The wine that Norman Hardie built his reputation on was rejected – six times – by Ontario’s regulator for not being enough like other chardonnays from the province.
Johnny C.Y. Lam/for The Globe and Mail
Norman Hardie: The product of unique soil and arduous labour, his Ontario wines garner great applause
By Chris Nuttal-Smith, Prince Edward County, Ont.
Special to The Globe and Mail
Norm Hardie likes to tell the story of the time he hired a local kid with an excavator to dig his winery's underground barrel room. This was the fall of 2003, and Hardie, who had spent years as a travelling winemaker's apprentice with top producers in Burgundy, New Zealand and California, had at long last purchased a parcel of rock-strewn land to call his own. The location, in a boom-and-bust farming community on the north shore of Lake Ontario, was atypical, to put it mildly.
Only a handful of winemakers had ever bothered to try their fortunes in Prince Edward County. Summers were just barely long enough to bring wine grapes to ripeness. Winters got so cold, meanwhile, that the only way to save the vines from certain death was to bury them under hills of rock and dirt.
Hardie, a Johannesburg-born sommelier who had managed some of Toronto's best restaurants, knew that great wines sprang from extreme conditions. And the area's geology – a few centimetres of clay and rock, and then nothing but fractured limestone – was similar to that of some of the planet's most hallowed appellations. As that excavator broke ground, clawing out the barrel room's shape, Hardie followed the limestone ever deeper with his eyes. What caught his attention wasn't the rock itself, but the vertical cracks that the digging revealed. Each of them was filled with long, thin roots; the plants had learned to draw water and life as if straight from the stone.
Today, Hardie's big bet looks like a stroke of genius. Thanks in large part to the harsh climate and to that limestone, and the complex, flinty, fresh-tasting character they impart, Norman Hardie Winery's pinot noirs and chardonnays are perhaps the most sought-after Canadian dry wines ever made. Writing this spring on jancisrobinson.com, the British critic Richard Hemming described Hardie's bottlings as "absolutely, utterly, profoundly delicious," and singled out one $70 bottling – the most expensive on Hardie's list – as "grossly underpriced."
Matt Kramer, a prominent U.S. wine writer and contributing editor for Wine Spectator magazine, named Hardie's county chardonnay one of his wines of the year in 2011 (he also called Ontario "The World's Least-Known Great Wine Zone"), and has been a vocal booster since. "I certainly remember my reaction when I first tasted his chardonnay," Kramer said on the phone a few weeks ago. "Who is this guy, where is this from, and why have I never heard about this before?"
Kramer continued, "When I taste a wine like that, I know this is not a wine that's made. It's a wine that's born."
That may be true: Hardie, who turned 50 in May, is the first to credit the land and the climate of the sites he farms, both in Prince Edward County, and Niagara, where he purchases grapes from a few prime plots. His wines, as he often says, are above all else expressions of the soil. But before they're born, there's a hell of an arduous labour.
The 2008 County chardonnay that Kramer and so many other wine lovers, sommeliers and critics fell so hard for, and which all but made the winery's reputation, was rejected not just once or twice, but six times by Vintners Quality Alliance Ontario, the hidebound provincial body that determines, among many other things, whether a winemaker can print the term "Ontario" on a bottle, and how much of a wine's sale price a producer is allowed to keep.
That chardonnay, which even today remains powerfully crisp and refreshing, with bright lemony acidity, a silken texture, uncommonly low alcohol and a strong whiff of gunflint, "lacked typicity," according to the VQA's standards – it wasn't enough like other Ontario chardonnays.
The fight to have that wine approved almost broke Hardie, he now says. He could easily have dosed the entire vintage with copper sulphate (or any number of other common chemical additives) to clean it up: to strip away the gunflint character and much of the wine's soul, which would have sped it through approvals. Instead, with the backing of his winery's business partner (not to mention an emergency $100,000 loan), he stood his ground.
That gunflint taste, which is prized in such other wine regions as Jura and Burgundy (the French call it " le matchsteek"), came straight from the soil, Hardie believed. His mission, he reminded himself, was to make wines that express the place they're grown.
