{"id":1574,"date":"2011-10-21T10:23:51","date_gmt":"2011-10-21T15:23:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jameschatto.com\/?p=1574"},"modified":"2012-05-01T10:13:43","modified_gmt":"2012-05-01T15:13:43","slug":"top-chef-canada-stars-cook-for-visa","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jameschatto.com\/?p=1574","title":{"rendered":"Top Chef Canada stars cook for Visa"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Mark McEwan, arbiter of talent<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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\u2019s 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\u2019 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\u2019s in the process of opening his own first restaurant, called Bestellen, on College Street at Rusholme \u2013 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 Lumi\u00e8re 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\u2019s back this year and will be a strong contender for gold on November 4.<\/p>\n

Each of these chefs contributed a canap\u00e9 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 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 \u2013 plump and juicy with that creamy, almost sticky texture raw scallops have \u2013 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. \u00a0Beneath them was a green streak of peppery, citric arugula pur\u00e9e 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 \u2013 the dried and pressed roe of Mediterranean grey mullets \u2013 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 pur\u00e9e and dressing brought out the sweetness in the protein. The wine match was spot on \u2013 a creamy2009 Sauvignon Blanc from Craggy Range Te Muna Road in New Zealand\u2019s Martinborough area \u2013 not as tart as a Marlborough SB and richer, with the body to match the sticky weight of the scallops.<\/p>\n

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Dale MacKay prepared our second dish, using ingredients he brought with him from B.C. \u2013 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 consomm\u00e9, 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\u2019t so happy. Mitchell Watervale 2010 Riesling from Australia\u2019s 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\u2026 never to be seen again.<\/p>\n

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\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Connie DeSousa created the third dish \u2013 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\u2019s 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\u2019s take on sauerkraut \u2013 shaved raw fennel pickled with caraway \u2013 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 \u2013 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 \u2013 a rustic Sangiovese maybe \u2013 but I suppose that would have been fairly predictable. A good proportion of the room approved the Merlot match.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The main course was classic Mark McEwan \u2013 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 concass\u00e9 and a pur\u00e9e, and the very last of the year\u2019s fava beans. What wasn\u2019t classic McEwan was the fact that the beef was Canadian. For as long as I\u2019ve eaten Mark McEwan\u2019s food \u2013 going back to Pronto, circa 1988 \u2013 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\u2019t switched back. His kitchens still use USDA beef for burgers and there\u2019s a USDA cowboy ribeye on Bymark\u2019s menu, but otherwise it\u2019s now Canadian beef for Mark. Last night\u2019s showing explains why \u2013 a delicious dish, honest and hearty and beautifully matched with a 2007 Bordeaux blend from Hawkes Bay, New Zealand, the legendary Te Mata Coleraine.<\/p>\n

Then there was cheese \u2013 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 \u2013 in honour of the beef, presumably. Melissa Stunden poured a smashing young single-vineyard vintage port with this \u2013 Quinta do Noval Silval 2005 \u2013 that surprised everyone by its precocity.<\/p>\n

The finale was a miniature chocolate and peanut butter torte with concord grape ice and crisp vanilla tuille that was gone in a flash.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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\u2019s 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. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[91,94,1],"tags":[506,510,508,507,179,509],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jameschatto.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1574"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jameschatto.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jameschatto.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jameschatto.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jameschatto.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1574"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/jameschatto.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1574\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1966,"href":"https:\/\/jameschatto.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1574\/revisions\/1966"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jameschatto.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1574"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jameschatto.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1574"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jameschatto.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1574"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}