It's Saturday night at Parts & Labour and the fashion tribes are gathering. Over shared plates of pork belly, urban woodsmen sporting bushy beards, flannel shirts and vintage nerd glasses woo hip girls in preloved scarves and hand-me-down Chanel jackets, while lithe, inscrutable blondes in gilded stilettos perch atop spring-loaded stools, sip sangria and look exquisitely bored by the attention of junior Bay Street executives. A few iconoclasts – a woman in a Minnie Pearl hat, a man dressed like Juan Epstein in sweatpants and a denim vest, someone with a mullet – add spice.
That this stylish motley crew has gathered in Parkdale, a rapidly gentrifying west-end neighbourhood that still has the potential to be scary, makes the novelty that much greater.
Appropriately, the restaurant's unadorned white brick walls focus attention on the crowd, while a rectangular, Mondrianesque bar, lit by dozens of colourful pot lamps, has both booze and treasure – part of a carburetor, a reel of fly fishing line, a paperback copy of Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil – tucked into its cubbyholes. On the way down to the basement, a venue for all manner of alternative music, repurposed smashed windshields serve as guardrails. Tonight, though, the sound system features nothing more challenging than the Band's Greatest Hits.
Whether this nexus of hip is a reflection of good things on the menu or the menu draws the crowd is a chicken-and-egg question better left to future dining historians. The simple fact is: Parts & Labour is having a moment.
A supergroup of hip young service-industry professionals have combined forces to open this energetic restaurant-cum-performance space on West Queen West. It includes Jesse Girard and Richard Lambert (owners of the popular nightclub The Social) and Brian Richer and Kei Ng of Castor Design (whose familiar spent fluorescent light tubes illuminate the communal tables). Manning the stoves is the celebrated and heavily tattooed young chef Matty Matheson, who also oversees the kitchen at Oddfellows, Ng and Richer's art-world hangout.
Here, the menu's main conversation piece – and the dish that best sums up the restaurant's proletariat aesthetic – is listed as “fried pig face.” Take that, haute cuisine. For all of its hard-core posturing, however, the dish is really just pork croquettes – and kind of middling ones at that, dense and a bit dull. I was hoping for a little more punk spirit from something called fried pig face, some sign of a grimace perhaps. Each croquette, though, gets dressed with a splash of tartar-like gribiche sauce, while the plate is busied with caper berries, gherkins, pickled vegetables, fresh greens and a splash of demi-glace. Good flavours all, but too many of them.
Better is Matheson's Buffalo quail, which is fried and tossed in a soft, spicy dressing: chicken wings for grownups. Evolving the traditional celery and blue cheese dip into a salad of shaved celery and fennel in a Roquefort dressing is an inspired move and the kind of hearty, macho cooking that Matheson excels at. He is also experimenting with more subtle flavours, as evidenced by his sea bass carpaccio, a pretty, complex dish that benefits from the addition of a bright, fresh acidity in the form of pickled shallots. (On one visit, though, a slight fishiness was evident, rendering the dish merely okay.)
Moving on, all of the parts and labour really start to come together when it comes to the entrées. Beautifully rendered cast-iron-roasted Cornish hen with a haunting mushroom demi-glace (but not served, sadly, in a cast-iron pan) is paired with a deeply savoury warm chick pea salad enhanced by scorched treviso, honey cream and salty nuggets of lardon. It is an imaginative, delicious take on the obligatory poultry main.
