I am not now, and nor have I ever been fat. I am the happy owner of a fast metabolism, which turns foie gras and triple crème cheeses into fairly manageable little bulges that are nicely camouflaged by expensive clothes. I do not sample small amounts of the dishes on my plate. I order gargantuan meals in restaurants three or four times a week, and eat pretty much everything, unless it's total dreck. Despite having been a restaurant critic for more than 25 years, eating remains my second favourite indoor sport. To those who say I have the best job in the world, I have only one thing to say: Eat your heart out; you can't have it. At the risk of sounding saccharine, I confess to loving it -- most days.
Of course, there are bad times: On Saturday at 6 o'clock, I'm in jeans and a T-shirt, tired and peaceful in the weekend way. All I want is to be a normal person: order pizza, rent a video, morph into a couch potato. Instead I have to get dressed up (stockings, heels, makeup), schlep downtown and make a big deal out of dinner. Other bad times: having to go out to dinner with stomach flu. I can remember reviewing the old Courtyard Café in the late eighties (when it was all brown vinyl and kissy-face) with the flu, and going to the bathroom to retch between courses. Speaking of retching, in all these years of reviewing, I have only been poisoned once (accidentally): My spousal unit and I ate bouillabaisse in Marseilles and spent the next 18 hours throwing up in a small, cramped, hot hotel room.
He is the silent other in all my reviews. And there lies one of the big perks of my job: Fifteen years ago, when we commenced doing our bit for humankind by reproducing, I saw the writing on the wall: It's said that two-career parents can kiss their relationship goodbye for a couple of decades. I chose instead to stop taking friends out for reviewing dinners, and dine only with my honey.
So he and I sit down across a table from one another twice a week, every week, and that has been divine for our relationship.
Except when it's not. We were reviewing a sushi place downtown last week, while having a fight. The fight escalated to the point where the only grand geste involves walking out. In the middle of the meal. Can I do that? Never. It's like leaving work in the middle of the day.
As for restaurants that make me mad, I can't leave them, either. But I can strike back. When they failed to honor my reservation -- twice! -- at Far Niente, an upscale-casual spot on Bay Street, I didn't get mad, I got revenge. In print. Ditto when the waiter at Fez Batik, a quasi-Moroccan restaurant on Peter Street, forgot we existed for half an hour. Then there was the time we drove to the Laurentians to pay homage to L'Eau a la Bouche and were seated in a passageway and summarily ignored for almost $250 a couple. That could ruin somebody else's weekend, but to me it was research. As was the Indian Motorcycle Company's similar astonishing ability to ignore us while fawning over the young blondes at the next table. No need to fret, it will all come out in black and white on Saturday.
The other bad times are when I encounter a chef whom I've pilloried. This is to be avoided at all costs, but sometimes you can't. Last year, I went to a catered dinner party. Midway through dinner, the chef in the kitchen told the host (who told me right away) that he once owned a restaurant I'd slaughtered and eventually lost it (my fault). He'd gone bankrupt, and then his wife left him. Yes, I was frightened, and, yes, I left right after dessert. And, yes, I have an unlisted phone number.
In three decades I have only had one serious lawsuit threatened: I had accused a restaurant of using frozen hamburger meat, which they denied. They threatened to sue, and I had to retract my statement and apologize. I did not change my mind about the hamburgers, but I learned to write "tastes as if it was frozen," which has kept this paper out of court.
Then recently there was the Shopsy's guy: Having hung, drawn and quartered Shopsy's last month, I wasn't that excited to get a message to call the owner. But it's rude not to return calls. He wanted to defend his corned beef and debate the value of frozen Yukon gold fries; I wanted to get off the phone. Yes, it made me feel bad. Am I made of stone? Don't answer that question.
Feeling bad is an occupational hazard, one I try to avoid. The best way for a restaurant critic to feel bad is to say mean things about a chef or restaurant owner whom you know. Hence my obsession with not knowing them. I never go to restaurant openings and very rarely to their special events. The downside of not hobnobbing with food folk is being out of their information loop. The reward is my independence, and the resulting freedom to call a spade a spade, and to say something looks like dog food when it does.
Which reminds me, sometimes I do go too far. In 1991, while reviewing the now defunct Natalie's on Queen Street West, I wrote that the curried corn soup "looks like Doctor Ballards (and tastes it)," prompting one astute reader to ask: "How would she know?" The letters-to-the-editor page has been a best friend to my enemies.
