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If you've ever wondered what a pig's eyeball tastes like, here's a hint: pretty darned good. If, on the other hand, the mere thought turns you off, think twice about reading further. There is going to be discussion about ears, brains, tongues and stewed rooster cockscombs, too.

A pig's eyeball tastes uncannily of boiled beef, perhaps with an overtone of veal kidney. It is not at all chewy or tough. Quite the contrary. It yields to the tongue like properly braised short-rib flesh.

This is the kind of gastro-anatomical intelligence one acquires at the hands of Martin Picard, the no-holds-barred chef of Montreal's acclaimed Au Pied de Cochon restaurant, the Quebec-cuisine brasserie that has become an international temple of nose-to-tail eating thanks in part to such frequent pilgrims as TV chef Anthony Bourdain. It is not the kind of thing one typically learns in the missionary-position dining city of Toronto, especially not well outside of Chinatown on a thin-crust-pizza strip of gentrified Queen Street West.

Mr. Picard and Montreal colleague Fred Morin of Joe Beef restaurant brought their off-road cooking to Toronto for the first time Wednesday night as part of a $295-a-plate charity dinner at the Drake Hotel. The feast, in service of the James Beard Foundation, which supports culinary education across North America, included such other luminaries as Rob Feenie, the food concept architect of Cactus Restaurants in Western Canada, Tobey Nemeth of Toronto's Jamie Kennedy Wine Bar and the Drake's own executive chef Anthony Rose, a veteran of top restaurants in San Francisco and New York.

Billed as the culinary event of the season, it lived up to the promise if only for the shock value of the main course, prepared by Mr. Picard and Mr. Morin.

Dubbed "head & shoulder," it featured a pig's head at each table, gently poached in a vacuum bag overnight in a trendy process known as sous vide. Next to it was a whole pork shoulder, with leg stump attached, sitting in a stew of lobster tails, morels and those red wobbly sacs that perch on the heads of roosters, which, incidentally, turn grey and taste like a sautéed button mushroom infused with liver.

As the pig heads were paraded out on individual cutting boards - carving knife conveniently tucked into each porcine jaw - out came the flip-phone cameras. For a moment, it seemed like there had been a Britney Spears sighting.

"All right, the jacket's got to go," said Daniel Speck, co-owner of Henry of Pelham Family Estate winery in Niagara and one of the evening's beverage donors, as he pared down to shirtsleeves at my table.

Hoping to spare my freshly pressed lavender shirt from another trip to the cleaners, I retained my sports jacket for splatter protection and accepted a considerate - and better-dressed - tablemate's offer to do the carving. If odd body parts are your thing, Leslie Ng, owner of Toronto's Kubo Radio Asian Pub, knows how to oblige.

"I'm Chinese; we eat everything," he said while arranging some brain, ear and tongue ("You get the tip!") on my plate. Then he reached into the skull, felt around and deftly retrieved the right eyeball, which he promptly popped into his mouth.

Encouraged by his glee, and sensing no other takers at our table, I inquired about possible cartilage and mouth-feel issues before accepting the left eyeball.

"The texture of, um, maybe bladder," Mr. Ng said, unhelpfully.

Pardon?

"Very delicate," he clarified.

Indeed. It frankly tasted better than the liver-like tongue and chewy, rind-like ear, and I would sooner eat eyeball again than pig's brain, which has a mealy texture if also an attractively earthy flavour.

Pigs' heads and other odd body parts are standard fare at Au Pied du Cochon, a boisterous seven-year-old establishment where the "gastro" in gastro porn literally means gastrointestinal. Among the most popular menu items is something non-ironically called "duck in a can," various duck parts pressure-cooked in a tin cylinder and plopped onto your plate at the table. Another is foie gras poutine, the traditional Quebec fast food consisting of French fries topped with gravy and cheese curds, only with the addition of 100 grams of fattened goose liver.

Mr. Picard was also in Toronto to promote Au Pied de Cochon: The Album, the new soft-cover edition of a book he self-published in 2006. He said in an interview before the dinner that he believes PDC, as he likes to call the restaurant, may be the biggest consumer of foie gras in the world.

The only animal parts not sold at PDC, he said, are hair and the male sex organ. "We tried to make a pogo stick with it and it doesn't work," he said of deer penis, which is riddled with aromatic glands. "When we cut it, it smelled like hell."

Mr. Picard's pork-stravaganza wasn't the only brilliantly bizarre dish of the evening, hosted by popular cookbook author and teacher Bonnie Stern. Mr. Feenie, who arrived with his own pristine seafood harvested in British Columbia on Saturday, proved a major hit with an inspired first course of scallop tartare, micro cilantro, vanilla-scented trout roe and an eyebrow-raising topping of shaved parmigiano reggiano. The seemingly incongruous snowfall of beige cheese gave the glistening raw shellfish mound a creamy-nuttiness that magically harmonized with a 2006 Riesling CSV from Niagara's Cave Spring winery.

The late James Beard, often called the father of American gastronomy, whose New York townhouse serves as headquarters for his eponymous foundation, would probably have loved the meal. Despite his haute-cuisine leanings, he once said that, at times, he liked nothing more than to eat a piece of simple boiled beef. Had he been living in 2008, he might have said pork sous vide.