8

RISE AND FALL OF THE TASTING MENU

Ayear after it opened in August 2000, Susur Lee’s restaurant Susur defined itself with an untraditional stance from which it did not retreat until the day it closed in 2008: the restaurant would operate without menus. Technically, there were two small exceptions. Diners were indeed presented with a sheet of paper that theoretically invited choice—but the carte was not much larger than a business card, and the information proffered there empowered them to choose only between a full blind tasting menu of seven or more courses, or an abbreviated version that ran for only five. That aside, the only menus printed were to commemorate special events to which the diner was already committed—say, something designed around the occasion of a visiting chef like Ming Tsai, or Ken Oringer, or merely according to the whim of chef Lee, who was given to stirring up media interest (and business) with themed banquets commemorating such events as the arrival of Chinese New Year. The last time I dined at Susur, he was putting on a special tasting menu in celebration of the freshly arrived first harvest of the treasured black truffle of Périgord.

Lee was at the door when I arrived. Already in his late forties, he remained trim and fit, a heritage possibly of his youthful immersion in the obscure martial art of Baguazhang (which translates as the equally incomprehensible “eight-trigram palm”). He greeted me warmly and directed me toward a private corner of his stark white restaurant, where I sat alone in a booth for four alongside the kitchen doors. I looked out on the room from beneath Susur’s loudest design feature, an inset light box of perpetually changing colour. My view of the room was framed at left by the restaurant’s western wall, which featured an under-lit shelf that ran its entire length, and always featured a display of odd kitschy dolls that Susur’s wife, Brenda, had tracked down on eBay (and then lost on Gay Pride weekend, when customers invariably pocketed a few). On the occasion of my last visit the dolls were the same as on my first: a vintage set created in the ghastly likeness of a chef considerably less imaginative, fit, or stylish than my host, but immeasurably more famous—Colonel Harland Sanders.

Even without the market penetration of KFC, Susur Lee is the best-known chef this country has ever produced. Londonbased Restaurant magazine named Susur one of the fifty best restaurants in the world, and in New York, Food & Wine once anointed Lee one of the ten best chefs working anywhere. Some years ago, in Kyoto, I walked alone into what was supposed to be the best restaurant in town and sat down at the bar. The old sushi master stationed there prepared for me at least a dozen sensational courses, seemingly doing his best to raise the ante with each one and to finally concoct something too squiggly and weird-looking for a white person like me to eat (raw shrimp carcass, slivered raw sea bream skin, octopus roe, etc.). Then to my surprise, in defeat he revealed that, despite his earlier uncomprehending shrugs and protestations, he could, in fact, speak some English—and asked me how I had come to be enjoying an omakase menu in his restaurant. Too full to come up with a better explanation, I told him the truth: a randomly consulted hotel concierge had sent me over, after I arrived in Kyoto via bullet train from Nagoya, where I was attending the world Expo with a chef from Canada.

“The name of the chef?” “Susur Lee.” “Ah! Susur!” he said, smiling broadly. Then he disappeared into his back room, and a few minutes later returned with a photograph of Lee beside one of his recipes in a cookbook, and flipping a few pages forward, showed me that he, too, had a recipe in the same volume. My host turned out to be Yoshihiro Murata, one of the best-known chefs in Japan, the very man Joël Robuchon turns to when he needs culinary advice on things Japanese. He made me stay for as many more courses as I could handle, an interminable tea ceremony, then cigars, and I almost missed the last train back to Nagoya—all because he and Lee had once cooked together in Singapore.

Lee gets around. Before starting my truffle menu at Susur, I asked him how he could possibly have procured winter truffles from Périgord so early (it was the first week of December; the harvest begins at the earliest at the end of November and does not peak until late January). Lee told me that he was fresh back from Frankfurt. There he had cooked with chef Mario Lohninger, who owned the nifty nightclub Cocoonclub, with an adjoining restaurant called Silk and a tasting room named Micro, where every dish was served as a single, bite-size portion on a spoon to a diner who—like Nero or Caligula—ate and imbibed while reclining on a sofa or chaise longue. And while in Frankfurt, Lee had met a purveyor of unseasonably early winter truffles, and opted to purchase a couple of kilos and smuggle them home in his carry-on luggage.

