{"id":913,"date":"2011-01-07T19:58:07","date_gmt":"2011-01-08T00:58:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jameschatto.com\/?p=913"},"modified":"2012-05-01T10:19:29","modified_gmt":"2012-05-01T15:19:29","slug":"marc-thuets-french-food-my-way","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/jameschatto.com\/?p=913","title":{"rendered":"Marc Thuet’s French Food My Way"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Marc Thuet - French Food My Way<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Over the years, many chefs have thrilled me with their cooking but only a handful of them have consistently surprised<\/em> me. Off the top of my head, the list would consist of Michael Stadtl\u00e4nder, Greg Couillard, Mitsuhiro Kaji and Marc Thuet. I have eaten Marc\u2019s food dozens of times since I first tasted it in 1993, at Centro, where he had just taken over as Executive Chef after four years as Michael Bonacini\u2019s sous. He stayed there until 2002 and I never knew what to expect. Some nights he\u2019d come out and ask \u201cDo you wanna play?\u201d and then he would send out something miles away from the restaurant\u2019s standard menu \u2013 a dish of pig\u2019s trotter slow-braised almost to jelly and layered with persimmon, perhaps, or a little pastry filled with molten M\u00fcnster cheese, or (so unexpectedly) sushi topped with foie gras and icewine jelly.<\/p>\n

After that came two triumphant years at The Fifth (I voted it the best restaurant in Toronto during his stay, as I had done a couple of years earlier when Didier Leroy was chef), then a brief stay at Rosewater Supper Club (he was gone before I had a chance to taste his work there). And then he settled into the property on King Street West, next door to Susur Lee\u2019s restaurants. There were still surprises. No one cooks game better than Marc Thuet and the properly aged and hung game he procured for off-menu dinners was the best ever tasted in Toronto \u2013 at least in the modern era. When he reinvented the place as a bistro he revived recipes learned from his grandmother in Alsace \u2013 awesome choucroute and cassoulet \u2013 dishes, he told me, that took days to prepare from scratch. But there were also dishes that astonished with their delicacy and discipline, almost a Japanese aesthetic, that reminded us that Thuet had started his career as an apprentice at The Dorchester hotel in London under the great Anton Mosimann.<\/p>\n

The room\u2019s last incarnation was as Conviction, with Thuet employing former convicts as kitchen and front-of-house staff, the whole socio-culinary experiment filmed as a reality television show. This time the big surprise was Thuet\u2019s gift as a teacher. He didn\u2019t look the part \u2013 big and burley as a biker, arms covered in tattoos, movie star shades worn on top of his dyed golden curls; and he didn\u2019t sound the part \u2013 the basso profundo growl still showing a heavy Alsatian accent, effing and blinding with every other word. But two or three of the raw recruits managed to stay the course and one, I know, has since opened a bistro of his own.<\/p>\n

TV tends to lead to a book deal in this shallow age, and here it is: Marc Thuet\u2019s French Food My Way<\/em> (Viking Canada, $39). Many of the favourite dishes from his restaurants are featured, and if the snippets of accompanying text don\u2019t quite sound like Marc talking it\u2019s only because his editors have weeded out the cuss words from a personal patois that normally puts Captain Haddock to shame.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a thrill to find the recipes for dishes I\u2019ve loved in his restaurants \u2013 quail consomm\u00e9, choucroute, cassoulet, roasted pumpkin soup with poached bone marrow and white truffle (no one has ever accused Thuet of shying away from rich textures). The big question, of course, is how well do they translate to the page. Consider his take on tarte tatin (page 148). All the necessary information is there, and anyone who knew how to time a caramel sauce and pack the apple would have a pretty easy time doing it justice. But a cook who lacked experience or instinct? I\u2019m not so sure.<\/p>\n

The best thing about the book is the insight it gives into Thuet\u2019s culinary mind. These are the things that make him tick, the ingredients that matter to him, the background techniques he learned in Alsace and London, the flavours he found in Canada. I\u2019m not sure about the pictures \u2013 there are plenty of them, which is great, but they lie a tad flat on the paper. Nevertheless, I shall be putting this volume on the shelf reserved for books from which I intend to actually cook, some day, when there\u2019s time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Over the years, many chefs have thrilled me with their cooking but only a handful of them have consistently surprised me. Off the top of my head, the list would consist of Michael Stadtl\u00e4nder, Greg Couillard, Mitsuhiro Kaji and Marc Thuet. I have eaten Marc\u2019s food dozens of times since I first tasted it in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[102,1],"tags":[277,276],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/jameschatto.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/913"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/jameschatto.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/jameschatto.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jameschatto.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jameschatto.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=913"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/jameschatto.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/913\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":916,"href":"http:\/\/jameschatto.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/913\/revisions\/916"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/jameschatto.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=913"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jameschatto.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=913"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jameschatto.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=913"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}