On the seventh and final appeal, it won approval. But the whole affair only reinforced Hardie's view that he had to keep pushing for greatness, no matter how hard the fight. "The great wines have always been made on the edge," he says.
As he tastes through the barrels in that underground chamber one day this summer, Hardie explains what happens once the land has had its say.
Rather than use bagged, commercial yeast to ferment his harvests, Hardie cultures a natural yeast from every field, using glass bottles, aquarium bubblers and a few litres of fruit from each plot. "If I use a bagged yeast, generally I get the descriptors that the manufacturer tells me I'm going to get. I'm not interested in getting those descriptors."
He crushes whole clusters of grapes, stems and all, and presses them far harder and more roughly than many modern winemakers do – all to extract more flavour and sediment, called lees, which he stirs through the juice during fermentation. "We're moving backwards," Hardie says.
Rather than add sulphur to tame natural yeasts, he allows nature to more or less take its course; the tastes and smells that emerge in the short-term can be immensely awkward.
"When it's kind of good-stinky, you just leave it," Hardie said. "Don't panic." When all goes well, the reward for that awkward adolescence is extraordinary character.
To be sure, Hardie's approach is hardly unique. Natural winemaking has been a dominant international trend for much of the past decade, even if antiquated local regulations have limited it here. He's quick to cite other excellent Ontario wineries, including Pearl Morissette, Foreign Affair Winery and The Old Third, that have made top-flight wines while pushing boundaries, often to the VQA's disdain.
Since that fight over his 2008 chardonnay, Hardie has had some 20 other wines rejected, he said. The sting isn't as great now as it once was. Thanks to an "army of ambassadors," as he calls them – high-profile sommeliers, critics, restaurateurs and wine-lovers – his wines don't lack for buyers. His supporters are some of the biggest names in hospitality.
"You put any of his wine in front of me at any moment of the day and I am thrilled to drink it," said Vanya Filipovic, the influential wine director at Montreal's Joe Beef empire. The likes of Boulud and Per Se, in New York, have featured Hardie's wines on their lists, as do many of Canada's best restaurants. London's prestigious Wine Society wants far more of his wine than Hardie can send, he says.
"It helps you believe in yourself," he says, smiling as he stares out at his ripening vines. "These are places that can buy any wine in the world, and they've chosen yours."
Margit Nellemann and Victor Vesley: Their experiment resulted in the first ever tea grown in Canada
By Rebecca Tucker
Special to The Globe and Mail
This summer, Margit Nellemann and Victor Vesley made history. More than six years after the Vancouver Island couple first broke ground, they launched their Westholme Tea Farm on (appropriately) July 1 – officially making their two acres of land the first-ever tea farm in Canada.
Nellemann and Vesley wanted to grow tea not just because they happen to be particularly fond of it, but because their property – south-facing slopes located in the temperate Cowichan Valley – seemed like it could handle it. Plus, Nellemann grew up on a farm and has a background in the culinary arts, and she was curious about how Vancouver Island's terroir would affect the taste of tea leaves in general, and brewed tea in particular.
As word began to spread that a pair of Canucks were attempting to cultivate tea, interest in the project snowballed. Westholme has welcomed curious visitors from Taiwan, India and China – countries that have been producing tea for millenniums – to their farm. But Nellemann says that tea-growers can be somewhat secretive about their methods and techniques. When combined with the fact that no one in Canada has ever attempted to cultivate tea before, that mystery makes what she and Vesley are doing profoundly experimental.
Call it beginner's luck. There are now 800 tea plants growing on their two-acre Vancouver Island property, with 400 more to be planted next summer. A recent tea-tasting event for 140 held at the Westholme property sold out, and tins of their first tea – a kelpy-tasting, sencha-style green priced at $50 for 10 grams or $150 for 25 grams – has been flying off shelves. The couple hopes to collaborate with local chefs, who – Nellemann hopes – will likely jump at the chance to use what is, essentially, a cultivated ingredient never before seen in professional kitchens. "The idea," Nellemann says, "is for us to become the home of tea culture in Canada."
