5

GAME 

Shortly before Christmas 2011, eight lucky Toronto men converged on an excellent restaurant on Queen Street West  with their minds set on the pursuit of the sort of sophisticated but essential pleasures that all levels of Canadian government do their best to prevent. No, there were no opiates on hand. And yes, all the waitresses were fully clothed and very much expected to remain that way. The contentious issue was rather about the comestibles destined for the plate. Because unlike the vast bulk of meat and fish legally consumed in this country, the stuff selected for this meal had not been sourced from dodgy intensive farms, where the miserable creatures were pumped full of drugs to prevent their getting chronically ill from their cramped and insalubrious conditions. Instead, they came from the Canadian wild. And to complicate matters further, the game in question was not going to be mangled by some country bumpkin who thinks that real Canadian cooking involves braising some chopped-up caribou leg in a bottle of Pepsi. Rather, it was going to be prepared by one of our finest chefs, a master with game, and a man justifiably accustomed to being well remunerated for his services. Needless to say, we have many laws on the books to protect us from this kind of thing.

For starters, in this Toronto version of a conundrum that plays out similarly all across the country, any chef who tries to sell his customers local game will be blocked by the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources, which forbids hunting for profit—and thus the purchase or sale of locally sourced wild game meats. If they try to bypass that problem by instead sourcing game from a foreign jurisdiction and, say, importing some exquisite Scottish grouse or pheasant, they will come up against the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, which forbids imports of such tasty stuff. Regardless, the Toronto Department of Public Health forbids restaurants or food shops to sell for consumption anything caught in the wild and then processed somewhere other than a federally approved abattoir. So for the chef who wants to serve his customers a little of Canada’s natural bounty, there is but one legal escape hatch: purchase game meats without a traceable receipt (i.e., through cash or contra), give it away to their customers for free, and then—nudge, nudge, wink, wink—charge them $80 for the side of carrots or bottle of water that went with it.

In the case of this dinner for eight, matters were simplified because the customer—philanthropist and truffle enthusiast Steven Latner—is also a good hunter, and had been considerate enough to shoot, kill, and provide all the required game meats himself. Furthermore, the legal dance around the billing had been long established with the chef, David Lee, co-owner of the restaurant in question, Nota Bene. For the game dinner was an annual event going back to 2005, when Lee was chef and co-owner of Splendido, on Harbord Street, which he and his partner, Yannick Bigourdan, sold in 2009. Splendido was a fine-dining restaurant, with an emphasis on Old World service, right down to little details like leather-covered purse stools that were noiselessly planted at each lady’s side as they sat down, a nifty touch that I first witnessed in Paris, at Restaurant Alain Ducasse in the Hôtel Plaza Athénée. Lee and Bigourdan opened Nota Bene late in the summer of 2008 with hopes of appealing to a broader and less stuffy audience, and it worked out for them so well that they decided to sell Splendido. And the highly accessible Nota Bene has thrived ever since. When I arrived for the game dinner at close to six o’clock in the evening on that cold November night, even the long bar was full, and the only empty seats in the dining room were at the big table reserved for the game extravaganza. Alas, I had not been invited, so I mournfully looked over the splendid collection of grand crus from Bordeaux and Burgundy breathing on the side table, and moved on to the kitchen.

There I found David Lee’s faithful chef Geoff O’Connor at the pass, as usual, calling out orders, checking plates, and projecting a contagious calm from the helm even at the peak of the mad dinnertime rush. While chef Lee conceives the Nota Bene menus and oversees most lunch and dinner services, he works neither pass nor line here, and seldom has. The only exceptions are special events. Such as for those old Splendido addicts who refuse to accept that times have changed and will happily pay extra for a taste of the past in the form of a Lee-authored gastronomic tasting menu. And this happens with increased frequency in the autumn, with the concurrent onset of white truffle season and the festive run-up to Christmas.

