After a recent quickie reno, the gloriously proportioned dining room at uptown mainstay Centro is more impressive than ever.
Centro 2472 Yonge St., Toronto 416-483-2211 www.centro.ca $175 for dinner for two with wine, tax and tip
Centro has been tootling along respectably for years, neither the best nor the worst upscale restaurant in town. It looked to the non-initiate like an uptown social club, where the hunks of meat and the net worth weighed more than the epicurean ambition. It was Conrad Black's favourite resto during his forced Toronto sojourn, but we know where he's eating now.
To gourmands who looked closely, there was always a disjuncture between the food and the service. Serious foodies were not drawn to Centro for the food, which was competent but lacked the passion of the service. In November, however, Bruce Woods, Centro's chef (and co-owner) left; he is now cooking at the recently renovated Brassaii. Armando Mano (the other co-owner) got very lucky: He hired Jason Carter, who had been chef at both Madeline's and Lee and was sous-chef at Susur.
To celebrate the new food regime, Centro closed on March 9 for a quickie reno and re-opened this week, lighter and brighter. Gone are the old orange chandeliers that made the food look orange. Instead of being clad in brown, the tall pillars now wear white ultra-suede. Huge slanted mirrors reflect the room for diners facing the walls. And what a grand, gloriously proportioned room it is.
As the front-of-house guy, Mano remains the host with the most - the most personal welcome, the most wonderful attention to detail, the most positive influence over his wait staff, whose warmth and attentiveness mimic his. Where else in town do you see busboys scanning the room? Yes, the most junior of juniors are always looking for what needs doing at every table.
This is likely due to Mano's mentor, Toronto restaurant legend Franco Prevedello, whom Mano calls "pop." And the two are indeed like father and son. Mano's second job in Canada when he was a green Portuguese émigré with bad English was as a busboy at Pronto, where Prevedello recognized something special in the kid and started teaching him what real service was. They remain close, with the elder still offering restaurant tutelage to the younger.
One of Centro's weaknesses has been its focus on big manly hunks of meat at the expense of interesting fish. New chef Carter fixes that: On the menu, a thick chunk of first-rate raw tuna sits atop a slice of avocado; atop the tuna is a little stew of sun-dried tomato with finely diced smoky bacon - a small, clever and unbearably yummy play on BLTs. His sea bass, moreover, is fried so hot that its skin crisps and so carefully that its heart melts. He sauces it with a green and white duo - white wine foam and broccoli purée. On top is lightly cooked lemon speared with fennel frond for yet another layer of flavour. One wonders if this guy took Art 100 at university and learned about Venetian underpainting: His compositions seem so intentionally layered. Perhaps it was all his years of training under Susur Lee, the high priest of complex dining.
Even Carter's old-fashioned green salad gets reimagined: It consists of inner leaves (only) of romaine, shaved zucchini, parmigiano reggiano, a deep red blood orange segment and tiny browned shallots with a whipped up (emulsified, for techies) mustardy vinaigrette.
Chef Carter makes his own big, flat pappardelle noodles and rolls them up in a tight spiral, sets the spiral up like a cone and slathers it with his idiosyncratic ragu built on braised small chunks of beef, pork and veal and deglazed with white wine before its stewing.
His meditation on lamb is small juicy slices of the best lamb tenderloin, perfectly roasted and anointed with a simple sauce of lamb and beet juices cooked down and garnished with tiny rounds of glazed beet and raw apple as well as beet tuile. To make a beet tuile, which tastes like a happy cross between borscht and a great cookie, Chef takes the mustfrom boiling beets, spreads it on a cookie sheet and dehydrates it.
His take on chicken is another multi-layered opus: He roasts the breast and leg and sets them atop crackling breast-skin confit, which in turn sits on top of velvety celeriac purée studded with tiny chives and surrounded by a pale green moat made by tearing off the leaves of Brussels sprouts and barely braising them. One of chef's very few failings is overcooking the breast and leg.
For dessert he deconstructs banana split, he renovates cheesecake by lightening it dramatically and he does impeccable little opera cakes composed of layers of coffee buttercream, moist sponge cake and the deepest, darkest chocolate ganache. If there are a few lemon-scented mini-madeleines on the side, that's just a Jason Carter throwaway line. He's that kind of chef - with passion to burn.