4 
FOIE GRAS
According to the culinary gospel of chef Normand Laprise, a restaurant freezer is suited to storing berries in their seasonal prime, ice cream, and sorbet but nothing more—not even a tub of fond blanc or demi-glace—and so his menu at Toqué! in Montreal is vulnerable to the vagaries of market and season more than any other I know. There is, however, one item listed on it that has not changed a whit since that happy day back in 1993 that Toqué! first opened its doors on Rue Saint-Denis. Price aside, it did not change through the subsequent renovations that saw the original street-front kitchen move downstairs, or the expansion into an adjacent space that saw the one-time forty-seat restaurant grow to accommodate sixty and then eighty diners. And it was still on the menu after 2004, when Toqué! decamped to an all-new and far more spacious site on Place Jean-Paul-Riopelle. So it now seems safe to say that as long as there is a Toqué! there will be foie gras chaud “fraîchement Toqué!”
“What is foie gras chaud ‘fraîchement Toqué!’?” I asked the waiter when I first spotted it on the menu 1993.
“‘Fraîchement Toqué!’ means the inspiration of the chef,” he replied. “It’s what he feels like doing.”
“And what does he feel like doing tonight?”
“I don’t know,” the waiter said, with a smile and a shrug. “Chef changes his mind all the time.”
This was intriguing. The word toqué is not to be confused with toque, the name for the tall, formal pleated paper hat once favoured by French chefs. Add an accent to the hat and you get something completely different: a patois expression that means, well, crazy. So, if you want to know what foie gras chaud “fraîchement Toqué!” means and the chef is too mad to tell anyone about it, you have no choice but to order it. And while I do not remember exactly how Laprise did it that night twenty years ago, I do recall the moment, vividly, right down to where I was sitting in the restaurant and who I was with, because the experience was so very poignant. The table was near the back of the room, I was dining with my mother—and at first bite it suddenly struck home for the first time that I had endured a deprived childhood. Twenty-five years on earth and I had never yet tasted hot seared foie gras! Mercifully there had been foie gras terrines aplenty, and naturally, plenty of foie gras mousse too, but I had never experienced the stuff in its hot, glorious apotheosis, with its melted fat coursing luxuriously over my tongue bite after bite so exquisitely that medium-fat smoked meat would forever after seem like melba toast. Those first two perfectly seared hot slabs of the exquisite stuff set me off on a whole new life course. And ever since, I have wanted to know what foie gras chaud “fraîchement Toqué!” might be at any particular moment pretty much continuously.
So I keep checking whenever I can. Thus I can tell you authoritatively that Laprise has of late been preoccupied with saucing his seared foie gras with the light, fruity, and mildly acidic counterbalance of pear water. Picture, for example, a thick slice of hot foie gras in a pool of the liquid studded with halved ground cherries, small cubes of jellied honey, braised baby turnips, and at the side of the plate a small heap of seasoning—salt mixed with sugar, powdered citrus, and sumac—left to the diner to apply according to taste. Another recent time pear jelly, hazelnut oil, and begonia petals made their way into the equation. Another time Laprise ran with sliced poached pear, small Quebec-sourced morels, and a sprinkling of crumbled toasted pistachios. I remember lentils once appearing on the plate. I could go on and on.
But all that now matters of his preparation in 1993 is that back then, while other chefs across the country sensible enough to be cooking with foie gras were still turning to major foreign producers like France and Hungary, Laprise was instead using homegrown product from what was then a nascent Quebec industry. Palmex, in Carignan, which has been the favoured Toqué! supplier for more than a decade, was not founded until 1998. Le Canard Goulu, in Saint-Apollinaire, which is the preferred source for the finest restaurants in Quebec City, did not open for business until 1997. In 1993 Annette and Élisé François, future founders of Aux Champs d’Élisé, of Marieville, were then just experimenting with moulard ducks as a sideline to their dairy farm. Of all the big Quebec players in the foie gras industry, only Élevages Périgord was open for business when Laprise started serving fresh foie gras at his restaurant. But the fledgling Quebec industry that Laprise worked so hard to promote now produces two hundred tons of foie gras a year—roughly one percent of world supply—and much of it is of such high quality that it is favoured by innumerable top chefs stateside, among them Thomas Keller, Daniel Boulud, and Mario Batali. Even Charlie Trotter preferred it—before he went over to the dark side and stopped serving foie gras in 2002. They all correctly recognize the corn-fed Quebec product to be superior to its rice-mash-fattened cousin from New York State, whether its purpose is to be seared, salt-cured, made into a terrine, incorporated into a mousse, cooked sous-vide, grilled, roasted whole à la Eckart Witzigmann, or what have you.
