Is this the hottest food in Toronto?

I bite into a bronzed dumpling of a shrimp pakora and kaboom! the chilis race through my system. Automatically I reach for water, but no, now I remember don’t do that, water simply spreads  and intensifies the fire… Have to wait it out… I’m sure my blood pressure’s rising.

I look around the gaudy extravaganza of a room, pink walls, Chinese pictures, paper lanterns, plastic flowers and seajungle scapes on the tables and nobody else seems affected. But then I’m at Federick, the Chinese –Indian place in Scarborough where only the chili-addicted dare to go. And there are lots of them. When we arrive on a sub zero night, the lineup for takeway stretches out into the stripmall on Ellesmere – between Markham and McCowan.

David our waiter has warned us. “Sure you want it spicy?” Of course,  says  Big Chili who made his bones with Szechuan, Harissa, Texas Fire Alarm Chili, Southeastern Sambals. The chili is yang – extreme machismo food. Bring it all on is his ‘tude. Uh uh. The Hakka blast is relentless.

Hakka? Asks Big Chili as beads of sweat break out on his forehead. Yes Hakka. The Hakkas are part of the great Chinese diaspora (former Governor General Adrienne Clarkson is a Hakka so is Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore) which has taken Chinese food around the world, reinventing it as they do so. (Susur Lee’s manipulation of French techniques with Chinese ingredients is a Toronto example.)

In the 1700s, the Hakkas put down roots in Kolkatta (Calcutta) quickly adapting their food to local tastes and spices, and then started spreading out.

This is where Federick comes in. Simon, a Haka, the spelling he prefers, who owns the Scarborough restaurant, comes from Mumbai and he explains he took the name from a restaurant in his hometown. Why Federick? The restaurant is now gone but it may have been named (as an existing restaurant is) for the architect Frederick William Stevens, a local hero who designed Mumbai’s amazing  phantasmagorical gothic railroad station.

Back to food. The portions are huge. I’m sure it’s a pound of Haka Chow Mein $7 being placed before us -  slim little fiery noodles tossed with shrimp and chicken: Kan Shue Green Beans $6.50 are fried and piquant. Now we consider fermented bean curd, a traditional Hakka favourite. Which dish is the most typical, we ask David. He replies “Everything is Hakka.” We settle for home style bean curd $6.50,  fine  chewy  bean curd with those meaty round black mushrooms, carrots, onions, beans in a glutinous sauce. Without chilis, this dish would be good enough but bland. What the Hakkas have done is simply make traditional dishes and fired them up.  Looking over the extensive menu, we wonder whether Manchurian Beef, Frederick Delicious Garlic chicken, Singapore Fried Rice, Szechuan Shrimp will  taste more or less  the same – of chilis.

Chili chicken $11.50  is Federick’s poster dish, chunks of battered chicken on and off the bone in a viscous garlicky, soy sauce spiked with chilis to the max. We have a mixed opinion on this. I didn’t expect it to have the consistency of a sweet and sour dish while Big Chili objects to the battering – makes the chicken heavy.  One thing we agree on is the heat. We need the white rice.

Looking around, we realize we have hardly dented the mounds of food. Other patrons are going home with white plastic doggie bags. Big Chili cries Uncle, but  I take home the shrimp pakoras $10.75. They heat up wonderfully the next day and I eat them with those small sweet Mexican tomatoes. I find I want more almost immediately. I’m addicted.

*and 1/2 Federick, 1920 Ellesmere, 416-439-9234. Four dishes $45 GREAT Yums for bucks.

**Tips from Winterlicious which ended last week. These dishes are also on the restaurants’ regular menus.

Hemispheres does a marvelous  tossed salad of mango, papaya and avocado with fresh herbs, pistachios and sesame vinaigrette. $10

Hemispheres Restaurant and bistro at Metropolitan Hotel 110 Chestnut St 416-599.8000

Croque Monsieur Parisien at Didier, best in the city, a rosemary-smoked ham and comte cheese in a sandwich lightly sautéed in butter with a fresh green bean salad. $15

Didier 1496 Yonge St 416-925-8588

A superb melding of flavour – a roasted pear, shaved fennel, watercress, frisee, walnuts, stilton cheese, mustard dressing $12 at Pangaea.

Pangaea 1221 Bay St  416-920 2323

The Potato Council of Britain, of course, funded research into the benefits of potato chips at Birmingham’s Aston University (Daily Telegraph)Experts believe that it may be because of the carbohydrates in chips – of course it is….