This is not always convenient. But fortunately the only ingredient chef Lee loves working with more than truffles is game; and when a customer requests a no-holds-barred tasting menu focusing on both, Lee would not miss it for anything. He could not, anyway, because the kitchen at Nota Bene was set up to produce food of nearly bistro-basic simplicity, not tasting menus, and the line cannot handle both at the same time. So when the main line is in full swing, special menus here are produced from the back of the kitchen, largely from a six-burner hob situated across the counter from the pastry kitchen. Pulling off a lofty tasting menu in such environs requires a uniquely Lee skill set. And so that is where I found him, down the corridor past his office, beyond the shelves laden with jars of dried chicken skin, dehydrated morels, and pickled spears of white asparagus and wild ginger—all the way at the back of the kitchen, in the space shared by the adjacent patisserie and garde-manger. This would be his HQ for the evening. With only nine plates to turn out for each course (eight for the dining room, one for me), he had two chefs at his exclusive disposal—and plenty of others ready to jump if summoned. The kitchen set-up might have been less than ideal, but three chefs for nine covers is a locally unheard-of multiple-Michelin-starred-kitchen level of staffing.

When I said hello to Lee he was running his chefs through some course descriptions and putting his finishing touches in his mise en place. The kitchen phone rang and Lee ignored it—but then O’Connor materialized at his side. “Chef, it’s Wanda. She’s at the airport. She’s coming here first.” That would be Wanda Srdoc, more commonly know as the Truffle Lady. “She’s cute, and she smells of truffles,” a very successful Toronto chef had texted me, along with her phone number, when she arrived on the scene nearly a decade ago. When I hooked up with her to score shortly thereafter, I learned that Srdoc was Croatian, and has family there still, harvesting the very same indigenous white truffles that often cross the border into Italy to be sold at the Alba market as real Alba-sourced truffles at the much higher local price. Some years her truffles trump the Alba product, sometimes the two products are interchangeable, and sometimes not.

“I’ve got truffle from three different places already,” Lee told me. “And now Wanda. I guess we’ll try hers later, too.”

Well, why not?

“Guys!” Lee called out to his chefs, collectively. “Gimme the first white.”

The truffle Lee was handed was easily two inches in diameter, and its aroma was magnificently potent. Word came from the dining room that the game dinner guests had all arrived, so Lee put the truffle aside on a board with a slicer and got to work on his first course. To begin, he was going the classical route of truffled scrambled eggs (nice free-range eggs from Church Hill farm, in Punkeydoodles Corners, Ontario). He had not already infused the eggs with truffle, as some chefs do, packaging eggs and naked truffle together in a sealed container for a few days before cooking them. Instead, he broke his eggs into the skillet and seasoned them with salt and pepper at the outset, then whipped them vigorously, moving the pan on and off the burner constantly to moderate the heat, rather than resorting to a double boiler. As he worked a head waiter turned up at his side.

“Chef? How long for the first course? Five minutes?”

“Yes,” Lee replied without looking up.

No more than thirty seconds later Bigourdan appeared.

“How long for the first course, Chef?” Bigourdan asked his partner, in his charming French accent. “Two minutes?”

“Yes,” Lee replied again, without looking up.

When Bigourdan left, Lee called out for whipped cream. “And give me a spoon,” he barked, to no one in particular.

No fewer than five chefs quickly materialized, each proffering a spoon for Lee. Even O’Connor had come all the way over from his station at the pass. “What do you need, Chef?”

Lee said nothing as he folded the whipped cream into his cooked eggs along with a little minced chive.

“Truffle!”

The truffle was handed over. Lee demonstrated to his two chefs how he wanted the perfectly toasted fingers of brioche arranged on each plate alongside the small mound of scrambled egg. The chef across the counter from him immediately got it backwards, forgetting that he was looking at Lee’s plate upside down.

“Right-fucking-handed!” Lee said.

They got it right the second time, and when each plate was adorned with both eggs and toast, Lee shaved a dazzling amount of truffle over them.

“It’s a beautiful thing,” a sous-chef named Trevor muttered as he walked past.