One of the worst things about being a restaurant critic is all those restaurants people heartily recommend to you that turn out to be really awful. Breaking the news can be awkward. Enduring the meal to prove your point of view is akin to torture. So that very rare occasion when a new restaurant actually lives up to its advance billing is a singularly happy occasion. Surpassing what has been promised is all but unheard of. But one glorious evening back in the winter of 2001, this happened to me not once, but twice in the same evening.
I was in Vancouver. I had an eight o’clock reservation for Rob Feenie’s Lumière, a first visit there that would ultimately lead to me eating at least a dozen courses and staggering off to my hotel convinced that I had just eaten at the best restaurant in the country. The extraordinary thing about that evening was that I had almost cancelled, because I did not want to leave the restaurant I had visited right beforehand, where I had met a friend for pre-dinner cocktails, been talked into a quick snack, and after a single taste decided it was impossible that I could do any better across town. That restaurant was Vancouver restaurateur Jack Evrensel’s Ouest (which later became West, so as to stop confusing the locals). The chef was David Hawksworth, who was then freshly repatriated from the U.K. and hereabouts unknown. The dish he had put in front of me was an early version of something you still find on his menu today at his eponymous Hawksworth Restaurant, at the Rosewood Hotel Georgia: parfait of Quebec foie gras and chicken livers with apple jelly.
The dish was flawless, from the thinness of the pork back fat that wrapped the parfait, to its texture, to the temperature at which it was served, to its hue, which was uniform from centre to edge, without the faintest trace of oxidation, as if the slice had just been cut from a freshly opened terrine. Which was impossible, because it was glued to the plate by a shallow pool of set apple jelly. Looking back now, after having happily eaten so much more of Hawksworth’s food, I realize that this one dish handily encapsulated his culinary philosophy—which, simply put, is built on a foundation of impeccable European training, but rendered contemporary with a deft, lightening rethink and a colourful presentation. When you have that plate these days at Hawksworth, the jelly is from green apple, edible flowers enliven the picture, and a tuft of foie gras candyfloss sits off to one side. But never mind the trimmings; it was the mousse or parfait that had moved me, so I followed up with a little investigation as to where Hawksworth had picked up the recipe.
To begin at the beginning, Hawksworth was born in Vancouver to English parents who shortly afterwards went their separate ways. His childhood was punctuated by a number of moves back and forth across the pond. At the tender age of six, Hawksworth became the first pupil in the history of his primary school in York, England, to be allowed to leave the premises at lunchtime for the more salubrious offerings of home. It would be appealing to put this down to the child’s precociously refined palate, but alas, the facts are different: “I hated the school. It was so archaic, so regimented. I had culture shock. I refused to eat the food.” Both Hawksworth’s mother and maternal grandmother were good cooks, making everything from scratch. His uncle Clive was a professional chef, at the Connaught Rooms, a posh banquet facility on Great Queen Street in Covent Garden. “He was a very charismatic, interesting guy,” Hawksworth recalls. “I remember visiting him there once and he said to me, ‘Would you like something to eat?’ He brought me this beef tenderloin and I sat and ate in his office. I’ll never forget that piece of beef.” It had been dry-aged to meltingly tender and flavour-intensifying perfection. Back in Vancouver, as a young teenager in search of a summer job, Hawksworth did as so many kids do and turned to the restaurant industry, washing dishes in a fish-and-chip shop. Soon enough, his responsibilities included peeling potatoes. One thing led to another: when he left high school, well aware that “he couldn’t sit still in an office,” he returned instinctively to what he knew, but this time secured a position in a proper kitchen—at the Beach House in Stanley Park. Hawksworth warmed to the marginal eccentricity of the kitchen staff and he enjoyed the absence of routine. “Every day was different.” Surrounded by real chefs, he soon aspired to join their ranks. He made inquiries about cooking school but deemed that “too expensive.” Chef Frank Abbinante told his young commis to pursue a proper apprenticeship.
