BANACINI IS IMPRESSED
Four eateries profiled
For MasterChef Canada judge and Toronto chef and restaurateur Michael Bonacini, going out to eat isn’t a matter of relishing the best that haute cuisine can offer.
“It’s not about fine dining and foie gras and truffles and lobster,” Bonacini said during a trip to Ottawa in December. “It is about finding a great little place that feels comfortable and cosy, where the chef just loves to cook and cooks wonderfully well, with flavourful food that is just right.”
While in Ottawa, Bonacini found four such restaurants, and his visits to them — Atelier, Fairouz, Bar Laurel and Edgar in Gatineau’s Hull sector — are documented on a new episode of his Bell Fibe TV channel 1 program, 24 Hours of Food. The program’s latest season, which includes episodes focused on the restaurant scenes of Ottawa, Toronto, Calgary and St. John’s, Nfld., was made available this week.
During his show’s previous season, Bonacini, also visited Ottawa, as well as Toronto and Montreal. Based on his experiences and research, he said Ottawa has an “exciting and vibrant” culinary scene.
What Bonacini appreciates about restaurants, wherever they might be, is their individuality.
“It’s almost the chef saying, ‘This is the kind of food that I do, if this doesn’t work for you, then there’s other restaurants for you out there,’ ” he said.
“I love that individuality of it, that sort of slightly maverick approach where, ‘These are my ideas, these are my values, this is the kind of food I love to cook, that I love to eat and I want to share with my guests.’ I think that’s amazing.”
Atelier on Rochester Street, the acclaimed restaurant of two-time Canadian Culinary Champion chef Marc Lepine, qualifies, Bonacini said.
Lepine only serves high-end and highly creative 12-course tasting menus, and the risks of Atelier’s uncompromising approach struck Bonacini.
“I (would have) thought it was a recipe for a quick, or a slow, painful death, to be honest with you ... that’s pretty darn gutsy, by any imagination,” he said.
But a visit to Atelier made Bonacini a believer in the restaurant and Lepine. “I left saying he’s doing an amazing job. He’s adding great interest and intrigue to the dining fabric of Ottawa. He’s doing a bloody good job.”
Bonacini gushed with praise for Edgar, the tiny brunch and lunch place run by chef Marysol Foucault, and for her signature Dutch Baby pancakes. “It was probably the most delicious breakfast I have had in years. As she was describing it to me, I said on camera I was totally salivating,” Bonacini said.
During the show’s previous visit to Ottawa, Bonacini tried Murray Street Kitchen in the ByWard Market for breakfast, Ma Tante Carole in Wakefield for lunch, the small Mexican restaurant Corazon de Maiz in the ByWard Market Square building for dinner, and Hooch Bourbon House on Rideau Street for late-night snacks. Of those four restaurants, Murray Street Kitchen and Ma Tante Carole have closed.
Still, Bonacini considered Ottawa “a city that appreciates what chefs are doing.” He said that in all of the Canadian restaurant scenes that he’s visited “guests want to be shown, educated, surprised ... they want to experience the unexpected, and I think the culinary world is doing that.” As an example, he noted the high-quality Lebanese wines available at Fairouz, which serves elevated Middle Eastern-inspired fare.
Last year, when OpenTable, a leading international online restaurant-reservation service, released its 2016 list of Canada’s 100 best restaurants, no Ottawa restaurant made the cut. Bonacini said he was surprised that restaurants here were shut out.
“My advice to the chefs is don’t give up hope,” Bonacini said. “In business, you create a vision for the restaurant and have a belief that the kind of cuisine, the style of restaurant, food and service move you closer to fulfilling that vision.
“I say, ‘Damn the torpedoes,’ to any list. It’s what you do day in and day out that really matters.”
At a higher level, no Canadian restaurant has won a Michelin star for fine dining because Michelin inspectors don’t survey restaurants here as they do in select American cities, France, Japan and elsewhere. Bonacini said that he once approached Michelin about Canada being excluded, and was told that Canada doesn’t have a sufficiently dense population in the breadth of its geography.
“I don’t have this burning desire to visit as many Michelin-starred restaurants as I can any longer,” Bonacini added.
“Michelin stars to me are not the be all and end all. What is more important to me is that vibe, that ‘it’ factor, that restaurants, when they have it, you know it’s a great spot.”
It is about finding a great little place that feels comfortable and cosy, where the chef just loves to cook …