I guard my independence jealously, most especially by doing all that's in my power to be anonymous in all the restaurants I visit. Credit cards in (frequently changing) aliases. Reservations also made in fake names. My goal is always to use what the military calls protective mimicry -- to blend into the specific culture of the restaurant I'm reviewing, which means clothes to blow the budget at North 44 and Scaramouche, and even more black than usual when on Queen Street. My obsession with anonymity forces me to grin and bear bad service. Instead of getting mad, I take notes (surreptitiously, sometimes in the bathroom, sometimes on my lap, sometimes right after getting home from the restaurant).
People I meet always ask whether I wear disguises (i.e. the hat) out to restaurants. Come on. It would hardly make sense to go out seeking anonymity wearing the item you're sporting in the newspaper! One's goal is to blend in, in order to be treated exactly as others are treated -- not to draw attention to oneself and be treated differently. I am the stand-in for the mythical average diner, so it's my job to be the mythical average Canadian diner. When badly treated, I don't demand that they move me to a better table, or fix the service, or recook the food. I think most of my fellow citizens (for better or for worse) aren't assertive enough to do that, so I ought to behave as the majority would behave, in order to find out how they'll be treated.
Despite all precautions, I must be recognized sometimes. Waiters must figure out after my column is published which one I was. ("She must be that bitch at table 13 who had the foie gras, the calamari and the crème brulée.") Waiters move around a lot. When that waiter surfaces two months later at another restaurant I'm reviewing, the jig is up. Except I never know. Not one waiter has ever said: "Aren't you Joanne Kates?" Either they're so smart that they do recognize me, give their all and not say a word, or I'm succeeding at being anonymous. Often I wonder: At a Christmas lunch at Boba last year, the waiter was almost too charming, too attentive, too sweet. My cynical self said he knew; my Pollyanna self said he was just a wonderful waiter.
Theirein lies the stress of my job: Especially in the fancy restaurants (where I narcissistically imagine them lying in anxious wait for me), I tremble with anxiety about being recognized. In fact, a major reason for keeping my circle of dining companions small is my fear of neophyte accomplices making a faux pas. (They invariably do, and then I have to lie to them and pretend I don't mind.) Their most frequent gaffe is to say my name out loud in front of the waiter. Either they do that, or they're on some kind of weird diet or don't like half the things I want them to order (in order that I can taste them). Which is why I prefer going with my significant other. He's trained. When ordering, I do require any and all accomplices to order only that which I'm interested in testing, and then to share it with me. My honey has been doing it so long that he's broken to that bit and happily refers to himself as the cleanup hitter.
My friends and social acquaintances (who number few, perhaps on account of the aforementioned strictness) almost never invite me to dinner, certain that their pathetic attempts at gourmet cooking will be skewered in next weekend's edition of Canada's national newspaper. Little do they know that I am invited to dinner so rarely (on account of that phobia) that I am grateful for it, and deeply non-judgmental in that situation. It is also true that I decline most of the few dinner invitations I receive, due to the simple fact that it's hard to find a night off if you have to dine out at least twice a week for work. Ditto movies, a passion I have forgone in favour of dining for a living.
I do have biases, of course. I grew up on rare roast beef (thanks to my dad's taste) and food that was never overcooked (thanks to my mom's cooking). I still love it undercooked, and I can't help that preference. I've loved sushi since discovering it in the eighties, but I'm getting sick of it: There's too much mediocre sushi around.
I remain biased in favour of small artisanal production and irritable about big companies running restaurants as corporate branch plants. I abhor powdered soup and sauce base. Fake whipped cream makes me ill. And I do especially hate overcooked dried out chicken and fish. Frozen frites in a white-tablecloth restaurant don't exactly turn my crank, and nor do wait staff who forget to pour the water and the wine.
On the other side of the ledge, I have been too kind at times. I can't help loving almost all Chinese and Japanese food. And I know I've been soft on Michael Stadtlander (never about his cooking, which has never veered from the supernal, but about meal pacing and setting). When he had Nekah on Wellington Street and was expecting people to sit for three hours of his edible masterwork, I supported it and I was wrong: He was way out of step with the city. I am too kind to Gaston Schwalb (Le Petit Gaston's) because he was the granddaddy of the French bistro in Toronto, and I can't forget learning French onion soup at Gaston's on Markham Street 36 years ago. I was wrong to rave about Winston's in 1998: The room, the haute cuisine style and the prices were not in sync with Toronto. I sometimes let sentimentality blunt my sword when writing about Jamie Kennedy, for he, too, has been such a seminal influence on Toronto dining. One struggles not to play favourites.