His first was at Le Crocodile, under the esteemed Michel Jacob, godfather of French cuisine in Vancouver. Umberto Menghi fulfilled the same leading role for local Italian cuisine, and so Hawksworth took on apprenticeships at a pair of his kitchens, too (lunches at Settebello followed by dinners at Il Giardino). And he rounded out the week with weekend shifts at the venerable Villa del Lupo. “I was running around, working around four jobs, but they were all part-time.” Then he quit them all for an opportunity in Tofino, on the west coast of Vancouver Island, where Menghi’s long-time corporate chef Ron Lammie was setting up the Orca Lodge. Hawksworth saw Tofino as a stepping stone, a small town where it was easy to live cheaply and save money. “Everywhere I had worked, they did the same garnishes for everything. They cooked the same chicken and veal.” He had already discovered that things were very different elsewhere, courtesy of two recently acquired cookbooks—Raymond Blanc’s Recipes from Le Manoir aux Quat’ Saisons, published in 1988, and Marco Pierre White’s groundbreaking White Heat, published in 1990. “When I looked at what I was doing and opened those two books, it was quite, um, different. The recipes, the finesse, the number of things on the plate … it looked like they were working on a different planet.” It took him ten months in Tofino to save (just) enough money to move to planet England to undertake his real training.
Hawksworth arrived in London in November 1991, preceded by only a week by two letters of application: one to Blanc at Le Manoir aux Quat’ Saisons, in Great Milton, Oxfordshire, and the other to White at Harveys, in Wandsworth, London. Each chef had two Michelin stars and was swamped with job applicants, but Hawksworth got lucky. White had just opened a second restaurant, The Canteen, in Chelsea Harbour, a relatively large and casual venture that was a smash hit from the get-go, and he was desperate for staff.
“I had one contact in London,” Hawksworth recounts. “I landed, I phoned this family friend, and she said, ‘Marco called. He wants you to come by Canteen.’” Hawksworth arrived in England on a Saturday and started work on Monday, jet-lagged, disoriented, and a half-hour late for his eight-in-the-morning shift on the fish station. The new chef poissonier lacked experience, local or otherwise. “It was a big restaurant and it was incredibly busy—so busy that we had to start buying fish broken down instead of whole because we didn’t have time to fillet them anymore. So we’d have portion-sized pieces of turbot and brill in the fridge and someone would yell for one and I had no idea which was which. Everyone else there seemed to have come from two- and three-[Michelin-]star kitchens. I felt like I had skipped eight years [of training].” But he muddled through and got the hang of things—new things—from eight in the morning till one in the morning, six days a week and sometimes more. One day in the fourth month, to his considerable relief, he got a call from the office of Raymond Blanc offering a job interview.
When the appointed day finally came, Hawksworth had worked fourteen days straight. “I was bagged.” Still, nervous, he slept for only three hours, and then got up to wait for the minicab that was supposed to take him from his flat in Southfields to the train station. The driver got lost and Hawksworth missed the first train to Oxford. By the time he finally arrived there, he was in a panic. He hopped into the tidiest-looking minicab in the queue and set off up the M40. “We drove on and on and finally cut through some country village and in a curve started to drift into the oncoming lane, and I’m thinking, ‘We must be getting ready to turn but where’s the Manoir?” No Manoir, but there was an oncoming car—Hawksworth’s driver was fast asleep.
“I flew head-first into the front foot well and my feet were sticking up in the air. There was glass and blood everywhere. I was taken away strapped to a board. When I woke up that night in the hospital, I phoned Canteen to say that I couldn’t make it the next day and they clearly thought I was doing a runner.” As it happened, he did not quit The Canteen for another month, not until a second and far more agreeable excursion to Oxfordshire ended in his passing Blanc’s customary test—take zese three eggs, make me sabayon, cook for me zese rouget—and being offered a job as chef de partie.
Hawksworth spent four years working for Blanc, first making the jump to sous-chef at Le Manoir and next, in mid-1996, becoming executive chef for Blanc’s next project, a 150-seat brasserie in central Oxford called Le Petit Blanc. (Since renamed Brasserie Blanc, it spawned a national chain that is now eight restaurants strong and growing.) His quest for experience continued apace: later that year he returned to London to become head chef at the Soho institution L’Escargot, handily maintaining its Michelin star for eighteen months before moving on to work at Philip Howard’s The Square, in St. James’s (which later packed up its two Michelin stars and decamped to Mayfair). His next move of consequence was to join the huge kitchen staff young Michelin-starred chef Bruno Loubet was assembling for London restaurateur Oliver Peyton’s £3.8-million Italian-themed flagship in Knightsbridge, Isola. Hawksworth had by then worked for or with nearly all the young chefs who were wresting the attention of the international gourmand from its traditional playground of France, and in the process leading the world. As it always does, haute cuisine has changed again since.