Indeed, creamy egg and white truffle are always a heavenly pairing, whatever the time of day. And the brioche was a perfect accompaniment, the crumb within the crisp exterior very nearly as buttery and creamy as the eggs. As I ate, Lee was already plating the next dish, an intermezzo of chilled jellied wild salmon consommé with shaved truffle of a different source. Then Srdoc walked in the back door with a big Styrofoam box full of yet more truffles. She popped open the lid, and the aroma in the kitchen was nudged a level closer to being utterly overwhelming. Lee plucked one from her box and tested its aroma and texture. He appeared to be unmoved, but bought a couple anyway. Srdoc had supplied Lee with Croatian white truffles since Splendido days—and evidently he deemed the relationship to be important to preserve, even when quality varied unfavourably. So it goes with nature’s goods.

Next, Lee plated a warm course of Alaskan chinook salmon, cutting it in bite-size pieces and then allowing them to be heated through—but barely—in the bath of hot fish consommé ladled overtop. The lean salmon shared space with slivered matsutake, or pine, mushrooms and a sprig of lightening cilantro. Then Lee produced a game terrine, which consisted of very lightly seared fillets of teal, pheasant, mallard, and king buck, all pressed together into the base of a terrine, with the balance of the mould filled with whole foie gras. The colours were fantastic: the bottom two-thirds of each slice was crimson, punctuated only with a stripe of pale pheasant, and topped with the unmistakable buttery caramel of cured foie gras. Naturally he then shaved truffle all over it: black ones this time, from Italy, and surprisingly pungent for the time of year (they peak at the end of January). The terrine was really more like a pressé, and each of its constituent game meats was so lightly cooked that they sometimes separated one from another as the terrine was cut apart. Their distinct and assertive flavours stood out enough to be readily identifiable for what they were, unmuddled, even when smeared with a little of the cured foie gras. That was a lot of flavour for a cold plate, and Lee followed it with a hot dish of lightly seared breast of teal and mallard, the unexpectedly tender crimson slices of the wild fowl draped over more pine mushrooms—braised caps this time—drizzled with a dark game bird jus and scattered with black truffle from Burgundy. Then Chef took a wise step back from all that intensity of flavour with a simple but exquisite fresh taglioni with butter and white truffles.

At this point word evidently reached the dining room that there was an imposter in the kitchen, freeloading on their meal at the source. So two of Latner’s dinner guests showed up to see what was going on. Fortunately, they were friends of mine: Josh Josephson (owner of the Josephson Opticians chain) and Steve Alexander (owner of Cumbrae’s, Canada’s premier butcher shop). Better yet, they came bearing gifts. One, anyway: a glass of the 1990 Château Latour they had been enjoying with the pasta. Nice.

You might well think that white truffle pasta with a glass of 1990 Latour would be impossible to top, and with a half-dozen courses to go, amount to a set-up for disappointment. Not to worry. For next up, Lee produced the most exceptional wild turkey breast, which had been seared and then butter-poached—not in a saucepan, as one would do with blanched lobster, but ever so gently heated through sous-vide, in a sealed bag bulging with beurre monté. The flesh of the turkey showed a hint of pink and the thick fibre of its musculature was shockingly supple. Lee served it glazed in its emulsified poaching butter. And naturally he then shaved more white truffle all over it, and the fowl was exquisite. We moved on next to an ode to Quebec that could warm the coldest winter night: a tourtière of mixed game meats plated with the small legs of mallard duck that had been cooked to submission in a pressure cooker, then doused with wild duck jus. Beans laced with diced pork belly were served on the side.

After that Lee briefly lightened up the procession with a second consommé, this one made from his game birds and infused with cloves, cinnamon, and crushed white pepper. A cabbage roll stuffed with salted pork belly was adrift in it, along with shards of cured foie gras that he had frozen and then sliced as thin as prosciutto on an electric slicer. There were truffles, too, naturally—and the magic of the dish revolved around the echo of their nuttiness in the sprinkling of chopped toasted hazelnuts he applied to the dish for a final touch. The dish was another gem, but Lee was far from done. Next he served a slice of seared breast of wild goose with another slice of rare loin of elk, draped over a latke with a side of applesauce. Finally there was roast loin of king buck with wild blueberry sauce, and sweetly sauced braised moose, with pearl onions and baby turnips. Dessert he kept mercifully simple: apple galette with wild blueberries and vanilla ice cream.