Lee’s meal started with an amuse-gueule of miso-flavoured custard set in a tiny rectangular dish topped up with a shallow pool of quail consommé, a small dollop of Ontario caviar, and a scant few truffle shavings. When you sampled a small spoonful of custard, the soup rushed in to fill the fresh cavity in the dish, and the caviar was instantly beached. When you ate the caviar and custard together you encountered a clever trick of mouthfeel: the flan provided a soft, silky textural contrast to the roe that made the eggs feel firmer and more distinct than they would taste on their own. That was typical Susur alchemy—making a secondrate product like that slightly mushy Ontario caviar taste firmer and better than it was, almost like the real thing.

Next, Susur served his main course, for he liked to serve his courses in a progression of decreasing size and impact, a concept he called the “reverse tasting menu,” and believed that he had invented (although I should point out that in The Physiology of Taste, published in 1825, Brillat-Savarin wrote that “the proper progression of courses in a dinner is from the most substantial to the lightest”). Here we had a fillet of venison loin roasted rare, sitting on its end in a pool of rich, black truffle sauce. Its neighbour on the square plate was a globe artichoke cooked so gently and for so long that each petal was as tender as the flesh at its base. The choke had been displaced in favour of a stuffing of sweet duxelles. The next course was the inevitable foie gras served in a predictable multitude of iterations—one small escalope, seared, one dome of foie gras mousse set over foie-gras-infused sabayon. At the other end of the rectangular plate, a thin slice of cured, truffle-infused duck magret rested on a warm salad of goat’s cheese and sunchoke. Next, a breather of guava sorbet sitting in a pool of lemongrass-spiked mango-pineapple juice. Upon landing on the table, the sorbet disappeared briefly in the swirl of heavy mist emanating from its bed of dry ice, temporarily transporting the Susur experience to some Polynesian theme restaurant of yore—in my case, to the Kon-Tiki lounge in Montreal’s Sheraton Mount Royal Hotel.

Next, Susur took a jaunt to the sea, with caramelized sablefish, skate cheek, crab, shrimp, salted duck egg, and dashi-poached winter melon heaped together in a vaguely gooey, superior stockstyle clear broth, like some sort of Chinese bouillabaisse. The black truffle shaved overtop provided an earthy undertone, offset in the end by the mild bitterness of the winter melon. Next, there was a firm mousse of Japanese scallop moulded in the shape of the muscle from which it was cast, nestled anew in its former home—its shell—the top of which has been decorated with petals of edible flowers, and the inside dressed with two butter sauces, one laced with truffle, the other with tarragon and chives. Then came a creamy gratin of B.C. honey mussel, topped with truffle, next a salad of mâche, roasted pear, and truffle vinaigrette, and finally, a course of sweet dim sum.

A year later, Lee left the game of haute cuisine, so that meal was emblematic of the style with which he finished. The plates displayed an assertively artistic sense of composition and colour. Asian influence showed itself conspicuously in the chef’s preoccupation with mouthfeel. But in the flavour equation, the Asian inflections that earned Lee his original renown were increasingly relegated to a supporting role. To come clean, I far preferred it when the duelling cuisines of his particular French-Chinese fusion were mated the other way around, with—if you will—the Chinese on top, for his exposé of unusual Chinese flavours and textures was far more compelling and singular than his takes on new European cooking ever were. But then, as Lee put it to me once, European flavours went better with those expensive bottles of wine he was counting on selling.

Lee was born in Hong Kong in 1958—the Year of the Dog. He was the youngest of two boys and four girls born to an accountant father and an illiterate mother who worked as a tea lady at the local British army barracks. Lee cites his mother’s frightful cooking as an early inspiration to pursue a career in the kitchen. He also had a precocious sense of taste—he claims that when he was only six, and his mother made him an after-school snack, he could tell the difference between fresh rice, rice reheated from the day before, or a mixture of the two. He remembers vividly as a child falling asleep to the sounds and aromas of the hawkers’ stalls set up across the street from their tiny government-subsidized flat on Castle Peak Road. On Chinese New Year, his father would take him to the celebrations at his employer’s house in Hong Kong Central, where, confronted with the unfamiliar wealth of choice at the celebratory banquet, young Lee would behave like a college freshman at a keg party, gorging with abandon, only to get sick from the excess on the long bus ride home to Kowloon.

