Love of food founded Where to Eat in Canada
Ottawa couple have published it since 1971
She frequents Ottawa restaurants that are open late because she works until 10 p.m. most evenings — “Fraser (Café) is open late; Murray Street stays open late.” She swims a mile before breakfast each day in summer. She thinks Model Milk, a stylish new bistro in Calgary, is “quite fun,” but Toronto hot spot Edulis is inconsistent.
For an astounding 42 years, Anne Hardy has been the authoritative voice of Where to Eat in Canada, a book that few realize is published out of Ottawa. She is now 80-something (a topic she does not wish to discuss), but shows few signs of losing her appetite for her work.
And it’s difficult to imagine that anyone, in any country, works quite so many hours, or travels quite so far, to track down the best places to eat.
“In the summer, we do Toronto and the southern-Ontario-Niagara region,” says Hardy, who was born in and who has lived most of her life in Ottawa (she left for a few years to study English literature at the University of Toronto and moved to the U.S. when her husband was a professor at Yale University.)
“In September every year we leave for the Maritimes, and do a driving circuit through those provinces. Then we fly to Vancouver, make a trip to Vancouver Island, and drive back, trying the restaurants along the way, to Winnipeg.
“We’re always trying to beat the weather when we’re in the West — keeping an eye out for snow in the Rogers Pass. One year we were the last car to get into Winnipeg before the roads were closed.”
Back in Ottawa by mid-November, she and her husband regularly work until 10 p.m. in a barebones former print shop that’s piled everywhere with books, old typewriters and even an old press. They’re busy writing and editing entries for the next Where to Eat in Canada and checking out Ottawa and Montreal restaurants, but also publishing literary books, the reason they started Oberon Press back in 1967, launching the careers of such writers as David Adams Richards, Wayne Johnston, W.P. Kinsella and Rohinton Mistry.
“Books are dying,” her husband, Michael Macklem, says from his perch in front of a computer halfway along the warehouse-like building on Spruce Street, near Albert and Preston streets. Nonetheless, they will publish “about seven” literary books this year, he says.
“It’s not about the money,” he hollers back as Hardy and I chat and he goes on working.
It never was about the money for Macklem and Hardy, though Where to Eat in Canada was, for many years, a money-maker that helped support the literary publications.
The cross-Canada guide, still the only one of its kind, started out almost by accident, or perhaps Hardy would say by necessity.
“Michael and I would cross the country — I was the salesman for Oberon,” says Hardy. “At the end of the day, I’d ask a bookstore employee or a librarian where to eat. There was no guidebook to restaurants across Canada. Michael said ‘You can do it.’ ”
The year was 1971. “Those were the days when everyone served a baked potato in the foil on the plate,” recalls Hardy. “And when I’d criticize that, I’d get indignant letters — ‘that’s how my wife serves them!’”
Restaurants, she says, have come a long way.
“People are opening restaurants left and right. With schools like the Stratford chefs’ school and the culinary institute in P.E.I., there are more and more young people opening good restaurants. Unfortunately, a lot of them don’t last.”
The 1971 edition of Where to Eat in Canada, written with the help of Hardy’s friend Sondra Gotlieb, was 175 pages and contained about 250 reviews.
The 2012-13 edition is 356 pages and includes about 500 reviews; most far shorter than they used to be.
“I wanted in the early days to sell Canada as a destination and I’m sorry in a way that I can’t do that anymore,” says Hardy. “I’d like to go on about the scenery and what else to see in an area, but now another restaurant wouldn’t get in.”
Because her book is organized somewhat idiosyncratically, with maps in the front and alphabetically by location rather than restaurant name, it has always worked not only as a guide to eating, but as a guide to travelling the country.
Hardy has always relied on regional editors and writers to keep her abreast of places to try and to fill in the gaps on the areas she doesn’t get to — she doesn’t travel to the North, for example, but should you end up in Dawson City or Yellowknife, her book will tell you where to eat.
