Category: food

Restaurant Profile – Indus Junction

induswindowIndus Junction
811 Queen Street West
647-428-7119

If I say “let’s go for Indian food,” to any of my friends, their first thought is going to be buffet, where we all fill our plates over and over again with passable but not especially memorable food. Sure, there are some upscale Indian restaurants in Toronto, but even there, the focus is on traditional, with the compartmentalized plates reminiscent of a cafeteria. Like so many ethnic cuisines that are now part of the culture of our city, we have this idea that Indian food must be traditional. But India as a culture has embraced the 21st century, and there’s no reason why Indian food can’t be modernized as well.

Enter Alka and Poonam Dhir, whose month-old Queen Street restaurant Indus Junction serves up beautiful Indian food, laced with authentic flavours and techniques, but with a modern twist. It is the junction where east meets west, old meets new, and the traditionally male-dominated industry gets a feminine touch that is as breath-taking as a jewelled sari.

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Culinary Mis-Adventures

Giving props where props are due, I’ve got a lot of respect for Loblaws and their President’s Choice line for opening up new gastronomic horizons for the good people of our country and our neighbours to the south. Without the folks from PC offering us everything from peanut sauce to cheesecake, mango dressing to balsamic vinegar, we’d likely still be a society in which meat and two veg was the order of the day. President’s Choice has allowed Canadians to expand their palates and learn about the food of other cultures without shrinking their wallets.

I buy a lot of PC products, and have been known to get ornery as a bear when various items that I like but which sell poorly are discontinued – hello! Wasabi rice chips!!

However, the one thing President’s Choice really doesn’t do well – at least to my taste – is their prepared foods. Their chana masala is bland. Their fish pie lacking in fish, their pad thai is a glommy clomp of noodles that tastes of ketchup.

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Is Something Fishy?

This article is from last week, but I’ve had it bookmarked because I really wanted to talk about it. It needed some thinking first though, some pondering. I’m still not sure how I feel about it.

I stopped eating imported shrimp many years ago after reading one of the many books by Dr. Vandana Shiva in which she details how shrimp farms in India and Thailand are destroying the local ecosystems.

To operate effectively, shrimp farmers destroy mangrove swamps to create a flat, shallow area underwater – conditions in which shrimp thrive. This allows them to harvest the shrimp by trawling.

However, the mangrove swaps are home to many sea creatures whose habitats are destroyed and trawling is indiscriminate – anything in the way of the trawler – including thousands of sea turtles – gets scooped up.

The removal of the mangrove swamps also removes a layer of protection against tidal waves caused by tsunamis. It is widely believed that the Tsunami of 2004 would have done considerably less damage were it not for the shrimp farms that lined the coast of Thailand. Shrimp farms also cause seawater to leach into nearby groundwater, ruining other crops, such as rice.

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Hello Alphanso!

Look what I have… All the way from India, aboard a British Airways flight. 6 whole luscious, juicy, much-coveted Alphanso mangoes.

Okay… now there’s only 5.

Quite possibly the best mangoes in the world, definitely the best in North America, available for only a few short weeks. Actually, I advise my readers not to seek these out, because once you have one, regular old supermarket mangoes will be dead to you. You’ll never be able to eat another one of those hard, yellow woody things.

We went across town yesterday with the sole purpose of bringing home a box of these babies. The flesh is dark orange, juicy and sweet. They’re smooth, melting away to the consistency of purée in the mouth. They’re so fragrant, you can smell them through box and all the paper. All are perfectly ripe.

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Oyster Boy – A Down East Difference

oysterplateOyster Boy
872 Queen Street West
416-534-3432
Dinner for two with wine or beer, plus all taxes and tip: $100

I’ve never been a fan of claiming you know about something because you’ve lived in close proximity to where it became popular. I once worked as a barista in a tourist area where a customer dissed my cappuccino because, “we’re from Seattle, so, you know, we KNOW coffee.” Apparently just by standing in the original Starbucks people are able to absorb absolutely everything there is to know about the beans, the production and the roasting of coffee. The same goes for people who have lived in London, England, and claim an expert-level knowledge of Indian food.

So it makes me feel like a bit of a hypocrite to write a review of a seafood restaurant and pull out the old “I’m from Nova Scotia, so I know seafood” line, but if the cliché fits, you’ve got to wear it. See, we made two visits to Oyster Boy on Queen Street West; one with another Bluenoser who had a similar opinion of the food, and once with some friends from Moscow for whom many of the dishes on the menu were a completely new experience. Seafood appears to be a matter of perspective.

