Without wishing to exaggerate or overstate the case, food people - chefs, restaurant owners, cheese makers, you name it - tend toward yearning.
They long to please others, to bring pleasure to others. Less often, they think about making a living as well. Sometimes they try to do both in the huge aching empty space that makes up most of this country. Part of the problem is geography, and part of it is history.
I recently met a woman in Saskatoon who still remembers the first time she served a customer a scallop. "Is this cheese?" the customer asked. The challenge can be restated another way. Let's say you buy a small restaurant on the east side of Highway 11, about 77 kilometres south of North Bay, and a few kilometers outside Sundridge, Ontario.
For a long time "Sunny Sundridge" was known for one thing: being the home of Mac Lang Chrysler Dodge Jeep, the biggest Dodge dealership in Ontario. What kind of a restaurant are you going to start in a place like that? A burger joint, of course. And so you try that, and for five years it doesn't really work.
Then you have this brainwave: you are going to change the restaurant. Instead of a burger joint by the side of the road in the middle of the god-forsaken northern Ontario forest, you decide to create a restaurant devoted to serving brilliant pasta dishes. Pause here for raucous laughter.
You build a sign. The sign is something Salvador Dali might have dreamed up had he been addicted to crystal meth: a plate of spaghetti, with strands of pasta shooting ten feet up into the air, where they twirl around a 12-foot-long fork.
— Ian Brown
All this is precisely what Danny Galekovic did in 1983, which is why, against all rational predictions, you can walk into Danny's Justa Pasta restaurant in the middle of nowhere and - if Sue Deschamps, the manager, can find you a table, or you don't mind waiting an hour in Danny's nearby gift shop - have one of the more memorable pasta meals of your life.
There's a guy standing in the lobby at the moment, for instance, who has just driven an hour to pick up some Justa Pasta takeout. "Remember when Mac Lang was the most famous thing about Sundridge? Now it's Danny's Justa Pasta."
Galekovic, another graduate of the transformative George Brown cooking schools, doesn't attempt to follow the 100-mile diet. (If he did, his mainstays would be moose steak and pine needle soup.) His mussels are from faraway New Zealand. The pasta is imported from one manufacturer in Italy. (Galekovic won't say which one). His bread, on the other hand, is made exclusively for the restaurant at an otherwise defunct bakery in Burk's Falls, down the road toward Huntsville.
The menu is nevertheless shockingly ambitious. Today's lunch specials include an oregano-crusted rack of lamb with soba noodles and assorted vegetables in oyster sauce; cream of cauliflower soup with maple beet puree and roasted walnuts; mussels in cumin yogurt sauce with a trio of onions; escargots in brandy peppercorn cream with tomatoes and leeks; and the lunch feature, an admittedly rambunctious-sounding Philly cheese steak cannelloni in tomato sauce. I order linguini with leeks, ramps and two other varieties of onions, marinated roma tomatoes, fresh and roasted garlic, baby spinach and chili peppers in extra virgin olive oil, with a raw egg yolk on top.
"They'll will toss it for you if it grosses you out," Sue Deschamps tells me. The tiramisu (with fresh strawberries and an orange chocolate ganache side) is some of the best I will eat in northern Ontario - and there is a lot of spectacular tiramisu in northern Ontario, thanks to the preponderance of Italian immigrants. (There ought to be a contest.) The restaurant was recently included for a second time in Oberon Press's Where to Eat in Canada.