“Food was bigger then. It was less product-driven. It was more about how many different components you could get onto the plate. Some of it was too complex. Some of it was … perfect.” Hawksworth looks on those sometime culinary mentors as having possessed different strengths. “Marco—his flavours were clean and perfect. And he was a technician. You wanted to bone out a pig’s trotter? He could do it faster and better than anyone on the planet. He was very gifted technically.” Hawksworth confirms Raymond Blanc’s reputation for having a far different and far more cerebral skill set: “Blanc’s palate, when it came to acidity and texture, and how we look at colours, and how to balance it all—he was very, very good at that.”
His management style was different, too. Where White was aggressive, often abusive, and known to get into the occasional fist fight (often with his young protégé Gordon Ramsay), Blanc preferred mind games. As Blanc himself remarked to The Times of London in 2008, he believes that “under pressure and sometimes fear, people grow the best.” Hawksworth summarizes the Blanc experience like so: “You’ve seen The Office with Ricky Gervais? Let’s just say I can’t watch it. It’s too familiar … Blanc is very talented, but his main goal was to fuck you up.” Often this seems to be the norm in the Michelin-starred European kitchen, but Hawksworth found an exception in Philip Howard. “Phil is a normal person. Very articulate. If you met him on the street, there is no way you would think he was a chef. Phil was an inspiration because he was down to earth even with what he achieved. I built a lot of confidence there.”
The year of relative calm at The Square was followed by utter chaos under Loubet at Isola, an architectural extravaganza spread over two floors, with space for 250 diners under its Murano chandeliers. “It was supposed to be this über-Italian experience. Anybody who even looked Italian got hired as a waiter. We ended up with fifty Italians, forty gypsies, and ten Croats.” They also went through five managers in the first couple of months. Chefs were showing up to work irretrievably sloshed; Hawksworth remembers one chopping unwashed parsley with the edge of a spatula while he tried to wake the poissonier because seven branzino were on fire in his wood-burning oven. When Jack Evrensel rang from Vancouver to try to lure Hawksworth home, he had worked thirty days straight. It took a few more calls, but in the end Evrensel came through with the magic number. Not the salary, but the seats: the new restaurant on Granville Street would have just seventy-four.
Which brings us back to that foie gras and chicken liver parfait. In haute cuisine, foie gras parfait or mousse was traditionally deployed as a luxurious binding agent for the most sophisticated of terrines. For example, in 2003, when Marc Thuet was the executive chef at The Fifth, he served me the finest, most elaborate terrine I have ever eaten. It had three layers, with breast of woodcock on one level, a little breast of wild Scottish pheasant on the next, and a breast of partridge down below. The first and second layers were divided by a strip of sliced black truffle, and the second and third by sliced black trumpet mushrooms. The breasts of fowl—which were of course oval because they had been cut crosswise when the terrine was sliced—were lightly cooked and set, floating in foie gras mousse. Foie gras mousse that, as it happened, tasted almost identical to Hawksworth’s, because the recipe shared the same lineage.
Thuet picked it up in the 1980s when he put in occasional shifts at Pierre Koffmann’s much-missed three-Michelin-star restaurant La Tante Claire, in Chelsea. There, Koffmann made a three-tiered terrine with breast of pheasant, squab, and teal. Among the chefs in Koffmann’s employ was a young Éric Chavot (who would eventually earn two Michelin stars at The Capital, in Knightsbridge). After Tante Claire, Chavot went to work for Marco Pierre White at Harveys. There, White always featured a dish of hot seared foie gras. And, of course, even though fatty duck livers are bloated, misshapen things, packing one lobe twice the size of the other, White would serve nothing but perfectly proportioned escalopes. This translated into a lot of foie gras trimmings, and that is very expensive waste. What to do? Chavot suggested a parfait of foie gras, all on its own, adorned only with gelée de Sauternes or perhaps one made with truffle or Madeira.
