Chef’s care enriched culinary landscape
John Bil was an authority on sustainable seafood, with top restaurants to his name
If there was a Forrest Gump of Canada’s culinary scene, John Bil would have fit the profile. The co-owner of Honest Weight seafood restaurant and seafood counter in the Junction was involved in one way or another at some of the best restaurants in the country.
Bil died early Wednesday morning at his Toronto home at the age of 49 after being diagnosed with Stage 4 melanoma in late 2013. He leaves a legacy of helping to open some of Canada’s best restaurants and championing the country’s sustainable fisheries.
“He was a no-bullsh-t guy with an incredible work ethic. Uncompromising, but polite,” said his wife, Sheila Flaherty, who met Bil through the restaurant industry in 2015; the two married in October the following year. “It always seemed like we were on borrowed time, but we did so much cool stuff together. If there’s anybody that could be loved by him as much as he loved me, they’re the luckiest people in the world.”
The Toronto native got his start shucking oysters at Rodney’s Oyster House on King St. W. in the early ’90s. In 1992, he drove to Prince Edward Island to work at an oyster farm and learn more about Canada’s seafood industry. He became a travelling oyster salesman, driving to cities such as Boston, New York and Montreal to sell oysters to restaurants. It was this job that led him to meet David McMillan and Fred Morin, two chefs who would become his best friends and later recruit Bil to help open their first restaurant in 2005, Montreal’s Joe Beef, which would go on to become one of the country’s most-lauded restaurants.
Bil was committed to sourcing the best seafood for the restaurant (McMillan said in an interview that Bil would drive hours to meet an oyster farmer and taste an obscure breed of oyster), earning him a reputation that quickly spread throughout the industry. While Quebec chef Martin Picard was working on his 2012 Au Pied de Cochon Sugar Shack cookbook, he asked Bil to help manage his remote Cabane à Sucre sugar shack restaurant outside of Montreal. While working at the two restaurants, Bil came up with an unconventional way to avoid an hourlong, late-night commute back to the city.
“Prep was a bit overwhelming sometimes and between working at the Sugar Shack and Joe Beef, it was really tiring,” Bil told the Star in an interview last July. “Martin had a closet where he kept his fishing gear and it had big, industrial shelves. So one night I cleared the shelves, put in a bed roll and started sleeping there pretty regularly. Martin didn’t know about it and one day he went to get his fishing gear and when he turned the light on I was staring right at him from the shelf. I think it was at that point that cemented the fact to Martin that I was an OK guy.”
In 2010, Hugue Dufour, a former chef at one of Picard’s restaurants, asked Bil to help open M. Wells, the Michelin-recommended New York City steak house. In another example of his dedication, he slept in a trailer parked inside the restaurant’s con- struction space, and once spent a sleepless night monitoring the health of the 80 trout he got from a hatchery as they settled into their new home at the restaurant’s giant tank.
“He made so many people better and was this amazing source of information. He wanted these restaurants to succeed and asked for nothing in return,” Flaherty said of her husband on Wednesday.
After his cancer diagnosis at the end of 2013, Bil settled in Toronto where he could seek treatment. But he didn’t slow down. The tall, quiet, but always affable restaurateur opened Honest Weight with coowner Victoria Bazan in January 2015. Bil only stocked sustainable seafood from fisheries he could vouch for and encouraged diners to enjoy the flavours of simply prepared seafood, telling them he preferred to pan-fry fish with a bit of butter rather than hide it in deep-fried batter.
A year later, Bil teamed up with Joe Beef’s Morin again at the Luminato festival, transforming the second floor of the derelict Hearn Generating Station in Toronto’s Port Lands into a fine-dining French restaurant, Le Pavillon. Staffed by Toronto and Montreal’s top chefs, sommeliers and bartenders who befriended Bil over the years, Le Pavillon was the hardest restaurant in town to score a table at during the festival’s twoweek stint.
“Le Pavillon was like climbing Everest. He was still very much sick then but we still decided to do it. He was always up for anything,” said Morin, who left a cooking engagement in Philadelphia to be by Bil’s side Tuesday. “The guy was a peacemaker and brought people together. I believe he’s at peace and he’s happy.”
Morin added that Bil, a competitive cyclist, marathon runner and oyster farmer before entering the restaurant world, “lived the most dense life out of everyone.”
It’s a life that Bil once said he hoped would be remembered for all of his accomplishments, be it as grand as building a fine-dining restaurant in an abandoned power plant or as small as giving a customer tips on how to cook mackerel (his favourite fish).
“When I first got the diagnosis three years ago, I didn’t have a restaurant in Toronto and it might have been the bigger story that I had cancer than I was opening a restaurant,” Bil told the Star last summer. “Now after having Honest Weight and done Le Pavillon, I hope the story is about what I’ve done, not what I have.”