To Bymark on Wednesday, to MC an evening for VISA Infinite card holders, an evening starring the three finalists from the television program, Top Chef Canada, and the show’s head judge, Mark McEwan. Not having a tv, I had missed the popular series but caught up quickly last week through the miracle of the internet. Besides, I had eaten these chefs’ food before. Connie DeSousa is co-chef and co-owner of Charcut Roast House in Calgary, a place renowned above all for the quality of its meats and house-made charcuterie. Before opening Charcut, Connie competed for team Alberta at the Culinary Olympics in Germany in 2004, cooked in Cologne for a year then moved to California where she opened a restaurant in the St. Regis hotel in San Francisco and also worked with Alice Waters at Chez Panisse in Berkeley. Rob Rossi spent the last couple of years as Executive Chef of the Mercatto restaurants in Toronto, raising the standards of the homespun Italian cooking to deliciously unexpected heights. He’s in the process of opening his own first restaurant, called Bestellen, on College Street at Rusholme – it should be ready by Christmas. Dale MacKay, the ultimate victor of Top Chef Canada, worked for six years in Gordon Ramsay restaurants around the world before taking over as Executive Chef of Lumière and DB Moderne in Vancouver. When Daniel Boulud closed them down, MacKay opened his own restaurant Ensemble. For the last two years, he competed at Gold Medal Plates in Vancouver and won silver (he is an intensely competitive chef). He’s back this year and will be a strong contender for gold on November 4.
Each of these chefs contributed a canapé to the pre-dinner Champagne scrum up in the bar and an appetizer to the meal downstairs. The main course and dessert were courtesy of Bymark’s own chef, Brooke McDougall. Wines were generously provided by Lifford, the wine agency, and introduced (though not actually chosen) by the brilliant Melissa Stunden, a gifted sommelier who now works for the agency.
Rob Rossi got the ball rolling with a dish that looked delicate but packed a punch in terms of vibrant flavours. He started with some big raw scallops from the Bay of Fundy – plump and juicy with that creamy, almost sticky texture raw scallops have – cured them for a quick half hour in a dry mixture of salt and sugar, citrus, coriander, black pepper and bay. Then he rinsed them clean, dried them and diced them into trembling opalescent chunks. Beneath them was a green streak of peppery, citric arugula purée that he made by sweating some shallots and garlic in a pan, throwing in the arugula with a little oil and lemon juice and then blitzing it to an emulsion. He finished the dish with a little dressing of meyer lemon and olive oil, a pinch of smoked Maldon salt, some tiny fried garlic crisps and a scattering of basil cress. The final flourish was bottarga – the dried and pressed roe of Mediterranean grey mullets – which he grated over the top with a microplane to make gorgeous intense little flakes of flavour. I thought it was a brilliant dish. Scallop is always rich but raw scallop seems even more so because of the texture and the tangy purée and dressing brought out the sweetness in the protein. The wine match was spot on – a creamy2009 Sauvignon Blanc from Craggy Range Te Muna Road in New Zealand’s Martinborough area – not as tart as a Marlborough SB and richer, with the body to match the sticky weight of the scallops.
Dale MacKay prepared our second dish, using ingredients he brought with him from B.C. – a perfect, juicy little fillet of baked black cod that looked like a white building block in a topaz-coloured Thai pork broth. There were pea shoots and bok choy and smoked maitaki mushrooms in that heady consommé, perfumed with kaffir lime, lemon grass and a trace of chili oil. The flavour was wickedly layered and exotic and people could be heard moaning with pleasure as they tasted it. The wine wasn’t so happy. Mitchell Watervale 2010 Riesling from Australia’s Clare Valley tasted fresh and pleasing before the soup arrived but, together, it was as if that blithe, innocent Australian child had woken up in an opium den in Thailand surrounded by shadowed people in masks and incense and cellos… never to be seen again.
Connie DeSousa created the third dish – a radical leap into an entirely different style of food. Charcut is a real nose-to-tail shrine and Connie and her co-chef, John Jackson, take pride in breaking down and using up the entire animals that they buy. The largest beasts on their shopping list are the farmed bison up in Grand Prairie and for this dinner they used the bison’s heart and a lot of pork to make massive, hearty smoked kielbasa sausages that came to the table on platters, served family style for people to help themselves. Under the sausages was Connie’s take on sauerkraut – shaved raw fennel pickled with caraway – and a rather good grainy mustard made by a Calgary company called Brassica. The sausage was excellent and there were so many that half the guests (including me) asked for and were given doggie bags. The wine was Piovene Porto Godi merlot Fra I Broli 2008 from the Veneto – a classy, ripe, demure Merlot that played well with the sweet juices of the sausage. I would have liked something bigger and rougher with more acidic structure – a rustic Sangiovese maybe – but I suppose that would have been fairly predictable. A good proportion of the room approved the Merlot match.
The main course was classic Mark McEwan – gorgeous short rib braised in white wine beside a garnet-coloured slice of beef striploin with soft polenta, a spoonful of tomato sauce that had been made from oven-dried tomatoes and was textured halfway between a concassé and a purée, and the very last of the year’s fava beans. What wasn’t classic McEwan was the fact that the beef was Canadian. For as long as I’ve eaten Mark McEwan’s food – going back to Pronto, circa 1988 – he has been the champion of USDA beef. Last summer, however, he and Brooke McDougall did an event where they compared USDA Prime with grass-fed beef from Prince Edward Island. McEwan was so impressed that he went out to PEI to see for himself and found a great little operation with a dozen or so small farms raising grass-fed, hormone-free cattle which were briefly finished, just before slaughter, on potatoes. Well, what else would it be on PEI? McEwan decided to switch to this beef in his restaurants and at his store and he hasn’t switched back. His kitchens still use USDA beef for burgers and there’s a USDA cowboy ribeye on Bymark’s menu, but otherwise it’s now Canadian beef for Mark. Last night’s showing explains why – a delicious dish, honest and hearty and beautifully matched with a 2007 Bordeaux blend from Hawkes Bay, New Zealand, the legendary Te Mata Coleraine.
Then there was cheese – the cider-washed Le Guillame Tell from Quebec with a subtle aroma of apple and mushroom; sweet, gentle Niagara Gold from the Upper Canada Cheese Company; and a firm, forthright Avonlea Clothbound Cheddar from Prince Edward Island – in honour of the beef, presumably. Melissa Stunden poured a smashing young single-vineyard vintage port with this – Quinta do Noval Silval 2005 – that surprised everyone by its precocity.
The finale was a miniature chocolate and peanut butter torte with concord grape ice and crisp vanilla tuille that was gone in a flash.
Apparently the second season of Top Chef Canada finished shooting in September and is now in the editing salon, ready to appear on tv screens next March. The nation is holding its breath.