“So I made a golden apple jelly to lighten it up and make the dish—if possible—lighter,” Hawksworth explained to me many years later. “The rest is history.”
On their most festive occasions, the Chinese of Fujian Province turn to a ridiculously elaborate dish called Buddha Jumps Over the Wall, which at its most authentic features some twenty different types of meat, from shark’s fin, abalone, and sea cucumber to dried scallops, pigs’ trotters, lamb fillets, a whole duck, a whole chicken, and a sizeable portion of cured ham. The joke implicit in the name is obviously that Buddha is resolutely vegetarian; the idea is that the aroma of this dish is so divinely alluring that even the Buddha would jump over a wall just to get at it. And that is what I was thinking about on November 18, 2005, in the kitchen at Lumière restaurant in Vancouver, as I watched Charlie Trotter nibble contentedly on one of chef Rob Feenie’s exquisite pheasant boudins blancs.
Feenie had served them earlier that night drizzled with rich veal jus and plated on a bed of orzo as one of the courses on the two chefs’ elaborate $1,000-per-plate tasting menu conceived to celebrate the tenth anniversary of Lumière. The thing was that Trotter was then very much in the news as the most prominent chef to support a PETA-proposed city-wide ban on the consumption of foie gras in his hometown of Chicago. He had taken foie gras off his menu three years before. I had just spent fifteen minutes unavailingly attempting to convince him of the salubrious living conditions of Quebec’s foie gras–producing moulard ducks. (Despite the martinis and much wine, I had stopped shy of humouring Marc Thuet’s request when he heard where I was going—“You see Trotter, kick him in the balls for me!”) And now here was Trotter reaching for yet another delicate little boudin. It did not say so on the menu, but you would have to have a palate immeasurably inferior to that of the ten-time James Beard award–winning chef to not recognize that Feenie had laced his pheasant heavily with you-know-what.
“Mmm,” Trotter said. “It tastes a little of liver.”
Yes, I’ll say. That’s how good Feenie’s pheasant-and-foie-gras boudin taste: you could call them PETA Jumps Over the Wall. Some years later I finally talked Feenie into giving me the recipe for them. But the fact is that they are such a nuisance to put together that the recipe serves largely to remind one of why we go to restaurants in the first place. The recipe for the foie gras parfait of Éric Chavot’s is less complicated, but it is time consuming, and there is no way to make less than an entire terrine. In my experience having that in your fridge is highly impractical and not at all good for your health. I have only made it once. And I have the same reservations about investing the time required into making a terrine of foie gras entier—which is to say an even more luxurious terrine of pure, unadulterated foie gras. I learned to make Mark McEwan’s singular layered interpretation, which he developed in the 1990s for his menu restaurant North 44, fielded to general acclaim at James Beard House in New York, and sentenced me to test out and write up as a recipe of domestically reasonable, non-restaurant proportions for his first cookbook, Great Food at Home, which I co-authored. I designed it for a single terrine, but even so the recipe requires two entire foies gras, involves several stages spread out over several days, and in the end delivers a quantity of terrine that—even after I gave half of it away for Christmas—I was still eating six months later. It was great to learn the trick of it, but when all you need and want is one thick slice, you really are better off buying just that. Yet long before we worked on that cookbook together, McEwan taught me a different foie gras recipe that to this day I find indispensable. And it is quick and easy, too.
McEwan grew up on meat and potatoes in Buffalo, New York, where his father, a crooner (who got a callback for Oklahoma!), had moved to perform on local live radio. “He sounded too much like Sinatra for his own good,” McEwan remarked dryly to me once. “When you sound like Frank Sinatra but you’re not Frank Sinatra, you’re just another lounge singer.” At sixteen, Mark took a job at a popular Buffalo restaurant called Mindy’s Wine Cellar. It was not an interest in the food industry that drew him there. “I needed a job and I got a job,” McEwan said. His initial summerlong encounter with the restaurant industry was not an appealing one: he made $1.65 an hour as a dishwasher. The days were long and the owners obsessive—at least about the state of his dish pit at the end of his shift. They would check the corners; they would lift the drain cover out of the floor and check that, too; satisfied or not, they did not offer a discount on staff meals. “There was no way I was going to work all day at that just to give a third of my wage back for dinner.” So young McEwan got by on the most intact dinner rolls he could find on cleared-away plates. At the end of a shift, after a few drinks, there was always the promise of the Mighty Taco, on Delaware Avenue. “It was a drive-through, and you put your money in a square hole in the wall and the food came out.” He favoured the spicy bean burrito; it has no connection, however nascent, to the lobster, avocado, and jicama taco that would turn up on the menu at North 44 twenty years later. One night Mindy’s was short a cook, and the manager, a young blond woman who drove a powder-blue AMC Pacer with a white vinyl roof and matching upholstery, asked Mark if he would take a place on the line. He did, and he liked it.