John Tong: His expertise as a designer is enhancing the concept a restaurant owner brings to him
By Ellen Brait
The Globe and Mail
When you're standing in a John Tong building, admiring the decor, you may not even realize you're looking at the work of the designer of Toronto's trend-setting Drake Hotel. This could be because of the diversity of his projects or because the Toronto-based designer has played a role in so many major projects.
"You cannot compare any of his projects to each other," said Aras Azadian, owner of Barsa Taberna in Toronto, which Tong designed in 2013 and 2014.
"He's always trying to critically pass boundaries and think outside the box. He actually purposefully attempts to stay outside the box all the time. He's not the kind of designer who's trying to fit into the norm of what has worked for other restaurants."
Tong is the creative director and designer at + tongtong, which he founded in 2012 (before that, he co-founded 3rd Uncle Design). He's designed the salon and cocktail bar Her Majesty's Pleasure, the farm-to-table restaurant Cafe Belong, as well as the Drake and the new Drake Devonshire in Prince Edward County.
His work varies wildly in appearance, from the vibrant Barcelona-inspired atmosphere at Barsa Taberna to the elegant feel of Her Majesty's Pleasure. Many of his designs have won or been nominated for various awards.
"I'd never done a hotel before and he'd never done one before so we were kind of the blind leading the blind," said Tong of his work on the first Drake. "We didn't follow any formulas. What we were really trying to do was engage the local community and also draw people's interests internationally."
Tong says that before the Drake, boutique hotels and the restaurants inside them were beautiful but disconnected from their surroundings. When he designed the Drake before it opened in 2004, he and owner Jeff Stober tried to do just the opposite. "Once you arrive, you are automatically tapped into an authentic local scene," he says.
When designing a restaurant, Tong applies this approach to the menu, ensuring his design fits seamlessly with the food. Brad Long, chef and owner of Cafe Belong, and Barsa Taberna owner Azadian agree that Tong is an expert at understanding the concept owners have in mind and adding to it. Cafe Belong, which Long says was initially a "long, rectangular, boring building" now highlights the restaurant's locavore menu with wood detailing and an ornate, twisting green light fixture stretching from one end of the restaurant to the other.
"He not only designed something that is a functioning, workable, livable and enjoyable space, but he translated the crazy person's vision into an actual language," Long says. "It was so joyful to have him understand where I was trying to get to and suddenly he gives you this feeling of trust."
Tong said he also tries to combine all of his experiences when designing a restaurant, as he believes they are "more than a place to eat."
"Hospitality for me has really become a place where so many things converge," he said. "It's not just about food, it's not just about the design. It's really about creating a place which is multifunctional where people can work, eat, play and socialize."
Dennis Prescott: He lives a life of food, thanks to his pursuit of what draws his online followers to recipes
By Jessica Emin
Special to The Globe and Mail
To his 300,000 Instagram followers, he's @DennisthePrescott, dishing out a virtual smorgasbord: burgers oozing cheese, heaping pans of fried chicken and colourful charcuterie spreads. He's more Instagram famous than Vice TV personality/bad boy chef Matty Matheson, a far cry from where he was six years ago: living in Nashville, struggling as a musician, "broker than broke, living off the [McDonald's] dollar menu and KD with butter."
The turnaround came when he did his own take on Julie & Julia: Prescott checked out all the Jamie Oliver cookbooks he could find at the library and cooked them cover to cover in a bid to better feed himself. That's when the food photography began, with simple iPhone photographs.
He learned by studying images by other photographers he loved, experimenting with how light and shadow dance on food, and seeing what online followers were favouriting most.
It took a few years for his account to take off, but now he has analyzed what people are most attracted to; he says it's about taste memory, and it's more likely that people have connections and experiences with a fantastic-looking chocolate cake or grilled cheese than fancier dishes.
Today, Prescott awaits the publication of his first cookbook, Eat Delicious, and lives a life of food. His recognizable, colourful images of what he calls "North American influenced comfort food" have earned him both editorial and advertising photo work with everyone from Food & Wine magazine to Frigidaire.
