ETHICAL GOURMET / Remind me to Tell You About the Time I Looked in the Heart of an Artichoke

Interview with Joe Duby from Blu Duby BY BRYAN LAVERY Blu Duby is an unpretentious restaurant in downtown London that celebrates honest food and wine, a sophisticated atmosphere, friendly service and hospitality. Owners Joe and Cheryl Duby have established a loyal clientele by creating a welcoming ambience where patrons can come and enjoy a glass of wine or a cocktail at the bar, a couple of appetizers or a full dining experience, in a casual yet stylish setting. Creating a restaurant that others talk about and willingly recommend to others is paramount for restaurant success. The Duby’s are more interested in serving you a good dinner than in doing culinary gymnastics to compete for a spot in the gastronomic Olympics. Quite simply, the restaurant is aiming to feed its customers well by combining accessible artful cuisine and an eclectic wine list. Their tagline: “A remarkable experience designed to accommodate every budget.” The result: a sleek and very successful operati...

Toronto’s Culinary Hot Spots 2016 BY BRYAN LAVERY What is more exciting than planning a culinary getaway to Toronto? Here are a few recommendations and tips for navigating the vibrant and ever-changing restaurant scene and some of Toronto’s hottest culinary tickets. Park your vehicle. There is an efficient transit system that makes it easy to get around the city. More than that, Toronto is a walkable city of many communities with great restaurants, markets and culinary retailers. Located on Front Street and operating since 1803, the St. Lawrence Market is heralded as the world's best food market by National Geographic. The other must-see is Kensington Market, another noted gastronomic attraction, and colourful vestige of the area’s storied history. The market is an expansive multi-cultural culinary scene sprawling across numerous blocks to the west of downtown’s vibrant Chinatown. Both markets remain a fundamental part of Toronto’s epicurean cultu...

  Culinary Education:   Local Food Skills and the Culinary Pre-Apprenticeship Program at the London Training Centre BY BRYAN LAVERY Since 2002, David Corke has been the Executive Director of London Training Centre (LTC), an award winning, non-profit social mission driven organization, which applies market-based strategies to self-fund programs and initiatives that help people have a positive impact in the community.   Corke is a highly-respected and fervent food educator with a rock-steady commitment. He is a long-time proponent for local and sustainable food systems, from both a civic and economic development viewpoint. When it started in 1987, the LTC helped disenfranchised young people find employment in the food service industry. Since then, however, LTC has morphed into a cutting-edge and multifaceted organization providing food skills training, advocacy for careers in food service, and other services that range from computer training to banquet st...

BY BRYAN LAVERY

  BY BRYAN LAVERY Recently, my nephew Nicholas and I were guests of Langdon Hall Country House Hotel & Spa.   For our culinary road trip we were provided with an all-new Lexus 2016 RX350 from Lexus of London. We drove to Stratford for a delicious repast of chicken and waffles at The Red Rabbit restaurant and a trip to the Slow Food Market, arriving at Langdon Hall at three in the afternoon. As we turned into Langdon Hall’s discreet driveway and drove up the winding road, we passed through wooded acreage dusted with a light snowfall and arrived at the 75-acre hilltop estate’s main house, which is the centerpiece of the estate. Built in 1898 as the lavish summer retreat of Eugene Langdon Wilks , (a great-great-grandson of John Jacob Astor), the imposing main house is inspired by Georgian and Classical traditions of the Federal Revival Style. The property, with its expansive gardens and Carolinian trails, is situated in the countrysi...

    Gabrielle Hamilton, the chef/owner of New York’s Prune, the author of both the memoir Blood, Bones & Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef ranks and the Prune cookbook, and a star of season 4 of the PBS series Mind of a Chef. It is my opinion that Hamilton ranks among the upper echelons of food memoirists M.F.K. Fisher and Elizabeth David. Launching her Canadian visit on January 11th 2016 , Chef Gabrielle Hamilton will be in conversation with fellow Joseph Hoare Gastronomic Writer In Residence and notable author Ian Brown at the Toronto Public Library Appel Salon Series. The two acclaimed authors will discuss Hamilton’s life as a chef and writer. This event will be held at the Appel Salon in Toronto Reference Library. While in residence at the Stratford Chefs School, Chef Hamilton will work alongside students for three dinners, bringing her Prune to Stratford’s Prune Restaurant (the school’s dinner venue partner). Dates include: F...

Rione X1 and "Roman-Jewish Ghetto Cuisine" in Wychwood Park/Hillcrest Village BY BRYAN LAVERY   As anyone who reads my columns regularly is aware, I have been a student of the Italian kitchen for the last thirty years, so genuine regional Italian cooking resonates with me. Until the unification of Italy in 1861, one could not speak of a national cuisine. The reality of Italian cookery is an amalgamation of distinct regional cuisines more diverse than anywhere else in Europe. Like the rest of Italy, Rome is made of many districts, each with distinctive traditional specialities. Additional subsets of cuisines remain both strongly regional and localized. The self-proclaimed "Roman-Jewish Ghetto” cuisine, a form of cucina povera (literally meaning the impoverished kitchen) distinguishes the newly opened Rione X1, from   a number of other Italian-inspired restaurants on the Wychwood/Hillcrest Village restaurant strip in Toronto. The...