By then, McEwan’s father was working in television production at Buffalo’s Channel 4. But this was the mid-seventies, cable television was making its first serious incursion into the traditional broadcast market, and the elder McEwan was offered a job with better prospects in Toronto. The McEwan family moved north. When Mark finished Grade 13, he took a job on the line at a restaurant called the Country Squire, on the highway near Oakville. His intention was to enrol in hotel management at the University of Guelph, but he wanted to work for a year first. Looking to broaden his experience, he filled out countless job applications at Toronto hotels, unavailingly, until a family connection put him in the interview chair opposite Swiss executive chef Joseph Vonlanthen at the now defunct Constellation Hotel, near Pearson International Airport. “He liked the fact that I wore a tie to the interview,” McEwan recalls. Vonlanthen had impeccable training, but unlike so many of his countrymen, he did not adhere to the European tradition of long, rigorous training and slow promotions; he rewarded enthusiasm unconditionally. In 1976, McEwan started as an apprentice on the line; one year later he was a chef de station. By now he was no longer interested in management and the front of the house: “All the action was in the kitchen.” In 1977, he enrolled at George Brown College; two years later he graduated with two internships under his belt and moved on to the Grand National Hotel in Lucerne, where he served as commis de cuisine. He savoured the culinary side of the European equation, but was turned off by the poor wages and an obvious lack of upward mobility. It was not his dream to become a “forty-year-old sous-chef with a one-bedroom apartment and a mattress on the floor.”
Good call. After six months, he returned to the Constellation and, two years later at age twenty-two, was made sous-chef. Then he quit the distant suburbs for the allure of downtown and what was then de facto film festival headquarters and one of the top hotels in the country, the Sutton Place. At twenty-three, executive sous-chef McEwan cooked for Pope John Paul II; at twenty-four he was made executive chef and became—and remains—the youngest chef in the country to ever hold such a position at a major hotel. The salary was good but, in a now familiar pattern, he soon moved on for a different challenge: in 1985, aged twenty-eight, he quit in favour of running his own place, and with two business partners purchased Pronto from restaurateur Franco Prevedello.
It was the first time McEwan had taken charge of the kitchens of a fine-dining establishment with just eighty seats, and he excelled. (For what it’s worth, I vividly recall the highlight of my first meal there as a teenager: a large, succulent, and implausibly tasty beef tenderloin, charred but rare, topped with poached veal marrow and drizzled with a pure, veal-enriched reduction.) The restaurant swiftly established itself as one of the very best in town; not so the relations between the business triumvirate. In 1989, on Yonge Street a few blocks north of Eglinton, McEwan finally found a location to build a place that he would call his own and focused his attention there instead. The next spring he opened North 44.
“I had a budget of $700,000 and I spent two million—what a genius,” McEwan said of the venture eighteen years on. “One reason was a total lack of experience in construction. I had too much enthusiasm. I rebuilt the entire building and I didn’t even own it. I almost sank my ship.”
North 44 opened in May 1990. The recession arrived a few months later. McEwan owed contractors; he owed suppliers; he got further and further behind. “The last thing you can do is go back to the bank to say you have a problem.” He didn’t. “I cashed in my RRSPs. I sold my share of Pronto. I got some money—no need to say from whom, but I would have lost my fingers if I hadn’t paid it back.” He did that by hunkering down and working ridiculously long days. The restaurant was busy, and looking back, he admits he let it be busier than it should have been, sacrificing service to the need for numbers. By day, he made prepared foods and a line of North 44 breads. “I was up at six each morning, my car weighed down with product to sell.” He started a catering business. The tide eventually turned: by decade’s end, North 44 was a perennial top-ten finisher in Toronto Life magazine and had been anointed the best restaurant in town by Zagat and by Gourmet magazine for three years running. McEwan’s wheels were no longer good for transporting baguettes around town; he was now getting around in a new Porsche 911, and what’s more, he had the temerity to stop working the line each night and spend some time with his family instead. When he started talking about opening a new restaurant downtown, Globe and Mail restaurant critic Joanne Kates rang him up at North 44 to ask why he would do such a thing when he couldn’t be behind both stoves at the same time—making it clear that this was where he was expected to stay.
