Jamie Kennedy Restaurant
9 Church St., Toronto, 416-362-1957. Dinner for two with wine, tax and tip, $180.
I have been in a relationship with Jamie Kennedy for a long time, 25 years to be precise. It's a special relationship, although it is one-sided. I follow him around and pay him to feed me. Then I write about it.
Jamie and I are like a fabulous tenor and an opera critic, a successful artist and an art critic. We've never met socially, we do not know each other, but 25 years is a long time -- long enough for a fan to know certain things about the star.
For one, Kennedy is a chef with his feet planted firmly in the terroir, the land, the soil. Ever since I first found him cooking with his friend Michael Stadtlander at the (then) new Scaramouche in 1980, he has been trying to cook local, fresh and organic. For Kennedy, it's never just about the food on the table, but always about how it got there and where it came from. When he started Knives and Forks, a consortium of chefs and farmers promoting organic food, some thought he was a crackpot. Now organic food is in Loblaws and everyone is trying to catch up. Kennedy let me down for a few years.
After setting the town on fire at Scaramouche and then wowing us at his own place, Palmerston, until 1994, he retreated from the restaurant fray and ran his restaurant in the Royal Ontario Museum. It was lovely but a) had a limited menu and b) served only lunch.
As a loyal fan, I followed Jamie when he became more accessible by opening Jamie Kennedy Wine Bar on Church Street in 2003. The old Jamie was present in the big flavours and the flawless technique, but he was painting on a small canvas -- literally. The wine bar offers small plates (for smallish bucks) in a purposefully casual setting and, worst of all, doesn't take reservations. Even for Kennedy, I do not wait.
It seemed a shame to me that one of our best chefs spent 10 years not having a proper restaurant to showcase his cooking, so imagine my delight at his new Jamie Kennedy Restaurant -- which takes reservations! -- in the former party space adjacent to the wine bar.
The restaurant is very Kennedy, the result of a mature aesthetic at work. One wall holds a huge photograph of his own vineyard in Prince Edward County, another a blow-up of an old handwritten menu (his, of course). It's a textured room, quietly fine, rich with wooden grace notes: oak tables, bentwood chairs, trim made of long pieces of wood pressed together and lacquered. And it is quiet, thanks to large panels of layered felt put on walls to absorb sound.
Who but Kennedy would title an appetizer Streets of Toronto? Our server explains: "It bugs Jamie that Toronto has a bylaw stating that only hot dogs are legal to sell on the street, so this appetizer is a suggestion from him." And what a suggestion: a fab house-made fennel-scented sausage in a pile of onion jam; a tiny perfect pizza topped with green tomato and roasted and raw red tomato; and deep-fried perch atop miniature frites, with splendid tartar sauce.
He dresses a plate of red, green and yellow tomatoes in oil made sweet with fresh tomato juice. His crab bisque is all crab, no cream. His lobster jelly is an iconoclastic parfait of moist fresh lobster "swimming" in jelly made of transparent agar (a seaweed derivative). It's only the beginning and already we are in his power, thanks also to grilled flatbreads (built on a sweet potato base) dipped in tomato and olive butter.
In Portugal, cataplana refers to the large, metal clamshell-shaped pan that is used for steaming and braising, and also to the dish one cooks in it. Kennedy's cataplana is the traditional Portuguese braised clams with chorizo, white wine and tomato, so deftly rendered that having hoovered the sweet clams, one cannot resist drinking the delicate sauce.
As a chef, Kennedy has always had a broad reach: He references the slow-food movement with slow-grilled rib-eye of beef and slow-roasted potatoes, both of which have more flavour than one would have thought possible, thanks in no small measure to the deep, dark brown sauce, strong with the scent of fresh chanterelles. A proper brown sauce (demi-glace) comes from the classic French kitchen, to which Kennedy is no stranger:
He served his apprenticeship under the master Herbert Sonzogni at the Windsor Arms Hotel during its heyday in 1977-78. Sonzogni's tutelage in the cuisine of Escoffier is evident today in Kennedy's roast galantine of Cornish hen, a complex creation with a heart of moist chicken and a tasty stuffing. How clever to add the New World (fresh corn and lima succotash) to the Old.
By this point in dinner, it's clear: Here is a chef at the top of his game, a wizard who needed a full-on restaurant to strut his stuff. Night falls and our server pulls the curtains, diaphanous sheers in red, brown and bone that cover the big open windows on Church Street. Magic is afoot here, in the dark chocolate soufflé served with crème anglaise and purées of raspberry and blackcurrant. In the ultracreamy gratin of summer fruit. In peach shortcake with an impossibly fragile biscuit base. In sugar pear tart fresh from the oven, all butter crust and intense pear.
It is all so fabulous we can almost forgive the service error that brings the pear tart 15 minutes after the other desserts. Kennedy is the king, his cooking the best it's ever been, but the service needs work: Our table was booked for 7:30 and we waited in the bar till 8 to get it. At which point, I said (loudly): "I don't want to carry my wine to the table." The server failed to notice, and we had to carry our own wine. Which isn't normally part of the deal in an upmarket restaurant.
Nor, with such splendour on every plate, is having to fill your own water glass.