“It happened about six times,” Lee once told me. “My mother would get so mad at me.”

His appetite did not extend to academics, and at fourteen, Lee dropped out of high school. He moved in with his brother, Michael, and took the first job he found: as a bar boy at a restaurant called Me Lai Trin. Only a few weeks later he was fired for getting into a fist fight with a co-worker. But he had already recognized in himself an interest in the professional kitchen; it was not just the food preparation, but the life. “They could swear and throw things and tell the waiters off, and I thought, ‘That’s where I belong.’”

Next he took on the job of dishwasher at the (still) wildly popular Peking Garden restaurant in Kowloon, where aside from scrubbing however many woks it takes to feed three or four hundred customers each night, his duties included gutting fish, peeling shrimp, shucking oysters, and poaching lobster. A year or so on, a friend told him of an opening for a better-paying, drier job at one of the Western-style hotels, and so it came to be that in 1974, sixteen-year-old Susur Lee signed up as a stock boy at a place he had never heard of: the Peninsula Hotel.

“When I first walked in to the kitchen at the Peninsula and heard the chefs speaking French, it sounded to me like they were throwing up,” Lee told me of his first encounter with the language of Molière.

He persevered, not with the language but with the food—the vast, strange, and utterly foreign cuisine that I was brought up to think of as l’art culinaire. Gaddi’s, the showcase restaurant at the Peninsula, was a formal French restaurant with a conventionally organized European kitchen. It took Lee three years to make chef de partie, and then chef saucier, in which capacity he soon found himself stationed in the restaurant proper, pushing his trolley around the grand old dining room and finishing sauces with a theatrical, flaming-booze-embellished flourish for all to see. And that is how, while flambéing up a steak au poivre one night, he met a visiting English teacher from Tillsonburg, Ontario, named Marilou Covey. A year later he quit the colony for the first time to go travelling with her, and via a deliberately circuitous route through Southeast Asia, India, Egypt, Morocco, Greece, Italy, and France, finally made it to Toronto in September 1979.

For Lee, cooking was then just a job, and he signed up for three: he started his day baking croissants at an uptown patisserie, then did a dinner shift as a line cook at the Sheraton Hotel, and then another at a nightclub in Yorkville. When Covey took a course at the University of British Columbia, Lee landed a gig cooking pasta at a restaurant owned by Umberto Menghi. Later, back in Toronto, he returned to French cooking, but this time in the novel and intriguing form of la nouvelle cuisine, when he signed up as chef saucier under Gunter Gugelmeier at the Westbury Hotel. Other French restaurants followed, but Lee showed no signs of finding his culinary voice. They had married and were planning a return to Hong Kong when, on September 1, 1983, Covey perished along with 268 other passengers and crew when a Soviet jet fighter shot down Korean Air Lines flight 007. In the grip of depression, Lee stayed put and signed up for the easiest job he could find: flipping burgers at a place called Peter Pan, on Queen Street West. The local talent pool was slight and he was soon offered control of the kitchen.

The Queen West strip was then the city’s only neighbourhood to possess some reasonable fraction of New York–class gritty, stylish, urban cool. As Lee began to look around at what was happening, he perceived that the local clientele might be willing and eager to try something new. To begin, he marginalized the burgers and pushed salads and other healthier fare to the fore, sometimes making references in taste and texture to his Asian roots and other times to his French training or his recent travels. As the months went by, Lee began to demonstrate several proclivities that would from then on figure prominently in his career. His willingness to experiment by merging seemingly disparate elements of his training and experience into a new and successful whole was foretold in his first hit dish: a first course of a French-inspired chilled soup composed of a purée of watermelon and rhubarb (if you are Chinese, cold soup is dessert). The authoritarian streak of kitchen discipline that later earned him a reputation for throwing a lot of well-aimed pots and pans got off to a good start when he slapped a joint-puffing sous-chef with an open-palmed blow that extinguished the spliff right on his face.