“McEwan’s not really a chef—he’s a businessman,” one chef said to me at the time.
“He just got lucky on the stock market,” another said to me.
“Bymark is just going to steal business from his place uptown,”
one restaurateur predicted.
“Si Bymark ne fonction pas—c’est bye-bye, Mark!” another chef remarked gleefully.
Three of those four chefs are no longer in business. Meanwhile, Bymark is still going strong. McEwan followed that with One, a $3-million restaurant that anchors the Hazelton Hotel, where he exceeded his budgeted sales predictions for its first year by fifty percent and has annual sales considerably over $10 million. And one sunny August between opening that and following with his next venture, a $5.6-million, twenty-thousand-squarefoot fine-food emporium called McEwan, in the Shops at Don Mills, he hopped into his Mercedes AMG, loaded up the trunk with tomatoes ripened in his vegetable garden on Georgian Bay, USDA Prime steaks aged for Bymark, a whole Quebec foie gras, and Cuban cigars, amongst other staples, ripped up the 401 to the province of Quebec, and followed the 40 and the 10 to Austin, on Lake Memphremagog, in the Eastern Townships, where I was taking a summer vacation with my mother, Florence.
So I got my first and only risotto lesson on the AGA, a stove McEwan had never seen or heard of before, and was obviously taken with, proclaiming its heat plate to be the best heat source for making risotto that he had ever worked on. But it was the course that preceded the grilled steaks with squash risotto that had made the deepest impression. “This would be perfect for roasting the foie gras,” McEwan had said to me that afternoon, after I gave him the lowdown on the AGA’s roasting oven. My interest was definitely piqued. Roast whole foie gras? Why hadn’t I thought of that? McEwan apparently had not thought of it either—he attributed the recipe to the incomparable Austrian chef Eckart Witzigmann, who changed the course of European cooking in the late 1970s with his three-Michelin-star Munich restaurant Aubergine, and shortly thereafter was proclaimed a “chef of the century” by the Guide Gault-Millau (joining Paul Bocuse, Joël Robuchon, and Frédy Girardet in a club of four). The recipe is easy. And while in writing the recipe for this book I ventured that it would serve six to eight, be advised that McEwan, my mother, and I polished it off between the three of us, then ate the steaks and risotto, too—although I cannot say that it did much for my snooker game that night.
“Mark can come any time,” my mother said as he drove off the next day.
Whole Roasted Foie Gras
Chef Mark McEwan
Serves 6 to 8
1 fresh whole foie gras, about 1-1/2 lb (675 g)
Salt and white pepper
2 tbsp (30 mL) olive oil
3 cloves garlic, peeled
2 sprigs thyme
1 sprig sage
Suggested accompaniments: sliced baguette drizzled with olive oil, seasoned with salt and pepper, and toasted; braised wedges of apple or peach; roasted garlic
Preheat oven to 450˚F (230˚C).
Place the cold foie gras on the chopping block flat side down. Use a sharp knife to score the domed top, cutting more deeply (about 1/2 inch or 1 cm) into the larger lobe of the liver. Season it very generously all over with salt and white pepper. Heat a skillet on medium-high. Add the olive oil and then the foie gras, rounded side down, moving it around in the pan with tongs so as to brown the top all over––about 2 minutes. Flip the foie gras onto its flat side, add the garlic, thyme, and sage to the skillet, and transfer to the oven for about 7 minutes, basting frequently. Remove skillet (do not turn off the oven), drain off most of the fat, cover with foil, and leave to rest for about 7 minutes. Remove the foil and return to oven for about 5 minutes, basting frequently and draining fat as necessary.* Transfer foie gras to a warm platter with the braised fruit, roasted garlic, and toast, and tuck in with delirious abandon.
*For cooking times, assume a total of about 16 minutes for a 1-pound liver to about 25 minutes for a 2-pound liver.