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If this is the Gospel of Food, Maybe that Explains Why I’m Not Religious

You know how you can go through life believing and trusting someone until you catch them, maybe not in an outright lie, but in a tiny fib, or an omission, and then everything after that is tainted with confusion as you try to determine just how honest they’re being?

Thus is my relationship with author Barry Glassner and his book The Gospel of Food.

Glassner attempts to debunk a variety of theories and commonly held opinions and beliefs about food and eating, and for the most part, he writes a well-thought-out argument in which he supports his claims. When it suits him. That is, he tends not to bring up any documentation that might refute his claims, which makes me question not just the issues in dispute, but everything he writes.

I can agree with his opening claim that people who enjoy what they eat have more joyful lives overall, as opposed to people who deny themselves real food on the pretense of health or dieting. In the chapter False Prophets he references writer Emily Green who has written against non-fat dairy products and similar items which she refers to as “nonundelows” for their prefixes of non-, un- de- or low-; foods that have been modified to have their nutritional value, fat, calories etc., removed.

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Caving to the Craving

I didn’t, but man, it was tough.

Something happens to my brain in May. New produce starts appearing and my brain decides it is bored with those same old apples, oranges, pears and bananas. There is “summer” fruit in the supermarkets, imported of course, and it taunts me so very much.

I almost bought a hunk of watermelon today, but thought better of it and tore myself away. I knew it must have travelled from California and was probably bland and watery and tasteless . Then I fondled peaches, some imported muskmelon and peered sceptically at strawberries. I wanted them all, just not these ones. I wanted local produce, picked at the peak of freshness and sold to me by a cheery farmer. Hey Californians – does the fruit there taste bland and nasty or is it the travelling that makes it so unappealing? I mean, if I was in Cali, this would be “local” produce.

There will be strawberries in a few weeks. Raspberries after that. Some early blueberries maybe. Then apricots, peaches, melons, oh my. But each melon must have its time, and May is not melon time. May is, unfortunately, not time for anything, but those same apples, pears and bananas.

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If you Can’t Stand the Heat

Bill Buford hurts my head. That’s really my first thought when I try to size up the book Heat, An Amateur’s Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany.

He hurts my head because he may well be obsessive-compulsive, and the book is really the literary equivalent of a man obsessed, grabbing the reader by the hand and dragging them off on some wild goose chase in search of knowledge that no one cares about. Well, except Bill Buford.

I’m guessing that most people picked this book up because of Buford’s links to celebrity chef Mario Batali. Buford convinces the chef to give him what is basically an apprenticeship (Bill works for free to learn the ropes) in his flagship restaurant Babbo, and the writer documents his journey through the back of house. There are a few dirt-digging scenes to keep the Batali fans amused; one describes Batali digging through the garbage bin and pulling up celery tops and peelings, insisting they can be used for a soup; but the story is ultimately about Buford himself.

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Sunday Brunch – beerbistro

beerbistro
18 King Street East
416-861-9872
Three course brunch for two with all taxes and tip: $90

There’s an old cliché about the difference between night and day, but I’ve actually found a good example for which to apply it. I guess you could say I’m one of those “sensitive types”, or maybe my hearing is shot from too many industrial concerts in the 90s, but I hate, hate, hate loud restaurants. All that clinking of cutlery and loud music and raucous laughter. When you’re out for a quiet dinner or actually want to talk to the people you’re with, many restaurants are just not conducive to that situation.

Thus, I’ve become a bruncher. Even though I know how kitchen staff across the city, yea, around the world, hate the concept of getting up early after a night of busy service to poach eggs for those too intimidated to do it themselves, I really do prefer the usually quiet solitude of brunch over dinner.

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Totally Fun

I have a friend who is a music journalist. Over the years, she has become quite respected in her field and is often asked to give quotes and interviews on certain bands or music-industry-related issues. She once told me that she refuses to do any interviews for print media, and will only do radio or television, preferably live. This is not, as I had joked to her, that she thought especially highly of herself, but rather that she was frustrated with her words being used out of context in print. Radio and TV allowed her to have more control over how her comments were used. And remember, she is a print journalist herself.

Which makes me wonder if they offer a course at journalism school called “How to make your subjects look like idiots through the wonders of selective editing.” Because the Globe and Mail interview I did is up, and man, did they ever do a fantastic job at making me look like an airhead. (At least in the online version you’re all spared the scary photo that makes me look like I have no neck.)

But, just to set the record straight, here are some “corrections”…

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