And his habit of frequent travel to seek inspiration from other cultures and other restaurants was established when Peter Pan’s owner, Larry Guest, increasingly enamoured of his suddenly well-known chef, allowed him to take a month off each summer.

Pretty soon Lee was seeking ideas not for that restaurant but his next one—his own, which he wanted to open with a Peter Pan waitress, his new girlfriend and future wife, Brenda Bent. They opened Lotus in 1987. Over the next decade, Lee used that thirty-five-seat room to establish that his particular melding of French and Asian culinary traditions was one of the most simultaneously daring and coherent expressions of fusion happening anywhere. Then in 1997 he closed the place, packed up his young family, and quit town for Singapore, where he opened a restaurant named Club Chinois for the TungLok restaurant group, and worked as their consulting chef-at-large. When he returned two years later to look for a space for a new Toronto restaurant, he was determined to build one with a kitchen that could allow him to demonstrate all the new techniques he had learned in Asia—right down to steam ovens for cooking and heating individual bowls of soup. He also wanted to show off newly familiarized Asian ingredients. And the best way to showcase as much of each as possible was to build it with a kitchen large enough to enable what he tried to do but could never properly manage from the tiny kitchen at Lotus: multi-course tasting menus for every customer.

Singaporean Slaw with Umeboshi Dressing

Chef Susur Lee

Serves 4

For the pickled red onion

1 cup (250 mL) rice wine vinegar

1/4 tsp (1 mL) black peppercorns

1/4 tsp (1 mL) kosher or sea salt

1/4 tsp (1 mL) fennel seeds

1 sprig thyme

1 bay leaf

1 red onion, julienned

For the umeboshi dressing

1 cup (250 mL) umeboshi (salted Japanese apricot) paste

1/2 cup (125 mL) rice wine vinegar

3 tbsp (45 mL) granulated sugar

1-1/2 tbsp (22 mL) onion or chive oil

1-1/2 tsp (7 mL) minced ginger

1 tsp (5 mL) dashi broth

1 tsp (5 mL) mirin

Salt

For the salad

3 cups (750 mL) corn or peanut oil

1 shallot, thinly sliced

1/2 taro root, peeled and julienned

2 oz (55 g) rice vermicelli, broken into 3-inch (6 cm) pieces

2 green onions, julienned and soaked in ice water

1 large English cucumber, seeded and julienned

1 medium carrot, julienned

1 small jicama, peeled and julienned

2 large Roma tomatoes, blanched, peeled, seeded, and julienned

2 tbsp (30 mL) peanuts, toasted and crushed

4 tsp (20 mL) sesame seeds, toasted

4 tsp (20 mL) fennel sprouts

4 tsp (20 mL) purple basil sprouts

4 tsp (20 mL) daikon sprouts

4 tsp (20 mL) edible flower petals

For the pickled onion, combine the vinegar with 1 cup (250 mL) cold water in a saucepan and bring to a boil. Add the peppercorns, salt, fennel seeds, thyme, and bay leaf; simmer for 5 minutes. Pour hot over the onion in a bowl and let steep for 1 hour.

For the dressing, combine the umeboshi paste, vinegar, sugar, oil, ginger, dashi, mirin, and salt. Purée. Adjust seasoning and set aside.

For the salad, heat the oil in a deep saucepan to 325˚F (160˚C). Add the shallot slices and fry until bronzed and crisp––about 2 minutes. With a slotted spoon, remove shallots to paper towels to drain. Salt lightly. Raise heat so that oil reaches 400˚F (200˚C). Add taro strips and fry until bronzed and crisp–– about 2 minutes. Remove to paper towels to drain, and salt lightly. Add the vermicelli and remove it as soon as it curls––about 2 seconds. Salt lightly.

