The Foie Gras Tin and Other Delights: A Memoir of High Service and Higher Egos

The Foie Gras Tin and Other Delights: A Memoir of High Service and Higher Egos

At fourteen, I proved myself equal to a full day’s work at Heffernan’s, a general store on a lonely stretch of Highway 7 between Peterborough and Norwood. There, I wrote out receipts for local farmers and first grappled with the discipline of the pen. My initial attempts at cursive were so illegible that I began using a ruler to steady my hand. This obsessive habit developed into a formal penmanship. It is a hand that has earned me consistent compliments from schoolteachers and has served me for decades. I have used it to render daily specials on restaurant chalkboards with practiced, idiosyncratic clarity.

Between pumping gas and clerking, I found my way to the kitchen at the back of the store. This was my first brush with the messy alchemy of baking. Like most aspiring cooks of my generation, I was a devotee of Julia Child. Her televised rigour gave my amateur efforts a certain pedagogical purpose. I remember lugging a dangerously heavy banana cake, thick with cream cheese icing, onto a Greyhound bus bound for Toronto. I hid it with the secrecy of a bootlegger and no small concern for the stability of the unrefrigerated frosting. I placed it under my grandmother’s couch until her birthday the following day. It was a humble, cross-provincial pilgrimage that signalled my transition from the country to the city’s burgeoning food scene.

My formal education followed the trajectory of the era’s middlebrow palate. I spent my early years navigating the efficient galleys of the Keg and the Corkscrew. By nineteen, I was a standout, selected to travel between locations as a troubleshooter for various kitchen crises. It was an age of salad bars and broiled lobster tails. I became a devout reader of cookbooks, always searching for the "why" behind the "how." My shift toward a true culinary backbone began when I arrived in Toronto. I was fortunate to find several mentors with a dedicated interest in gastronomy. They took me through the city’s great dining rooms and offered a masterclass in the standards of haute cuisine.

My first post was at The Vineyard, the city’s inaugural wine bar. During these years, I began a weekly commute between Toronto and London. This rhythmic transit became a pattern I maintained many times over my career. One evening at The Vineyard, we hosted Alan Bates and Oliver Reed. It was a truculent pairing that felt less like a dinner service and more like a high-wire act of theatrical gravity. My next move was back to London in 1979. My life partner and I were the first two waiters hired at Gabriele’s, a German restaurant with serious French aspirations situated in the building that would eventually become Fellini Koolini’s. We were a crew trained by the sommelier and maître d’ from The Church Restaurant in Stratford. Even that rigorous finishing school couldn’t prevent the occasional absurdity. One night, my partner accidentally rolled a whole head of cauliflower, slathered in hot cheese sauce, down the centre of a table. A rogue vegetable made its debut alongside a formal Chateaubriand.

By the early 1980s, I was back in the thick of it at the Montreal Bistro in Yorkville. My first night stays etched in memory by the sound of exploding glass. While opening a prohibitively expensive bottle of champagne, the cork flew out with such force that the vintage erupted and splashed the head of TV Guide, whom I was serving. I was certain the incident would result in my immediate termination. I left of my own accord before the house could speak.

At Le Trou Normand, I worked alongside a young Susur Lee. We were both under the thumb of Wolfgang Herget—a man whose kind appearance could turn furious at the sight of a poorly made tarte aux pommes. Herget expected perfection, which made one night unforgettable. It was sweltering, and the terrace remained full as the last guests arrived: the chef from Three Small Rooms. Wolfgang was tired, and the heavy air added to the tension. In haste, he mistakenly plated the tin bottom of a pâté de foie gras container and sent it out. For the first time in my career, I saw Wolfgang so humbled he apologized. I took advantage, amplifying his embarrassment until it hung in the air, as thin as the tin itself.

It was a room of high stakes and fragile egos. I recall the songwriter Paul Williams, fresh off the success of "Evergreen." He was barrel-chested and diminutive, a man whose physical presence seemed to overcompensate for his lack of stature with sharp-edged impatience. Deep in his cups and far from polite, he snatched a numbered bill off the reservation desk to sign for an autograph seeker. The bills were strictly sequenced. Because the restaurant had recently been audited, we were forced to pay the house fifty dollars for every missing slip. When I politely suggested that I fetch him a proper piece of paper to save my own wages, he took it as a personal affront and became truly nasty. The situation was only defused when Babette, the formidable presence who ran the front of the house, arrived. As quick to hire as the Chef was to fire, Babette was the only one who could manage the room’s histrionics.