The meal was an education. We are accustomed to eating our tender and relatively bland farm-raised ducks, venison, and elk seared rare, but more often than not their wild brethren are served over-marinated and braised, for fear of their gamy taste and stringy, lean texture. But of the eleven wild meats Lee had cooked, only a handful (mallard legs, turkey breast, tourtière, and moose) had been exposed to heat long enough to even warm them through to the centre of the cut. The resulting textures were never chewy, but as assertively variable as the flavours. As good offal does, the game had left me marvelling at the blandness of so much of the meat we eat. “There is no better chef in town with game,” Josh Josephson proclaimed, when I settled in at his table in the dining room for digestifs. “None. He has been cooking it so long ………”

Indeed, chef Lee’s experience with game does not stop at cooking it, but extends to hunting it, too—and he is the only chef I know who has experience both with hunting fruit bats in Mauritius and shooting game birds at Sandringham. And no, he was not poaching there. Lee was born in the New Town of Stevenage, in Hertfordshire, about fifty kilometres north of London. Both his grandfathers hailed from Beijing but lived in Mauritius; David moved there when he was six, and then returned to England at age ten. But Lee continued to visit family in Mauritius each year until he quit the U.K. for Canada in 1994. Two generations of chefs preceded David in the Lee family; he grew up in a household where food was of paramount importance. Game is a staple of the English table, and venison is a favourite. They have deer in Mauritius, too. The fruit bat is more of an appetizer sort of catch.

“You see them coming down from the mountains at sunset, heading for the mango groves,” Lee once explained to me. “You shoot them with a shotgun, and the dogs collect them.”

Just like ducks, in other words. Except that they have to be peeled rather than feathered. You cook them as for any game bird salmis, with cinnamon, cloves, thyme, and a little sugar for seasoning. The meat is dark and sweet. Shooting at Sandringham came later. First, Lee learned to cook in the professional kitchen, starting out in small restaurants in Hertfordshire, where game was common fare. At seventeen he left for London, making the jump to the posh InterContinental Park Lane overlooking Hyde Park, where he worked at the Michelin-starred Le Soufflé under the late Peter Kromberg. Next he went abroad, to Hotel La Fleur du Lac, in Morges, on Lake Geneva, in Switzerland. In 1992 he returned to England to work for the great Swiss chef Anton Mosimann, who by then had left the Dorchester Hotel—where he ran the first hotel restaurant outside of France to earn two Michelin stars—to set up his private club in Belgravia, Mosimann’s. The Swiss chef then held (and still holds) a royal warrant as caterer for the Prince of Wales. Cooking for the royals requires access to the finest game, and hunting access to Sandringham was a standard feature of its procurement.

“We’d usually go and shoot for two weeks,” Lee recalls of fetching game for the royal table. “We’d stay on the grounds the whole time.”

So now you know: wild deer, rabbits, and game birds may be unfit for the Canadian restaurant menu, but are more than good enough for the royal family.

On a trip to Paris in the autumn of 2004, I happened upon a wonderful butcher shop in Les Halles, which in its display case had three plump Scottish grouse, lined up in a row on their backs, with the plumage pulled back to expose their semi-putrid breasts. Obviously I felt a great need to smuggle them home.

For Lagopus lagopus scoticus, the red or Scotch grouse—or la grouse, as the French call them—is the most coveted of game birds. “While nearly all the game birds are good, and some eminently good, grouse seems to me to … possess the fullest and at the same time the least violent flavour [and] the best consistency of flesh,” George Saintsbury, celebrated author of Notes on a Cellar-Book, ventured in Cookery in 1894. “Scotch grouse [is] the best, in our opinion, of all game birds in the world,” the esteemed André Simon added to the record some forty years later in his Concise Encyclopaedia of Gastronomy. “Nothing can beat it,” Sir Anton Mosimann wrote succinctly in The Essential Mosimann, of serving grouse in the Grill Room at the Dorchester Hotel in London in the early eighties, when a young Marc Thuet was enlisted there as one of his young chefs.