Never mind. This is jolly junk science. Sixty men and women watched a five minute film which depicted the fall out from the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Half were then given a magazine to read, the rest a plate of chips.

Apparently, the viewers were very upset, but after twenty minutes the chip eaters perked up. Now what I want to know is why the magazine readers didn’t. Could they have been forced to read the Economist. Bet they’d have cheered up with Cosmopolitan’s sexiest bachelors….

In the past decade, the Spanish have wrenched the crown of cooking from the French. The new king is Ferran Adria, a gee whiz kind of cook who is known for frozen whisky sour candy, white garlic and almond sorbet, ingredients reduced to foam, – and Kellogg’s paella, Rice Crispies made from shrimp heads and vanilla-flavoured mashed potatoes.

Rice Crispies paella? Francisco Franco, the late dictator, must be fulminating in his grave. No sooner was he underground than the country went to pot. Under El Caudillo, Spain lived in the margins of Europe, a grand and somber country shackled to the past. The food was earthy and regional. Pilgrims to Santiago de Compostela would walk by restaurants boasting the bounty of Galicia, grinning hake, goose barnacles which look like dirty toenails, a cheese shaped like a tit. Paella itself was a moveable feast, rice mixed with local ingredients, eaten straight from the pan, best of all cooked over a wood fire in a piney grove, garnished with fresh snails.

Franco’s spirit isn’t dead. Spain’s foodscape is  roiled by a schism among cooks. It was  revealed at the 2007 Madrid-Fusion, the annual showplace for avant garde cooks.  Before an audience of Spanish and foodies from all over the world (including me) Santi Santamaria, a traditionalist. whose restaurant Can Fabes in Barcelona has three Michelin stars,  lashed out at Adria’s techno-emotional cooking. He called   it pretentious, even dangerous. “”How can it be that products that are not recommended for your health are being consumed in many of the country’s most important restaurants?”

His Spanish listeners cheered and cried.

I want to eat some of that Franco food in Toronto.

Embruja Flamenco on the Danforth seems to be just the ticket. When I check the online menu I see several kinds of paella and as well, a tapas of the sublime jamon iberica de ballota. This ham is emblematic of old Spain. It is made from black Iberico pigs who live exclusively in southwestern Spain, spilling over into Portugal. They feed on acorns which are full of saintly oleic acid which produces GOOD cholesterol. Go ahead, split your sides. This side of the Atlantic, this  incredible food is now being SOLD for its healthiness!

In fact, it’s the taste of the bald pigs’ ham that sends gourmands wild. The leg is dry cured then smoked with beechwood and juniper to produce a taste as complex as that of a great strawberry.  The first bite is surprisingly mellow, then deepens into the delicate sweet of nutmeat, streaked with luscious fat that dissolves on the tongue. Along with foie gras, caviar, the Sand Dune oyster from PEI,  dover sole,  Iberica Belota (the top grade) belongs in the food Elysium.

I describe it in detail because Iberica ham has only been recently allowed into Canada due to a trade dispute.

I’d forgotten the friendly side of old Spain. We’re warmly welcomed into a cozy and dimlit room with a small stage and the sound of the guitar. Flamenco! As essential to the image of old Spain as Carmen and bullfight posters. We hardly have time to have a sip of Cava before the show begins.The dancer seems to have the heel taps right on but it strikes me that flamenco is environment specific – it has to be in the right context where the audience feels it is part of the show. It loses its passion as a commercial floor show.

Soon as it’s over, our waiter delivers a few slivers of Bellota for $25. Not bad considering a whole ham goes for $1,300. We eat it with our fingers, Spanish style.

The other tapas we choose is shrimps sautéed in chocolate sauce,$8.95. I don’t like eating really dark chocolate on its own, but its texture works in cooking. The shrimps are juicy and the sauce is black and viscous.

The main event, paella, comes in the correct two-handled pan. We’ve picked the classic version – $59 for two -  made with the unique and  super absorbent Bomba rice which expands several times more than conventional short grain, and gives the dish its dense fluffiness. The mouthful of flavours range from iodine shrimp to garlicky chicken to saffron rice which tastes like drying cotton sheets. The  strips of squid are very tender. We drink an appealing Volteo Tempranillo $49.

We close with strawberries dipped in anisette, great marriage $9.

**Embruja Flamenco 97 Danforth 416-778-ooo7

Wheelchair accessible. Dinner for two, food plus tax: $127

A University of Toronto study of nearly 50,000 people found that those eating chocolate were 22 per cent less likely to suffer a stroke than those that didn’t.

