Susur Lee, Toronto’s celebri-chef, is the king of multitasking. With restaurants in Toronto, New York, Washington and Singapore, and with plans to unpack yet another Toronto hangout in early fall, he’s got as many plates spinning in the air as a Cirque de Soleil juggler.
And if it’s Wednesday it must be Washington. Chef Lee and I are in Zentan, his atmospheric black-on-black restaurant, sitting side by side in front of a mountain of his visually striking Singapore Slaw with Salted Plum Dressing – 19 crisp, soft, sweet, delicate, salty, pickley, crunchy vegetables piled high (a favourite among Toronto regulars). Admiring the plating, the chef with the signature ponytail repeats the ingredients like a scientist reading from the periodic table: “carrots, jicama, nuts, taro root, edible flowers….”
“This is exactly the same,” he says with great emphasis, “in Singapore, New York, Toronto, and here in D.C.”
When he got the call to stand in for culinary whiz Todd English at a new Thompson hotel, Chef Lee had never been to Washington. But he says he took a look around the town, was impressed with local chefs Jean-Georges Vongerichten and José Andrés, and decided Washington was, in his words, “a very business-like city full of power lunches and power dinners.” So for this business-of-government locale, the master chef opened a restaurant in Donovan House, the new ultra-chic Thomas Circle hotel named after master spy William Donovan. In keeping with the undercover theme, Susur Lee called his restaurant Zentan (“spy” in Mandarin).
Chef Lee is now standing over the salad and tossing pieces of jicama dangerously high. In Singapore, the slaw is a celebration dish for the New Year. “Tradition demands the dish be placed in the centre of the table and everyone present stand and toss the salad,” he explains. This charming bit of theatre is usually performed in the restaurant by the house waiter. The charismatic chef leans into the dish and adds sotto voce, “Oh, the emotion of tossing at the New Year! Listen. You can hear the texture. You can hear shreddedness and freshness.” I bend my ear to the plate, but I seem to lack the required culinary ear. The tossing, he explains, means that “all bad things will disappear and start upgrading.”
Today Lee is in town to introduce some of his inspired and artistic cuisine to the buttoned-up Washington gang in buttoned-down collars. This afternoon (not long off his enormously popular appearances on Bravo’s Top Chef Masters), he is turning out an asparagus salad. As it’s the first asparagus season since Zentan opened, he deems this an auspicious moment to bring his recipe across the friendliest border in the world. “I do the same dish in Toronto. I use Dijon mustard, tarragon and celery. I want to make a very soft and smooth dish.”
Are the D.C. foodies at Lee’s sushi bar and lounge getting duplicates of the creations he concocts in Toronto in what he calls his laboratory? Well almost. He sighs. That border is friendly – unless you’re a citrus-toting outlaw.
“Here, I cannot get calamansi juice, a southeast Asian lime. I cannot find it in America because of the law forbidding import of that citrus,” he says. The calamansi, a special ingredient for fish dishes and citrus dressing, is de rigueur in Toronto. In the United States, yuzu takes its place. It’s not the only recipe adjustment dictated by access to ingredients: In Singapore he can’t get some of the vegetables he prefers; in North America he can’t get the young ginger he uses in Singapore. Such is the plight of the peripatetic chef. This problem, he explains, challenges his philosophy of consistency. He gives me a “this is life in the comestibles world” shrug and bounces back all Susur Lee, the high-voltage Top Chef Masters contender whose fans still think his culinary pizzazz should have landed him the big prize.