Getting these birds from Paris to Thuet’s kitchen to my plate was clearly the right thing to do. But how? My first thought was to buy a birdcage, load the dead grouse into it, check the package in at the Air Canada desk at de Gaulle, and upon landing attempt to distract the customs officials at Pearson with wild and tearful accusations about how Air Canada had killed my pets. But this plan hatched in desperation seemed a bit far-fetched—and it was far from certain that the dead birds would be released to me by customs for the proper burial I would insist on. So instead I leaned on a local friend to have them vacuum-packed under very low pressure, and then I stuffed them into my carry-on bag. Naturally, when the baggage-scanner operator at de Gaulle saw the birds and their little up-stretched claws lined up in my case, he waved me on without even mentioning it.

The grouse grew a little more putrid on the journey home. When, late on the afternoon of my arrival, Thuet opened the package in the kitchen at The Fifth, where he was then executive chef, the stench wafted all the way across the dining room and down the corridor to the office of restaurant owner Libell Geddes. She was not at all pleased. Thuet, however, was delighted. And the grouse he made for me and my mother the following evening, with their lightly seared breasts served in a jus made from the legs, thighs, innards, and a few cloudberries, was so exquisite that Thuet immediately got to work on establishing his own far more reliable smuggling network. By the time he opened Bistro and Bakery Thuet on King Street West in 2005, I was eating grouse at his restaurant every autumn.

Over in the U.K., hunting season for Scottish grouse begins on August 12—or as they call it, “the Glorious Twelfth.” So, give the birds a few weeks to hang, then arrange legal shipment to the United States, have chef Thuet drive down to the depot to inspect them and, just possibly, stuff a sackful into the spare tire cover on the back of his SUV—and come the end of September or early October, you would find me at the bar of his restaurant, eagerly poised to tuck in. Picture this: the two breasts of one of the plump little birds, each skinned and then lightly seared in a pan oiled with butter, cooked until dark brown without, crimson and barely warm within, stacked one atop the other over a hefty slab of foie gras de canard poêlé, which is in turn perched on a slice of brioche toasted crisp and smeared with a foie gras and pork liver mousse, heavily spiked—Alsatian-style—with Marc de Gewürztraminer. The periphery of the plate is dressed up with a judicious scattering of jackfruit brunoise, jackfruit purée, and a reduction of elderberry.

A first, small taste of the bird reminds me that Saintsbury, Simon, and Mosimann all got it exactly right. Quiet contemplation of a second forkful, meticulously assembled so as to represent a small sample of every element of taste on the plate, reveals something more: that this particular dish is classic Thuet. Very few chefs can conjure so many different flavours to come and play together on the palate in such harmony—even as each asserts itself so distinctly without getting muddled on the palate. The Thuet style also often shows a casual expertise in the preparation of game and foie gras. It involves unexpected flavours—like the jackfruit and elderberry. It also leans knowledgeably on tradition, giving it a sensible and often playful rethink (the toasted brioche is a delicate echo of the pan-dripping-drenched toast that the English traditionally serve with their roasted game birds). There is usually an inclination to be a little over the top—you may drag that once crisp brioche through your elderberry sauce if you like, but it is already infused with the juices bleeding from the grouse, the fatty runoff from the seared foie gras, as well as that of the mousse melting beneath it. If that sounds like overkill, be advised that one year’s grouse à la Thuet featured grouse breast roasted with raw foie gras and an envelope of foie gras mousse en croûtesauced with a reduction of local wild blueberries. The last thing you need to know about “à la Thuet” is that it never means the same thing twice.