Yet the room also drew the visionaries: Jim Henson was a regular, and I recall James Woods, Debbie Harry, and David Cronenberg huddling in the corridor leading to the restrooms. They were filming Videodrome nearby and appeared to be up to no good, the kind of beautiful, gritty mischief that cut right through our classical French rigour. It was here, too, that I encountered Peter O’Toole. Wolfgang was visibly disappointed when O’Toole bypassed the more "serious" fare for the “peasant-style”  Flemish stew. By the end of the meal, and several Calvados later, O’Toole had plucked a brass coal bed warmer off the wall and was swinging it around the room, apparently under the impression it was a chamber pot.

Later, I moved into management at One of One and Lela. One of One was particularly high-end, a few blocks from CityTV and across from Joe Allen's. We were the clubhouse for the city’s media class. Lela became a lighthouse for the early Toronto Film Festivals, where I hosted the likes of Divine, out of drag that evening for the film Female Trouble. Jane Siberry’s parents once mistook Bruce Cockburn for Bruce Springsteen. Jane herself lived around the corner and would drop in to order roasted garlic. She was one of the first dedicated vegans I met and cooked for. I also recall hosting Sandy Dennis for an entire afternoon. She was a hero of mine since Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Seeing such icons in a dining room was a masterclass in avant-garde hospitality.

In 1985, I found my way to The Church Restaurant in Stratford. Housed in a converted nineteenth-century sanctuary, it was the grand dame of the region's culinary scene. Under Joe Mandel and Robin Phillips, the restaurant became a theatre of fine dining. We were strictly told not to disturb Maggie Smith. She was then in her absolute prime, possessing a sharp, avian elegance and a gaze that could wither a waiter from across the nave. I had adored her since The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Earlier that week, I actually stood behind her in the queue at Canada Trust, only realizing it was her when she opened her mouth to speak. That unmistakable, world-weary cadence cut through the then-small-town bank air. The room was a revolving door of talent: Sada Thompson, Andrea Martin, Judy Collins, Timothy Findlay, Brian Bedford, Christopher Plummer, Colm Feore, and Martin Short all held court there. It was here I first met Susan Wright and Brent Carver, talents I would get to know better later when they were at London’s Grand Theatre.

Seeking a road less travelled, I landed in 1992 at La Sablonnerie on the motor-car-free island of Sark. It was a time warp where life moved at the pace of a horse-drawn carriage. We cooked what the island provided: Sark lobsters and cream so thick it felt like a luxury. Even the Roux brothers, Albert and Michel, would occasionally appear. To see the masters of the Michelin world in that rugged setting was my first real brush with terroir. This came long before it became a marketing term.

The romance of the industry met its hardest truth shortly after in Hampshire, England, at a dinner club in Chandler’s Ford. I was there just as "Mad Cow Disease" mutated into an epidemic. My naivety regarding the food chain evaporated. For the first time, I became politicized, questioning the very policies that stocked my walk-in. Returning to Ontario, this tectonic shift manifested in my own ventures. Along with Tania Auger, I opened the Shark Inn and 99 King—spaces where we could finally define our own standards. My later ventures, La Cucina and Murano, were love letters to the Italian regionalism that had finally betrayed my French loyalties. While at Murano Restaurant in 2000, the intellectual resolution to my earlier crisis in England finally arrived. On a culinary journey through Emilia-Romagna, I was formally introduced to the "Slow Food" movement. It was an epiphany: the radical idea that we must safeguard traditional regional specialties against the encroachment of industrial speed. It was also during this era that my colleague Joan Brennan and I were tasked with creating the food for the wedding scene in the Judy Garland biopic, Me and My Shadows. As a fan of Judy Davis, it was a surreal moment to see my own craft used to frame hers.

It was during this time that I first set up the restaurant and kitchen at Blackfriars, establishing the foundations of what would become a local institution. Though I moved on to other projects, I eventually returned twenty years later, coming full circle to shepherd Blackfriars through its final six years. My career has been a series of partnerships that have become a way of life, and a fair bit of name-dropping that has become a job requirement. Writing for eatdrink and Lifestyle magazine for many years allowed me to document this landscape from the inside out. Fifteen years ago, my involvement with the Western Fair Farmers’ and Artisans’ Market gave me a platform to lead innovative initiatives during a transformational time. I’ve learned that if you are patient, a vision more articulate than any business plan will emerge. It happens organically, often while observing the same familiar faces—I’d occasionally spot Victor Garber browsing the stalls, a quiet reminder of the world I’d come from. In the culinary corridors of Ontario, from London to Toronto to Stratford, we aren't just building kitchens; we are cultivating an ecosystem.