And although he travels from the southern United States all the way to Kenya, his day-to-day life happens in Moncton, where he starts his mornings at 5:30 a.m. with a run, before settling in to cook, style and photograph all day.
His best reward is when readers and followers send him direct messages with pictures of their take on his ideas and recipes. "Something I made was at the dinner table with that person that night," he says. "That blows my mind."
Fred Morin and David McMillan: They made Montreal's Joe Beef synonymous with top-quality anti-pretension
By Jon Sufrin
Special to The Globe and Mail
There is an undeniable magic to be found in the culinary marriage of high and low: when tinned Spam is as appreciated for its mass-market appeal as natural wine is for its complexity; when Velveeta is as acceptable a condiment as a Calvados reduction; when foie gras – the marquee of hoity-toity French gastronomy – is transformed into a trashy, bacon-and-cheese-stuffed pseudo-KFC Double Down.
Fred Morin, left, and David McMillan
No one in Canada knows this better than Montreal chefs Fred Morin and David McMillan, who flipped the bird to pretentiousness, preciousness and white-tablecloth single-mindedness by opening Joe Beef in a scummy Little Burgundy neighbourhood in 2005.
They were nearly broke at the time, strung out from years of working in high-stress kitchens for other people. Gaining international repute wasn't anywhere near their agenda – they just wanted to cook delicious, old-timey standards such as baked oysters, stewed rabbit and lots of offal. But worldwide recognition did come, because not only are Morin and McMillan exceedingly good at what they do, they are also contagious in their determination to extract and appreciate as much joy from life as the laws of the universe will allow. Last year, Joe Beef was officially recognized on the prestigious world's 50 best restaurants list, which hadn't seen a Canadian mention in years.
Now, with the addition of Joe Beef's two sister venues, Liverpool House and Le Vin Papillon, Rue Notre Dame West is a destination for gastronomes far and wide. And these days, nearly every young artist chef in Canada wants to do what the Joe Beef guys did: Build a world-class restaurant with next to no financial resources. And who could blame them, when Morin and McMillan make it look so easy?
Grant van Gameren: In rejecting compromise in favour of good judgment, he builds restaurants for a new generation
By Chris Nuttal-Smith
Special to The Globe and Mail
For a while there, the prize was anybody's. The old-guard, paper-toque-wearing chef-and-restaurateur corps was in its death throes, along with a good half-century of assumptions around going out for dinner. A new generation of would-be diners – not that they'd ever use as term as fusty as diner – was dying for a few great places to eat and drink. Grant van Gameren's trick was to give the times exactly what they demanded.
At The Black Hoof, the stripped down, pretension-free, offal and charcuterie bar he opened in the fall of 2008 with restaurateur Jen Agg, he combined rigorous technique, a life-consuming work ethos and a bang-on palate with cash-only, no-reservations service and stripped-down decor. In its prime, the place was easily one of Canada's most exciting restaurants. At Bar Isabel, his at once raucous but highly civilized take on Spanish taberna cooking, he recognized that the generation he'd courted with beef-tongue sandwiches and horse tartare was ready for something a little more refined. Even three years after its triumphant opening, it can be hard to find a table at Bar Isabel many nights. At Bar Raval, the painfully beautiful Basque-style pintxos bar he built on exquisite, savoury snacks and swooping oiled mahogany, he poured his heart into the tiniest details, and created one of the world's best drink-and-snack spots along the way.
I haven't yet been to his new place, a Mezcal and Mexican bar in Toronto's Kensington Market (it's still too new), but if I know van Gameren, I already have a good idea what I'll find. The chef-turned-restaurateur has mastered a template for building top-quality independent restaurants on hard work and solid judgment, instead of the far more common compromise and selling out. And so far, at least, he's kept his places exactly in the moment – reading and perfectly sating the new power dining generation's every desire.