Roast Grouse with Braised Pears, Baby Onions, Chanterelles, and Red Wine Reduction

Chef Marc Thuet

Serves 4

4 well-hung Scottish (red) grouse

2 tsp (10 mL) olive oil

Salt and pepper

1/2 cup (125 mL) granulated sugar

1/4 cup (60 mL) vinegar

4 small pears (such as Forelle or Seckel), peeled

1/2 cup (125 mL) cold butter

1-1/2 cups (375 mL) chanterelles, trimmed and cleaned

1-1/2 cups (375 mL) pearl onions, blanched and peeled

1 cup (250 mL) red wine

1/2 cup (125 mL) game bird or duck jus

3 oz (85 g) speck, diced

Preheat oven to 350˚F (180˚C). Rub the grouse lightly with oil, season with salt and pepper, place in a roasting pan, and roast on the middle rack of the oven for 25 minutes. Meanwhile, fill a saucepan with enough water to cover the pears, bring to a boil over medium-high heat, add the sugar and vinegar, and stir until the sugar has completely dissolved. Reduce the heat, add the pears, and poach until soft but not falling apart––10 to 15 minutes.

Melt 2 tbsp (30 mL) butter in a cast-iron or non-stick skillet on medium-low heat. Add the pears, mushrooms, and onions, and cook, adding more butter if necessary, until the pears begin to caramelize––about 10 minutes.

Remove the grouse from the oven and set them aside to rest. Thoroughly deglaze the roasting pan with the wine, add the game or duck jus, and heat through. Strain the liquid through a fine sieve into a saucepan. Add the speck and reduce by two-thirds. Correct seasonings and whisk in 1/4 cup (60 mL) of butter, a few cubes at a time. Place the grouse on 4 serving plates with a pear and a serving of chanterelles and onions. Top with a generous serving of red wine reduction with speck.

At 28 rue du Canal d’Alsace, in Thuet’s hometown of Blodelsheim, you will find Hôtel Restaurant Chez Pierre, an eighty-seat restaurant of unassuming appearance that in spring and fall, anyway, is hard to miss because of the tour buses that are invariably parked outside, disgorging hungry Swiss hunters in need of such local delicacies as white asparagus and wild game killed and cooked by someone else. These days, that would be Thuet’s cousin Jacques, but back when young Marc was growing up here, it was his uncle Pierre who was chef and owner. Thuet’s father was a farmer, and his mother, like almost every other farmer’s wife in Alsace, had an acre of the family plot to call her own, which she used to grow asparagus to sell for personal spending money. That would be white asparagus, the only kind they grow or eat here. So while Thuet’s first kitchen job as a child was restaurant garbage duty—say, mopping up the spilled blood and unwanted entrails from a freshly slaughtered wild boar—in the month of May, when asparagus season starts, things were more agreeable. All he had to do was get out of bed a couple of hours earlier than the school day required so that he could peel a few hundred asparagus spears before heading off to classes, and then peel a few hundred more when he got home in the late afternoon. And while it was some years back that he first told me about this business of the asparagus farm, for some reason the recollection eluded me one spring day when I dropped in on Thuet for lunch, selected for a starter a course of white asparagus with sauce gribiche, found them to be a little overdone, and foolishly elected to say as much.

“You don’t know shit about asparagus. People here who want them al dente are all idiots!” said Thuet, a large man who fills his chef’s jacket in every available direction, is unshaven six days out of seven, and, according to my files both photographic and anecdotal, has removed only once the mirrored wraparound sunglasses that he sports clamped tight like a headband over his spiky blond hair—when posing for a photograph with President Bill Clinton after preparing his lunch at Frank Stronach’s private Magna golf course. “When you hold it, an asparagus should look like this,” he continued, first holding out his well-scarred forefinger straight and rigid, and then allowing it to droop slightly. “It should look like a cock that’s just come—but it’s still just a little bit interested.”

At Chez Pierre, after asparagus duty at age six, Thuet graduated to plucking pheasant and partridge and skinning rabbit and hare. By the time he was twelve, his uncle began using him as cheap kitchen labour, helping out at all stations and now and then replacing chefs who missed work, like a junior tournant. His cousins Jacques and Patrick worked alongside.