“We do have very good editors in other places,” she says. “I pay them, but I pay them miserably.”
Still, Hardy says she has visited most of the places in the book at least once and she phones all 500 restaurants every year to update information. Her commanding voice — or perhaps Macklem’s — rings through in the writing, whether it’s a review of the Cow Bay Café in Prince Rupert, B.C., or the Ferry Last-Stop Café in Newfoundland’s Portugal Cove.
“Few hotel chains dare to pretend that they have a good restaurant,” her book says, noting that Kingston’s Aquaterra, in the Radisson, is a rare exception.
“Only the choice of icewine still needs to be improved,” she says of The Black Cat, one of about 16 Ottawa-area restaurants that make the grade.
“Whalesbone isn’t the sort of place to take your mother-in-law,” writes Hardy, who has two daughters-in-law. “But it’s probably the most genuine restaurant in the city.”
Of the chef at La Table Des Roys in the Iles-de-la-Madeleine, she says, “We’ve been writing about Joanne Vigneault for over 30 years and we won’t listen to people who complain of her menu or service.”
Hardy says they go over other writers’ work carefully and her husband rewrites many of the entries — “so it’s probably his tone or my tone” you get throughout the book.
The same disclaimer — “We accept no advertisements. Nobody can buy his way into this guide and nobody can buy his way out.” — has been sprinkled throughout the book from the beginning.
Montreal has 17 restaurants in the guide, Toronto 38 and Vancouver 47.
“Vancouver has traditionally had the best food in the country,” Hardy says. “They have access to so much fish. Also a lot of chefs like living in Vancouver and they stay there.”
She says they apply a different standard to Ottawa, Toronto or Vancouver restaurants than they do “to somewhere in the outer reaches” and they try to find somewhere for people to eat along every stretch of highway.
“Most places do at least one thing well. We judge the quality of the cooking, not the surroundings. Whether it’s hamburgers or haute cuisine, do they do it well?”
One place, York’s in Perth-Andover, N.B., where you got a second helping of any dish, even lobster, for free, has been in the guidebook every year since 1971, but it will not be in the new edition, due out in late May, because flooding last spring destroyed it along with much of the town.
Another longtime entry — Mamma Teresa’s in Ottawa — was in the guide for more years than many, Hardy’s sister included, thought it deserved.
“It can be hard when it’s your hometown,” Hardy admits. “Not that they knew us as the authors of the book, but you’re old customers and you feel guilty. We waited for (owner) Juliano (Boselli) to retire.”
Hardy, who says she eats out nearly every night when they’re home, says the Ottawa dining scene has steadily improved over the years, but she prefers her own home cooking.
“I still think I cook better than a lot of restaurants. But you know they have constraints — you can’t afford to buy in quantity what you can for two people. There’s a reason why you see pork belly everywhere.”
Hardy says she approves of most food trends, “but I don’t really like all this deconstruction going on — like having a carrot cake with icing on one side of the plate and the cake on the other. I can’t help thinking that food should work together.”
Still, she said that Ottawa’s Atelier Restaurant, noted for its deconstructed dishes and molecular gastronomy, will be included for the first time in the 2013-14 edition of Where to Eat in Canada.
What’s less clear is how many more editions there will be.
The former bestseller sells fewer copies than it used to. How many fewer? “I don’t know and I don’t ask,” says Hardy.
Macklem says that while it still sells, “we spend so much money researching and travelling, we end up subsidizing it.
“It’s been losing money for many years, but money isn’t everything. At least there’s no competition.”
I ask Hardy, who has three grandchildren in their 20s, why she and Macklem keep on working so hard to put out a moneylosing book.
“Why indeed?” she replies. “Because I believe in the cause. I still do. These poor souls — I’ve put some of them out of business because I’ve sent them too much business.
“They’re not in it for the money, mostly. They’re idealistic, mostly, and they want to read that someone appreciates what they’re doing.”
She pauses a moment to consider.
“Frankly I don’t know whether it’s going to kill us or whether it’s keeping us alive.”