Mohamad Fakih: His restaurant expansion plans include hiring Syrian refugees
By Maryam Siddiqi
The Globe and Mail
The company's name may conjure thoughts of a gourmet grocer, but Paramount Fine Foods is a thriving restaurant chain that specializes in Middle Eastern cuisine (try resisting the freshly baked, straight-from-the-wood-fired-oven pita; you will fail). Headquartered in Toronto's Yorkville neighbourhood, Paramount is expanding rapidly – there are currently more than 20 locations in Ontario, plus two Florida locations and 15 more international sites slated to open (one in Pakistan).
And Mohamad Fakih, Paramount's CEO and president, is concerned as much about planting roots in a community as he is about giving back. Earlier this year, when Canada welcomed thousands of Syrian refugees, Fakih, himself an emigrant from Lebanon, worked with job-search service Magnet and Ryerson University's Lifeline Syria Challenge to facilitate the hiring of 100 refugees at the Ontario locations of his restaurants.
Q&A: Jen Agg, restaurateur
Toronto and Montreal
(This interview was condensed and edited.)
What's your desert island drink (other than water)?
Rosé.
If you could eat dinner tonight at one restaurant (other than yours), where would it be?
I could and I probably will, and tonight it will very likely be Foxley.
Fill in the blanks: I'd rather eat an over-boiled egg than eat one little slice of humble pie.
What's one thing you'd fix about food or restaurants in Canada today?
The bar for what diners see as a great restaurant (or even a good one) is a bit low and perpetuates mediocrity, the attitude that we can get away with being "good enough" so we will. I don't like that. Also the rampant sexism and douchebro machismo that is literally everywhere … gotta stay on brand.
Related: a) tipping b) no tipping? Why?
Too complicated an answer for this forum but I am into tipping. Which isn't the popular answer at the moment, although I think you're going to start to see restaurants that tried no tipping reverting fast, as is already happening in New York.
Who is the next big name in Canadian food?
Hmm, I'm gonna say Drake. Bet Frings does a country-wide roll-out in the next couple of years.
The most overrated current trend is:
I dunno, copying other people's stuff and passing it off as your own?
The only cookbook I need is:
Rosé and the internet.
Vegetarians are a) living saints b) a pain in the bum
I do not have either of those extreme feelings about vegetarians.
Best Wednesday night dinner at home meal:
LOL, okay fine … honestly, it's probably savoury oatmeal, do not judge me. Squash and onions sautéed with chili flakes and thyme, nice big slices of Parmesan and a drizzle of olive oil on steel-cut oats topped with almonds for crunch. I eat variations of that a lot.
Give yourself a one-line review and a rating out of four stars:
5 out of 4, I am clearly awesome.
Q&A: David Castellan and Cynthia Leung, chocolatiers and owners of Soma
Toronto
(This interview was condensed and edited.)
What's your desert island drink (other than water)?
David: Coconut water? Too obvious?
Cynthia: Iced Vietnamese coffee. Refreshing and gives you energy to build a deluxe treehouse.
If you could eat dinner tonight at one restaurant, where would it be?
David: Chez Sam in Essaouira, Morocco.
Cynthia: I would really like to try Osteria Francescana in Modena, Italy. We met Massimo at our shop last year and and his approach to food is genuine and his enthusiasm is infectious.
Fill in the blanks:
David: I'd rather stab my leg with a fork than eat coriander.
Cynthia: I'd rather eat a bowl of spicy noodles for breakfast than eat anything sweet.
What's one thing you'd fix about food or restaurants in Canada today?
Cynthia: A living wage and access to health benefits for people who work in restaurants regardless if it's a family restaurant or high-end kitchen. This is an industry that needs to catch up. Designing thoughtfully with acoustical materials and speaker placement so restaurants can pump up the funky tunes and people can still enjoy chatting and hanging out with their buds. I believe this balance can happen.
Related: a) tipping b) no tipping? Why?
David: No tipping – cooks have always been poorly paid. I've witnessed the arcane calculations that need to occur to make sure servers and cooks are getting balanced payouts. So servers and cooks should make a good wage like every other job and have it all reflected in the price – the customer wins by not having to use their brain to calculate tips. Many countries operate successful eating establishments with no tipping (e.g., Japan).