And those who did suffer a stroke but had indulged in chocolate were 46 per cent less likely to die as a result.

The reason is believed to be that the food is rich in flavanoids, a healthy anti-oxidant.

Sarah Sahib, the study author , then goes and fudges it..”More research is needed to determine whether chocolate truly lowers stroke risk, or whether healthier people are simply more likely to eat chocolate than others.”

Farming country, Britwell Salome...

Young Ryan Simpson just got his one star from Michelin for his cooking at the gastro pub The Goose — when the owner gave him the boot saying his food was “too poncey”. More bangers and mash were needed on the menu.

After all, the Goose’s regulars are farm folk from Britwell Salome. I remember from my childhood that Britwell Salome,  a few miles away from where my family lived,  was kneedeep in  mud.   Can’t see the locals knowing what to make of Simpson’s roasted wood pigeon and carpaccio of Chiltern Hills muntjac — although they might know what I don’t, ie what a muntjac is what is  - a deer!  Still the owner does seem confused. This the third star chef he’s fired.

Tony Turnbull on Timesonline follows up with advice on how to  spot a pretentious restaurant. ..”–There is nothing wrong with fancy cooking — or, indeed, formal service — if that is what customers want. The problem comes when a restaurant’s ambition is hopelessly at odds with reality, when both front of house and the kitchen fall back on a lazy notion of what fine dining should be — in other words, they resort to ponciness. Watch out for the telltale signs. I’ve picked the items that are particularly apt for Toronto.

The greeting Hospitality should be the watchword of any good restaurant, and this is their chance to put you at your ease. That doesn’t involve making you stand there like an asylum seeker while they check if your name is indeed on their reservations list. Would it hurt to take you at your word?Has Tony ever got this right!  Being given the stasi treatment at the door is a real downer and it happens all the time.

Presentation “This is the category in which a restaurant’s ponciness can go off the scale. Dribbles of this, towers of that — some chefs think that every plate must be a minor work of art. While I agree that we eat first with our eyes, let’s not lose sight of what is really important here: the taste. The more artfully tweaked a dish, the longer it has spent under the heat lamp and the more closely the chef has breathed over your plate.” Sometimes I think a fashion stylist has designed the plate before anything’s been cooked. Food rarely lives up to an overstyled dish.

Service Staff “in properly smart restaurants do the bare minimum. They take your order, they bring food to your table, they take away the empty plates. Please note, they do not continually refill your wine glass; keep asking if everything is all right; point to your dish with their little finger and tell you that the salmon is the salmon and the shellfish veloute is the shellfish veloute (I know, I ordered the damn thing).” Right on. Refilling the glass is a way of making you drink more, order more wine. The Hey How YOU Doing chorus should be banned by any smart restaurateur. If I’m fed up, I’ll let you know….

Tableware “I have round plates and bowls at home. I use them for all sorts of things: soup, pasta, fish, meat, puddings. Curiously, I don’t have octagonal plates, I don’t have square plates, I don’t have crescent-shaped bowls or huge-rimmed bowls like the sombreros of Mexican midgets. Come to think of it, I don’t know how I manage.” Yes. Why bury scrambled eggs in a bowl? Nothing looks more welcoming than a plate of beautifully scrambled eggs.

Judy Creighton interviewing Bob Blumer, surreal chef.

The other day, Judy Creighton’s friends gave her a roast to celebrate her more than three decades of food writing.  It was lots of fun, lots of newsroom jokes – Judy’s worked at Canadian Press for most of her professional life,  marvelous anecdotes about Judy the insoucient  outlier, someone who never marched to anyone else’s drummer.

As I walked home I suddenly realized that in all the laughter, nobody had summarized Judy’s particular achievement. Why –  she’s done more than any other writer in Canada to raise our consciousness and appreciation about food and cooking.   She’s used her national profile to spread the word cross country about the latest trends, the newest personalities, cookbooks,food writers,  not just from Canada but from all over the world.

To read Judy is  to understand what’s been happening to food and our perception of it in the past tumultuous decades.

An exceptional  journalist is one who doggedly puts together the details then fits them into the big picture, one who illuminates the subject, stretches its dimensions, maintains a sense of balance, of fairness, most of all makes the information accessible. Judy’s doing that without ever losing her sense of humour.

More than that. She’s generous. A big heart.   All writers are prickly with competition. Compliments to others don’t come easily.  But Judy is quick to praise and support. When I started writing restaurant reviews in the ’90s, I knew I was working on the dark side, so blow me down when, as I stood waiting at an elevator bank,  I was given a shout out by Judy – whom I then didn’t know. It took me a while to realize that she was sincere – as she is sincere about everything.