Uncle Pierre—who by the by was not the first Pierre of Chez Pierre, but the third—had other passions. Twice a year, he went hunting wild boar with a gang of friends who enjoyed the sport. They were all chefs, and fine ones, too. Back when, unlike today, Michelin stars were extraordinarily hard to come by, young Marc finessed his understanding of the connection between guns and dinner in the company of hunters like Émile Jung (Au Crocodile, Strasbourg, three Michelin stars), Antoine Westermann (Restaurant Buerehiesel, Strasbourg, three Michelin stars), Pierre Gaertner (Aux Armes de France, Ammerschwihr, two Michelin stars), and the late Bernard Loiseau (La Côte d’Or, Saulieu, three Michelin stars), the brilliant chef who made the classic dish of frogs’ legs, garlic, and parsley his very own—but was less than ideally suited to keeping all those hunting rifles lying around.

Young Marc, meanwhile, knew from an early age that he wanted to be a chef, and so as a teenager he enrolled at the Institut Régional de Tourisme et d’Hôtellerie, in Strasbourg. He graduated two years later with top honours and ended up on the dean’s list, an achievement he celebrated on graduation day by making a heap of all the suits he had been obliged to wear at school, dousing them with lighter fluid, and setting them alight, an initiative that swiftly attracted the local fire department. “I was a little bit hammered,” he concedes. His school years were marked by one other miscalculation: “I always told my friends, ‘We’re going to be chefs—what the fuck do you think you have to learn English for?’” Thuet followed his own advice, and this suited him fine as he completed stage after stage in the best restaurants in Alsace, landing eventually at Restaurant L’Ecureuil in Riquewihr, where chef Michel Roëlly decided his young apprentice should follow tradition and move on to hone his talents and widen his horizons abroad. Roëlly dispatched young Thuet—unconsulted, and very surprised—to London, where he had arranged a job for him with his friend and former colleague (at the Palace Hotel in St. Moritz) Anton Mosimann, at the Dorchester Hotel.

Thuet arrived for duty, age nineteen, with barely a word of English at his disposal, but he learned fast, seizing first upon the word people in the kitchen appeared to use most and making it a signature catch-all. “I was in London for two years before I finally learned what ‘fucking’ meant,” he concedes now. But then, he was busy learning a lot of other things: Mosimann was then in the process of revolutionizing not just the culinary vision of the grand old Dorchester but also that of the country at large. In the Dorchester’s Grill Room, the tired staples of traditional British cookery—from roast grouse with drippings on toast to steak and kidney pie and bread-and-butter pudding—were being lightened and reinvented with a finesse from which they had long been estranged. At the Terrace, Mosimann was developing his concept of cuisine naturelle, a style of cooking that incorporated the healthful lessons of nouvelle cuisine in a new culinary philosophy that was far more substantive and emphasized seasonality and the purest, unadulterated flavours. And he ensured its popularity by fielding his new ideas in the framework of what was then the entirely new concept of menu surprise, wherein diners sat down trustingly to a six-course meal without any idea of what was to come.

“I had worked in three-stars all over Alsace. I never saw cooking like that,” Thuet reflected of the cooking at the Terrace in those early days, put out by Mosimann and his chef Ralph Bürgin, who had previously worked with the legendary Eckart Witzigmann at his three-starred Aubergine in Munich. “Chefs like Hans-Peter Wodarz and Roger Vergé came from all over Europe to see what they were doing. I thought if Mosimann didn’t get three stars, I wouldn’t believe it.”

Thuet was first stationed in the kitchen at the Grill Room because he was deemed too young to cook for the Terrace. But he offered to do it for free, and finally one day when the poissonier called in sick on the tournant’s day off, Thuet got his chance—and thereafter the Terrace was where he stayed, moving to saucier and finally becoming an unofficial chef tournant. The restaurant never received its anticipated three stars, but it did become the first hotel restaurant outside France to ever be awarded two of them. Meanwhile, after two years in London, Thuet was growing restless and seeking a post in the United States. Mosimann intervened and instead secured him a job in Canada, a stepping stone, with his mentor, the great Swiss chef Albert Schnell, who had been executive chef at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel in Montreal when Mosimann, drawn by the promise of Expo 67, signed up there as sous-chef in 1966. Fifteen years later, Schnell was at the Harbour Castle Hilton in Toronto. Thuet arrived for work in early 1984, beginning as chef de partie. Within a week his colleagues had a new nickname for him: they called him Fucking.

