Queen West eatery is keeping it Canadian
Montgomery’s gets creative in quest to only use ingredients from this country
Montgomery’s Restaurant chef and coowner Guy Rawlings lays out bags of dried herbs and flowers, procured from the restaurant’s rooftop garden and local farmers, on the kitchen counter. It looks like the contents of an herbalist’s pantry.
There are dried twigs of wild ginger, dried pickerel bellies and west coast squid, ground peppers, preserved salted Himrod grapes and woodruff leaves.
These curious components are the most ambitious additions to the restaurant’s goal of using only seasonal foods — including spices and condiments — sourced within Canada on its menu.
When Rawlings is finished grinding the pickerel and squid into a powder, he’ll add it to dressings as a salty, fishy alternative to anchovies. Recently the wild ginger was ground and added to dessert custard to give a hint of warm spice in lieu of cinnamon. The Himrod grapes add a caper-like, briny punch to a cabbage dish. The woodruff leaves will give his house-made ice cream (sweetened with honey from the Niagara region) delectable notes of pistachio, anise and rosewater.
The restaurant has sourced only Canadian meat, seafood and vegetables since Rawlings and his wife-business partner Kim Montgomery opened at Queen St. W. and Ossington Ave. in 2016.
This past January, they decided to take their local-fare-only philosophy one step further. Rawlings packed up all of the restaurant’s non-Canadiangrown spices — cinnamon, star anise and black pepper — into a storage bin and gave it away — giving the chef the room to get creative and find local replacements.
“You force yourself into a position that really makes you look at the ingredient, because there are fewer options to choose from,” he says.
“Modern society puts in our mind that some things are available year-round,” Rawlings says of the way food has become available. He wants to cook with what is local and in season and “right now we have cabbage, turnips, onions and rutabaga.
“Having that focus on a few ingredients should produce better dishes because you’re not making a dish with seven different components that don’t necessarily add anything to the dish other than being pretty.”
By growing his own ingredients and visiting local farms, he has come to better appreciate food.
“When you’re carrying the soil, keeping the rodents away and doing the harvesting, you’re more respectful of the ingredients and more careful with every leaf of that herb and will think twice before throwing anything away,” he says.
He turns to the stoves to prepare a cabbage dish — an example of using an ingredient to its fullest potential.
He roasts the tender cabbage leaves until the edges are singed, then seared to a point of caramelization before they are cooked in fermented cabbage juice. Rawlings then drizzles sweet malt syrup — made from barley supplied from the nearby Bellwoods Brewery — over the leaves before a savoury foam made from duck broth, mustard and cabbage juice is spooned on top. He finishes the dish with preserved salted Ontario Himrod grapes that give little bursts of salty, briny juice.
The cabbage’s tough outer leaves — normally discarded — are roasted until dried and ground into a powder used as a seasoning. “The flavours intensify as they’re dried,” he says. “The cabbage got sweeter and developed a mustard undertone. We do it with other plants year-round and they all develop very different flavours. It’s interesting but not a new concept: paprika is dried peppers and now it’s an international spice.” Before opening Montgomery’s, Rawlings highlighted Canadian ingredients at other restaurants where he worked. When he was chef at the nowclosed Brockton General in Brockton Village eight years ago, he sought out small-scale local farmers and did his own butchering. Before that he briefly ran his own Canadian mustard business. He also used to forage around the GTA, though lately he’s been too busy with the restaurant — and two young kids.
At Montgomery’s, ramping up the Canadian ingredient theme means instead of lemons, his larder has some 20 kinds of vinegars made by adding a bacteria culture to cider or wine. Each is flavoured with different fruits as they come into season.
Instead of olive oil, he uses cold-pressed canola, sunflower and soybean oils from Pristine Gourmet in Waterford, southwest of Hamilton. He grinds dehydrated peppers grown on the rooftop garden to add heat to dishes and gets finishing salt from Annapolis Salt Co., a new venture by his friend chef Geoff Hopgood (former owner of the now-closed Hopgood’s Food- liner on Roncesvalles Ave.) that harvests salt from the Bay of Fundy on the east coast.
Still, the restaurant hasn’t reached the point where everything comes from Canada. It still serves tea and coffee and the cooking salt is the U.S.based Diamond Crystal Kosher Salt brand, the go-to salt in most professional kitchens due to its unique, flaky and hollow shape that makes it harder to oversalt dishes.
“Salt is the one thing we haven’t found a solution to yet,” Rawlings says. “Seasoning is very difficult to nail consistently among every cook in the kitchen. When you spend your whole career using that salt, it’s very hard to switch to a different one but we’re open to find- ing an alternative.”
Another challenge is realizing that keeping it Canadian doesn’t necessarily mean better for the environment. After all, Rawlings says, an ingredient from B.C. travels farther to get to Toronto than something from Vermont. Ideally, the chef one day wants to use mostly ingredients from southern Ontario.
“We’d like to set a radius but for now, we’re just saying within Canada. I think doing this pushes me to really think about the ingredients and will help create a more distinct culinary identity for the province we live in,” he says. “It sounds cheesy but I believe that what grows together goes together.”