Forget pancaking flipping on Shrove Tuesday. I’m naming this Grumps’ week. Researchers at  Harvard University for the online journal Current Biology now believe that being aggressive, intolerant and short-tempered could be a sign of a more advanced nature.

Now everyone can behave like Gordon Ramsey without a twinge of guilt, and critics can breathe a sigh of relief. As the world warmed in recent years and plaints like “Can’t we all get along?” multiplied, the acerbic critic has been on the wane this side of the Atlantic – Pauline Kael and Nathan Cohen would never get a byline today. The last of the great grumps was the theatre critic John Simon who was dumped by New York Magazine for someone more “constructive” ie,a nice guy who pats the promising on the head.

My inner grump released, I decide – as a public service and so the bloggers don’t have all the fun  – to revise my policy of not reviewing restaurants of no redeeming social value. Like Zin. This Chinese restaurant succeeded Boba on Avenue Road last summer. After sampling four dishes which defied their descriptions by all tasting the same, I thought Zin won’t last. Mistake. It’s still open. I also let off Papillon on the Park, a new branch of the successful crepe chain. I ate the Quebec menu and decided not to comment because my remarks might cause a constitutional crisis.

In this cautious spirit, I would have swallowed the check from the Local Company on the Danforth east of Logan. But now…

The emailed press release emphasized the food… “ The Local Company’s menu reflects Chef Steven Wilson’s dedication to contemporary Canadian cuisine while emphasizing his commitment to support local food growers and producers” – so what else is new? On the other hand, “ Chef Wilson prepares everything in-house, even condiments, garnishes and ice creams.” I was interested enough to discount the ominous words.  “ Diners will also be treated to the sultry sounds of bossa nova while they dine in a stylish loft ambience.”  Now I think of it, funny they didn’t just say it’s a resto lounge, dude.

The Local Company is almost empty when we arrive around 7.30 on a Friday evening. It’s a barn of a place, a former dress shop, high ceilings with  chandeliers, red brick walls,  a blacked out entertainment space at the end. No Bossa Nova.

The waiter swaggers over with ‘tude.  “Hey, How YOU  doing?” When our table starts to pitch and yaw,  upsetting the water, a busboy struggles to adjust it while the waiter is standing at the bar. We finally say we want another table.  No apology.

We order hopefully.  The three onion soup with aged Ontario cheddar $7 is fragrant and rather too sweet, the crust of bread and cheese is comforting. But there’s a problem with the other order. Instead of Wilted greens with Broome Lake Duck Confit and crisp potato “croutons” $11, my companion is served a duckless salad. The waiter bristles “You said wilted greens…” “That’s right.”  No apology. Fifteen minutes later,  after I’ve finished my soup, an incredibly salty duck confit arrives.

Ten minutes later, the waiter comes up “Hey, How YOU doing?”  Then he retires to the bar where the help is congregating.

After this experience, I drop the idea of ordering sage gnocchi because gnocchi are routinely murdered by lesser cooks, but then I go and order risotto, also dodgy eating in the city. Red wine braised veal cheeks $17 are rich enough but they come with an overnuked rice pudding with skin on top and showing few signs of the advertised wild mushrooms. Like the veal cheeks, the pork chop comes from Ontario but I’m not going to hold  Premiere McGuinty personally responsible for its tough dryness. Fashionable roots accompany the pig.

We have to hail HeyHowYOUdoing? at the bar to find out about desserts. An anemic pineapple sorbet.

As we leave, I learn that the general manager is stuffing his face at one of the VIP tables, so-called because they’re higher than the other ones. HeyhowYOUdoing is the floor manager. I don’t tip him. I should of course have looked him in the eye and told him exactly why — because the service was dreadful and the experience ugly. But I lost my nerve. If he reads this review he will after all know why.

The Local Company  511 Danforth Ave 416-465-5522 wheelchair accessible. Dinner for two: food/tax: $100

Perhaps  you’ve been told it’s perfectly ok if you’re quick and pick it up within five seconds – before e-coli settles in.   But a couple of years ago, two biology students at Connecticut College tested the five second rule with a series of ingenious series of experiments:  they dropped apple slices and candies on the ground and measured how long it took for dangerous bacteria to cluster == their verdict:  you have 30 seconds to pick up wet food and more than a minute to pick up dry foods.

Now SFoodie, SFWeekly’s food blog, have complexified the eat or not to eat dilemma with this flow chart.