After a year at the Hilton, Thuet moved on to the Windsor Arms Hotel, and from there, in 1989, to Centro Grill & Wine Bar on Yonge Street, where in 1993 he became executive chef. The next year, shopping around for a new chef, he called his old mentor Anton Mosimann in London for help. Mosimann sent Thuet a young chef named David Lee. But within a couple of years, tensions between Thuet and his partners had the whole Centro ownership structure under severe strain.

One Sunday in 2001, I went to visit Thuet at his farmhouse near Pefferlaw, an hour from Toronto on Lake Simcoe. He had been toying for some time with the idea of selling his Centro stake and establishing a restaurant at the farm, so he had invited me out with my family for brunch and to have a look at the place. When we pulled up around noon, his truck was nowhere to be seen, and when I knocked on the door, it was his girlfriend and future wife, Biana, who answered.

“Marc’s next door. He had to kill a bear,” she explained matter-of-factly.

Indeed, as it turned out, his neighbour was an apiarist, and for some weeks, a local bear had been availing himself liberally of the honey supply. The neighbour appealed to Thuet for help, and that night when he arrived home from work, Chef grabbed a hunting rifle, drove into his neighbour’s driveway, focused his headlights on the apiary, and with his gun hanging out the window, he watched and waited, waited some more, and dozed off. Sometime later, a little rustling woke him up and he let off a quick shot, but the bear stumbled off into the darkness. Never follow an injured bear into the woods at night, the old Alsatian saying goes, so Thuet rolled up the window and went back to sleep. When he awoke, he found that the bear had only made it a few feet. And now, there it was on its side, with Thuet’s young son Jules giving it a prod with his foot, which was causing blood to spurt from the wound. Thuet began hammering its rear paws onto a two-by-four so he could hoist it over a tree branch to dress it. At which point my daughter, Simone, just three at the time, asked me why Thuet had killed the animal.

“He was a bad bear,” I explained. “He was stealing honey.

” Then, remembering that she was big into Winnie-the-Pooh, who had very similar habits, I dispatched her, her brother, Max, and their mother back to Thuet’s house to wait. And just in time, for they cleared the shielding hedge just as the bear’s entrails tumbled vigorously out of the carcass and onto the ground. Thuet was shoulder-deep in the thing when I asked his seven-year-old daughter, Robbie, who was standing and watching right in front of me, if she wanted to go back to the house, too. She looked, eyes open wide, wrinkled her nose, and giggled a little.

“This is the grossest thing I’ve seen Daddy do since that time he cut the head off that pig and it ran off into the road and he couldn’t find it!”

The bear yielded some excellent tenderloin, and a year or two later, its hind legs—like those of so many of Thuet’s pigs before it, raised on Centro slop—matured into superior prosciutto. And this was just one in a long sequence of local wild game meats he has prepared for me and a select few over the years. I will never forget his sensational civet of deer (“Bambi walked in front of the wrong house,” he said at the time), or the terrines with noisettes of wild Arctic hare, and breast of wild pheasant and woodcock. Alas, all of it forbidden on his restaurant menus, unless sold by stealth. Once, I had the misfortune of strolling into his office at Bistro and Bakery Thuet just as he slammed down the phone with Canada Customs, which had just seized a shipment of his Scottish grouse.

“A Sikh can wear a turban in the fucking RCMP but a fucking French chef can’t cook grouse?” he bellowed at me. “It’s a fucking outrage!”

It is. And it is also an outrage that Canadian chefs cannot use their restaurants to showcase our own wild grouse, turkeys, deer, hare, rabbit, and every other game animal across the land. For game is one of our great resources, and in keeping it out of the hands of real chefs who know what to do with it, and leaving it entirely to home cooks, who do not, we have defaulted on developing what might have become the cornerstone of our national cuisine. So even today, if you really want to eat great Canadian game, as our own chefs generally lack experience with it, you do best to import for the occasion a great European-trained chef, like David Lee or Marc Thuet. This situation strikes me as absurd and rather sad.