To finish, scatter vermicelli on 4 plates. Drain the green onion, pat with paper towels, and scatter over the vermicelli. Follow with the cucumber, carrot, jicama, tomatoes, and pickled red onion, mounding the heap into a peak. Sprinkle with peanuts and sesame seeds, and finish with a scattering of fennel, basil, and daikon sprouts, flower petals, and the crispy shallots. Serve the dressing on the side.

The blind tasting menu is a modern hybrid of two long-established culinary traditions: the French menu dégustation, that formal, luxurious, multi-course affair, meticulously scripted with punctuation by amuse-gueules, sorbets, and mignardises; and the Japanese tradition of omakase, wherein the customer honours the chef with his trust, carte blanche. It was Anton Mosimann who, in 1981, put the two together to come up with his menu surprise at The Terrace in the Dorchester Hotel. And—unsurprisingly—it later fell to Charlie Trotter, a thinking chef and a jazz enthusiast, to popularize these culinary jam sessions in the States from his Chicago base. Vancouver chef Rob Feenie had done an apprenticeship with Trotter in the early nineties, and it was on a return visit to Trotter’s kitchen in 1997 that he was inspired to give his struggling young Vancouver restaurant, Lumière, a rethink.

“Lumière opened November 11, 1995,” Feenie said, telling me the story some years later. “We were à la carte. And French. Going through some papers the other day, I found a menu. A rack of lamb was $21.95. We did veal with morels, filet de boeuf with peppercorn sauce. People complained it was too much like Le Crocodile. They were right.”

There was not much to choose from in Vancouver in 1997—“Umberto’s, Le Crocodile, Bishop’s. That was it”—but two versions of one of them was still one too many, and so Feenie decided to revamp the Lumière concept with a big nod to Trotter, and in particular to those blind tasting menus that would eventually help catapult the American chef to ten James Beard Foundation awards and two Michelin stars. And for Feenie, who was the first chef to perform the tasting menu trick in Vancouver, the ensuing adulation was similar, in large part because as well as being new to town, the format was so very liberating for his cooking.

“I cook by taste. I cook by experiment,” he explained to me. “I grew up with Japanese food, and later, in France, with French food. I’m not going to cook Indian food—I like to stay in a comfort zone of what I know. Lumière was an Asian-influenced restaurant with French techniques.”

The small-plate format suited his instinct for tidy juxtapositions of those two traditions because by their very nature, uncluttered by the other elements that must be included in a conventional main course, small plates lend themselves to the clear assertion of a single culinary point. Tasting menus also proved to be a dazzling showcase for Feenie’s unrelenting finesse. I was lucky enough to enjoy many of them. One of the last started with a demitasse-sized portion of a velvety purée of sweet corn enthusiastically sprinkled with white truffle oil. Then there was scallop tartare made with thin, delicate slices of small bay scallops built in a little mound over a raw oyster, enhanced with the mild crunch of a fine brunoise of blanched celery, dressed with vanillainfused trout roe, foamed onion jus, and the very surprising but eminently successful addition of a few shavings of pecorino. (When I asked how he had ever thought of that one, he came clean: “Actually, we didn’t plan it and we didn’t used to make it that way. The cheese fell off another plate at the pass, and instead of taking it off the tartare, [chef] Marc-André [Choquette] said, ‘Let’s try it!’”) The next course was a tiny, delicate boudin blanc served atop a bed of orzo laced with shredded lamb cheek and a reduction of red wine and lamb jus so rich that it left one’s lips tacky. Then there was sablefish, glazed with soy, ginger, and sake and plated with braised pork belly and tiny, delicate chanterelles, all encircled with a shallow moat of truffled vinaigrette. And finally a few slices of ultra-tender duck magret accompanied by a delicate ravioli stuffed full of shredded confit, sauced with a duck reduction laced with smoky paprika, its citrus notes an echo for the two tiny, peeled segments of clementine perched on top of the magret. As usual my notes then trailed off into generic observations on rich Quebec cheeses and impeccable desserts.