Wine: another personal black hole. I am not an oenophile. I am a wine slob. My wine knowledge and interest are permanently stuck at the elementary level. Give me one glass of oaky chardonnay or a full-throated cab, and I'll ask no more. Two factors have prevented me from fulfilling the wine portion of my mandate: One, I am a hopelessly cheap drunk. Consuming more than one glass of wine would utterly eliminate my ability to evaluate a restaurant or remember anything about the meal. It's hardly worth ordering a bottle of wine when one member of the duet can't consume more than one glass. And you don't learn wine without ordering bottles. The second reason is financial. You don't learn wine without ordering good (read expensive) bottles. The food I order costs this newspaper outrageous sums of money every week. A wine budget would have seemed de trop.
In addition to my failure on the wine front, I am criticized for supercilious rants, arrogant extremes of opinion and being too picky. Yup, that's why they pay me the big bucks.
WHAT I EAT AT HOME
When not reviewing restaurants, my diet is pathetic; prior to having kids, I often gave elaborate dinner parties. I most often did French and Italian, but also made complex curries from scratch. Nowadays at home I eat pathetically simple pasta, salads and grilled fish. Sic transit gloria.
The thing I cook most often when busy and stressed is pasta aglio e olio: Boil pasta; sautée a gargantuan amount of garlic very briefly in a lot of oil (I always keep my own minced garlic in the freezer); throw in chopped parsley if you have it; toss with pasta and serve with Parmigiano-Reggiano. Great fast kid food on weeknights. If they're lucky I manage a salad, too.
The only time I cook with any ambition is on vacation: In situations when other people kick back and eat out, I always get an apartment with a kitchen, cook like crazy and avoid restaurants. To me, that's a vacation. FIRST REVIEW (APRIL 22, 1974): WHEN 'ITALIAN' MEANT LASAGNA, NOODLES HIT TORONTO'S EYE LIKE A GRILLED PIZZA PIE The following is an excerpt from Joanne Kates's first review on April 22, 1974. The restaurant in question is Noodles, a long since defunct restaurant that played a leading role in Toronto's culinary coming of age during the 1970s. ... [The waiters]smile just as broadly whether you buy fettucine with sweetbreads and truffles in a cream and brandy sauce for $1.75 or a big deal $40 dinner. In a city where too many waiters practice the adversary system, playing the snob game to make themselves feel less servile, Noodles's joyous waiters are refreshing.
The staff knows many of the tables are bad ones and they don't enjoy seating you in social Siberia near the hot cauldron. Or the stairs. Or the still troublesome north side where half the seats face a blank wall. . . .
Thanks to Noodles, Toronto's Italian food is no longer limited to lasagna and pizza with side trips to veal marsala and fettucine a la carbonara. At Noodles, there's shrimp and green pea soup, fresh Dover sole in a delicate anchovy, capers and tarragon butter. Dessert ranges from zabaglione to dried plums, their pits replaced with almonds and then batter fried and dusted with chocolate. Noodles come in every shape under imaginative sauces, pesto, lobster and cheese.
Pasta is made from scratch every day and then cooked to order in the cauldron. You won't find a fresher noodle in Canada today. Or tomorrow, probably.
Then there's the decor. In an age when restaurateurs are slapping up fake wooden beams to look folksy, [George]Minden is charging the future like a bull at a gate. And who said the future would be tranquil?
Hard, reflective surfaces like the orange and red wall tiles, the mirrored ceiling and the fat, phallic chrome pipes all are great fun. . . .
Noodles's approach raises the question of just what restaurant decor should do. We thought it should make you feel as cosy and relaxed as your favourite chair. Maybe not. Young people apparently love this elegant hyper-stimulation. They've replaced the Bayview jet-setters at dinnertime, and lawyers and public relations men can be found there wooing clients with privately imported Soave house wine and fresh brook trout in lemon sauce.
Would that Minden lunched more at Noodles. Absentee owners miss details, and Minden's preoccupation with his Courtyard Café in the Windsor Arms [hotel]is keeping Noodles a notch below the brass ring. He should visit the ladies' room and change the ghastly daffodil vase. He could strike the tasteless prosciutto and vegetable broth from an otherwise palate-tingling menu. Surely he hasn't eaten the panicotti lately -- dry pancakes cradling drier cheese.
In any business, imitating proven themes is one route to success: Witness Sutton Place, Gatsby's and the Four Seasons Motor Hotel.
It takes a little money, a little more time and a lot more daring to be original. Flawed it may be, but credit Noodles for venturing tastefully where few dare to tread.