Cynthia: No tipping. This removes the hierarchy between diner and server/cooks and makes for a more genuine relationship. The "tipping moment" is usually laced with awkwardness and drunken math. Diners should be able to fully immerse into the experience and the restaurant can focus on thoughtful service and food. I also prefer paying first, get the nitty gritty out of the way.
Vegetarians are a) living saints b) a pain in the bum
David: We make chocolate so vegetarians are most welcome. Vegans on the other hand …
Cynthia: Pain in the bum-bum. Sorry, veggie buds.
Give yourself a one-line review and a rating out of four stars:
David: Professionally chill and very punny.
Cynthia: Explorer of taste, bright and kooky.
Q&A: Matthew Corrin, CEO of Freshii
Toronto
(This interview was condensed and edited.)
What's your desert island drink (other than water)?
Quad espresso over ice.
If you could eat dinner tonight at one restaurant (other than yours), where would it be?
La Carnita.
Fill in the blanks: I'd rather run 10 kilometres in the Toronto heat than eat Subway.
What's one thing you'd fix about food or restaurants in Canada today?
I'd like to see more superfoods and less grease.
The most overrated current trend is:
$13 juice.
Vegetarians are a) living saints b) a pain in the bum
Living saints.
Best Wednesday night dinner-at-home meal:
Ordering in sushi.
Q&A: Suresh Doss, food writer
Toronto
(This interview was condensed and edited.)
What's your desert island drink (other than water)?
Any fruit juice I can find on the island, with liberal amounts of dark rum.
If you could eat dinner tonight at one restaurant, anywhere in the world, where would it be?
Can Pujol in Ibiza. I had one of the best seafood dinners of my life in Sant Antoni de Portmany.
Fill in the blanks:
I'd rather become a vegetarian than eat at Taco Bell.
What's one thing you'd fix about food or restaurants in Canada today?
Consistency. Restaurants and chefs need to focus on how each plate will taste rather than how it will look on Instagram.
Related: a) tipping b) no tipping? Why?
Tipping for now. We haven't fully determined the full implications of switching over to a no-tipping model.
Who is the next big name in Canadian food?
I'm certain that Rob Gentile and his empire will dominate the country in the next five years.
The most overrated current trend is:
Mediocre soft-serve ice cream dressed with stale carnival toppings.
The only cookbook I need is:
Martha Stewart's Original Classics.
Vegetarians are a) living saints b) a pain in the bum
A pain in the bum.
Best Wednesday night dinner-at-home meal:
Roast chicken or spaghetti bolognese.
Give yourself a one-line review and a rating out of four stars:
3 out of 4 stars. Ditch the fish tacos and pulled pork sandwiches, let me uptown-funk you up with one of my food tours.
Q&A: Dale Mackay, chef at Ayden
Saskatoon, Sask.
(This interview was condensed and edited.)
What's your desert island drink (other than water)?
60-per-cent lemonade, 40-per-cent iced tea.
If you could eat dinner tonight at one restaurant (other than yours), where would it be?
Bar Boulud in New York City. The food and ambience is perfect, plus Daniel has the best hair in the business.
Fill in the blanks: I'd rather be eating a sweet-ass ham sandwich with my son Ayden than eat alone.
What's one thing you'd fix about food or restaurants in Canada today?
The lack of international recognition that Canadian restaurants and chefs get.
Related: a) tipping b) no tipping? Why?
Tipping! It's a needed part of a functioning restaurant to reward all the hard-working staff that put all their efforts into giving a great dining experience.
The most overrated current trend is:
1) Poorly made charcuterie and 2) talking about local and sustainable. We get it, we all do it and it's what you should do as a good operator and chef.
The only cookbook I need is:
Marco Pierre White, White Heat.
Vegetarians are a) living saints b) a pain in the bum
They're people just like you and I; they just don't eat meat.
Give yourself a one-line review and a rating out of four stars:
Well-groomed, boyish good looks and tatted up with a foul tongue – four stars! (Reviewed by general manager Christopher Cho.)
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