Feenie’s tasting menus were a success from the outset. In 1997 Vancouver Magazine anointed Lumière the best restaurant in Vancouver. In 1998, the first year that Lumière began to focus exclusively on tasting menus, Foodservice and Hospitality magazine named it “Canadian restaurant of the year.” The next year, Gourmet magazine named it the best restaurant in Vancouver, and the year after that, Lumière became the only free-standing Relais Gourmand in Canada (joining two Quebec hotels, L’Eau à la Bouche, in Sainte-Adèle, and the Auberge Hatley, in North Hatley, in what was then a small Canadian club of three to boast the top Relais & Châteaux designation, since renamed Les Grands Chefs). Then in 2001, Lumière joined an even more exclusive club: Les Grandes Tables du Monde.

“I’m calling you to tell you this,” Feenie told me when he reached me on my cell phone, “because no one I’ve called in Vancouver has even heard of it.”

It had been growing apparent for some time that Feenie’s Lumière was increasingly operating at a disconnect from the tastes of his small hometown. His restaurant had no hope of charging the same prices as his sister restaurants in Relais Gourmand and Les Grandes Tables du Monde, places like Le Gavroche in London, Le Bernardin in New York, or Pierre Gagnaire in Paris. But he carried on all the same. Across town, West had opened with David Hawksworth at the stove, on request turning out tasting menus of equal calibre, course for course. Multi-course menus dégustations accounted for more than half the meals prepared by Normand Laprise at Toqué! When Susur restaurant opened in Toronto in late 2000, written tasting menus were popular at all the top restaurants in Toronto—Splendido, North 44, Scaramouche, The Fifth, Canoe, and Avalon. By the time Perigee opened in the Toronto Distillery District, in 2003, serving nothing but blind tasting menus, chef Susur Lee was doing that and more—his blind tasting menus were running ten or more courses.

The format was a godsend for chefs inclined to one-upmanship and showing off (i.e., most of them). And at a time when fine dining of genuine quality was a new phenomenon, freshly arrived in cities like Toronto and Vancouver that had been anything but weaned on it, it was the perfect framework with which to introduce diners to new flavours and ideas of which they would not ordinarily partake. For no matter how enthusiastic the consumer, there would always be more customers at David Hawksworth’s West ordering fish and chips at lunch than those selecting an appetizer of raw and cooked sea urchin with fennel. The same held true for Feenie’s braised sweetbreads with truffled lentils, and Marc Thuet’s braised calf’s brains with foie gras and his navarin of spring lamb with its kidneys and testicles. Even chef Susur Lee’s unusually dedicated diners were not going to make his elk strip loin with slimy yamaimo (Japanese mountain potato), arame (seaweed), and uni (sea urchin gonads) or Chinese-style braised abalone with braised pig’s ear, celery, and black truffle salad the bestselling items on his menu. And if these chefs and others like them had not put these dishes in their tasting menus, they would instead have languished in some overlooked corner of the printed menu, until they were excised from it altogether the following month to make way for something more accessible and profitable—which is what restaurants are all about.

So for food critics like me who ate out too much, our palates jaded and bored somnolent by the prospect of another perfect veal chop with porcini and cream, the tasting menu and all the nifty flavours that came with it were more than welcome. As long as they were executed by the right hands, they made for the best possible night out. After a time, though, it did begin to dawn on me that I was probably guilty of praising some of them in a manner that exceeded their particular relevance. A lot of people simply did not care to eat that way. Svelte women in particular seemed to consider the tasting menu a form of torture. And when I think back to some of those twelve-course dinners turned out by Susur Lee or some other chef who had asked me what I considered then to be such a lovely question—“May I cook for you?”—it is not always my full belly I remember from the experience so much as my bruised shins, courtesy of my date across the table, hissing, “Please, make him stop,” and kicking me under the tablecloth every time the waiter turned up with yet another course to explain.

