantro, cumin soup $10 which tastes like perfume. Original. Roasted Bone Marrow $10 is major meat homage spiked by celery-root salad.  The foie gras $25 en cocotte rests on black mission fig/spiced onion and port and is immensely, satisfyingly rich.  I curl my lip at rabbit. Wrong. It’s terrific, a roasted roulade stuffed with vegetables, offal and potato ragout and grilled king oyster mushrooms, invigorated by foie gras jus $36. I chuck the idea of liver for fresh West Coast Halibut   $40 with a melange of roasted salsify   leeks,  wild mushrooom and not enough oyster beurre blanc particularly because the halibut is on the dry side.

We take time outs, sipping a pinot noir suggested by our waiter Michael who as  the avid gourmand says approvingly  “took the work away from me.”  Michael is  a subtle salesman: Why he almost had us ordering wild sea bass from South Carolina til we remembered  the oil spill.

We end our meal with the dessert du jour, baby donuts, warm and lemony $10 stuffed with ricotta which comes with an orange-cardmom shake  and wild blueberry tart $10.

***1/2 Pangaea  1221 Bay Street 416-920-2323 www.pangearestaurant.com. Wheelchair accessible. Dinner for two: food and tax $150

Martin Kouprie’s Pangaea: Why It Tastes So Good,  Key Porter Books, comes out this October.

gina@ginamallet.com