The public’s enthusiasm for tasting menus was well on the wane long before the sinking economy struck its fatal blow in 2008. Although Feenie would not prove able to hang on to Lumière long enough to see the necessary changes through (he was ousted in late 2007), he had told me in 2006 of his plans to drop his tasting menu format and revamp to satisfy more casual tastes. By then, back in Toronto, Perigee had gone to a conventional menu format, only two or three percent of diners at North 44 were choosing the multi-course option, and Splendido owner Yannick Bigourdan had assured me that his were still popular only because hardly anyone else did them any longer. Susur himself was giving up on the concept the year before he formally wrapped it up with the closure of his eponymous restaurant that was so entwined with it.

“The bottom line is that there’s a new generation in my restaurant now,” Lee explained to me in late 2007. “They want to experiment but they want to have an element of familiarity with what’s on the plate, or they don’t remember what they’ve eaten. People don’t want to sit for so many hours anymore. They don’t want to spend the same big money.”

By then, neither did I. But for the rarest exception I had grown bored with the procedure, too, and did not see why chefs who could not get their point across in three or four courses should be indulged with another hour of my time to try again. Worse, the corrupting habits of learning the cooking trade in kitchens focused on tasting menus were starting to percolate into restaurants run by the younger generation: time and time again, I would try out some new place, have a great first course, and then be stumped by the second one—and in particular, by what the young chef had decided to plate with the protein. It started to dawn on me that most tasting menu kitchen alumnae had no idea what went well with what because they had never seen it done before—small plates do not have side dishes. It was fun for a while, but the time had come to turn the page.

Some form of tasting menu or menu dégustation nonetheless endures in Canada, at institutions (like Toqué!, in Montreal), at new restaurants where serious young chefs are cooking at their own restaurants for the first time (like Michael Caballo at Edulis, in Toronto), and elsewhere by special request. The Japanese tradition of omakase is alive and well at serious Japanese restaurants (like Sushi Kaji, in Toronto, or Tojo, in Vancouver). But by and large none of our chefs enjoy the co-existing circumstances that enable their counterparts stateside to continue more successfully with the format. American chefs simply have greater celebrity and international draw, and in cities like Los Angeles, New York, and Chicago, they enjoy a combination of local wealth and throngs of tourists seeking culinary experiences at any price that nowhere here can match. All top New York restaurants, such as Daniel, Per Se, and Jean-Georges, continue to offer extended menus. In Chicago, Grant Achatz’s tasting menus at Next! are sold out months in advance, and a reservation at his all-tasting-menu Alinea is also hard to come by. Nevertheless, even in Chicago, Achatz’s one-time mentor Charlie Trotter announced earlier that he is withdrawing from the game, closing his flagship eponymous restaurant after a twenty-five-year run in order to return to university to pursue a master’s degree in philosophy. (He never was an ordinary chef.)

The trend in Canada is to get back to basics on the plate—and to maximize profits through the use of a good name. No one has been busier at this than Susur Lee, who in 2008 finally made good on a fifteen-year-old threat to quit Toronto for New York, when he seized a last-minute chance to open a restaurant for the Thompson Hotel group in their new property on the Lower East Side. Lee called his hundred-seat New York outpost Shang. The next year, Lee opened a second restaurant for the Thompson group, ostensibly saving the day by filling in when Todd English unexpectedly backed out of their new property in Washington, the Donovan House. And in early 2010, he rejoined forces with his friend Andrew Tjioe’s TungLok restaurant group and lent his name to their new restaurant, Chinois by Susur Lee, in Hotel Michael at Resorts World Sentosa in Singapore, which he is required to visit three times a year. Back in Toronto, in 2008 his old flagship, Susur, was first relaunched falteringly as Madeline but lasted only two years (it was perhaps never a good idea to name a restaurant after a mother you tell everyone was a terrible cook). Madeline’s became Lee Lounge, an adjunct to his original mid-range restaurant, Lee. Like Lee, Shang and Zentan were never in the tasting menu business. They also marked Susur Lee’s return to the predominantly Asian flavours with which he made his reputation. Even so, Shang was poorly reviewed and closed in 2011. Zentan was better received, and continues to do fair business. In Singapore, Chinois serves upscale new Chinese cooking with great success.

In Vancouver, meanwhile, Rob Feenie lost Lumière in 2007, settling in next as the food program director for the Cactus Club Café chain.