Chef Jamie Kennedy bids farewell to the restaurant game,
Jennifer Bain drops in on chef Jamie Kennedy’s last day at Gilead Café and hears a lot of love stories
Nothing seems amiss at Gilead Café & Wine Bar in the early hours of Tuesday, March 31. There are welcoming vases of forsythia branches, freesia and pussy willows in the windows, and Mason jars of mustard pickles and pickled beans on the shelves.
Pablo Trindade fills breakfast orders for red fife sourdough toast and Americanos. Thayalan “Seeva” Thambithurai and Julius Sunthar George prep for lunch. Jamie Kennedy washes lettuce for dinner.
Yukon Gold potatoes are peeled, cut into those famous French fries, par-fried and spread out on six sheet pans to cool. It’s just a regular day at Gilead Café in Corktown. It just happens to be the last day. The last day not just of Gilead, but of a Jamie Kennedy restaurant in Toronto. RIP Palmerston, Jamie Kennedy at the ROM, Jamie Kennedy Wine Bar, Jamie Kennedy at the Gardiner, Gilead Café.
Breakfast, from 8 to 11, is uncomfortably quiet. There’s a table of regulars and the neighbour who does the flowers.
“Artistic, independent and authentic.” Christina Binetti, co-owner of Linden Grove flowers, chooses these words to describe Kennedy as she waits for Trindade to make her four drinks.
She lauds the “calm environment” of Gilead Café. “It’s elegant, but not pretentious, which I think is a reflection of Jamie’s personality. Everybody loves him very, very much.”
If these walls could talk, they would surely tell love stories.
By noon, the pace picks up. Walkins stride anxiously down Gilead Pl. to nab one of 45 seats. Dinner will be the real swan song. The reservation book is full for the prix-fixe, no corkage last supper.
“So the last day gave me an opportunity to pause and reflect on what I really want to do,” says Kennedy, who talks so quietly you have to enter his personal space to hear him.
The longtime local food advocate and member of the Order of Canada will go out with 11dishes, mostly classics with a few spontaneous touches.
The amuse-bouche will be a grilled lamb patty with tomato sauce and roasted carrots. For starters, there’s hot-smoked whitefish, salad with garlic scape vinaigrette or New England-style chowder. Tuesday means Cumbrae’s 60-day, dry-aged steak with fries, joined tonight by Fisherfolks’ halibut, a roasted squash with celery root purée and wild mushroom broth, and coq au vin.
“Coq au J.K. Hillier,” jokes Kennedy, who grows Pinot Noir grapes in the vineyard at his Pleasant Valley Farm in Prince Edward County and made the wine that goes into this classic braised dish.
For dessert, Kennedy will reprise the savoury rhubarb soup that he served at culinary protest Soupstock in 2012. There will be a comforting warm chocolate cake with vanilla ice cream, and apple strudel with maple ice cream and Ontario black walnuts.
Who, other than Kennedy, knows that black walnuts grow here?
Clayton Ruby will be at the last supper and advises that “you can identify a Jamie Kennedy plate by looking for simplicity, freshness and imagination.”
The criminal defence lawyer nominated Kennedy for his Order of Canada in 2010. He describes him as “the heart” of Canada’s food movement and believes half our “serious chefs” have passed through his kitchens.
Which brings us to the elephant in the kitchen. Kennedy is closing “because there really is no business case at Gilead.”
He staved off near bankruptcy in 2009 and chipped away at his debt until 2014 — the year that that he “gradually disengaged” from his lucrative gig as the exclusive caterer at the Gardiner Museum and then lost his “mojo.”
He expected his business to survive on meals and catering out of Gilead. He hoped to hire a young chef. It wasn’t meant to be. He was forced to return to night shifts and lettuce washing after 41 years in the industry. For a 58-year-old entrepreneur, it was “discouraging and a bit demoralizing.”
Kennedy pulled the restaurant plug before someone pulled it for him.
His gift to his four grown children is the Jamie Kennedy Kitchens brand. For himself, there will be “projectbased work,” whatever that may be.
“There’s got to be something else once you close a restaurant and make yourself available in ways you never thought about before,” he muses. He would make a brilliant teacher. Jamiekennedy.ca and a licensing agreement with Windows by Jamie Kennedy in Niagara Falls continue. Jamie Kennedy Kitchens may do select catering. J.K. Fries, led primarily by son Micha, may expand beyond its weekend market gig at Evergreen Brick Works. Gilead Café is for sale.
Those Mason jars of mustard pickles and pickled beans on Gilead’s shelves? The truth is there are only a handful of them. Kennedy calls the nearly empty shelves “a metaphor for the ending of a restaurant.”
As for Gilead’s 20-odd staff — which includes his three sons Micha, Jackson and Nile — Kennedy is helping some people find jobs, and letting others process the end of the J.K. era at their own pace. That’s the case with George and Thambithurai, the loyal line cooks who see Gilead through to the last meal.
“Last night I couldn’t sleep. It’s very sad,” sighs George, who has been with Kennedy almost 14 years. “This is my second house.”
Thambithurai goes back 22 years to Palmerston’s dish pit. “Jamie,” he says, “is a very simple person. He’s not like a boss. He’s like a friend. That’s why I like it here. He likes us too.”
“What can you do?” he asks with a shrug.
It’s a rhetorical question. You can’t replace an irreplaceable job. But you can fill the final orders of those famous fries.
In Kennedy’s prime, he turned out 340 kilos of fries a week. On closing day, he makes a respectable 23 kilos.
Gilead has “a tight little production area” where Yukon Gold potatoes are peeled, cut into thin fries, rinsed, blanched in Ontario sunflower oil, cooled on racks and fried a second time to order.
Like a musician performing his greatest hit at every concert, Kennedy gamely grabs a bowl and tosses an order of fries with fresh thyme for aroma, fine sea salt for seasoning and coarse sea salt for crunch.
These fries tell the ultimate local food story. As well, as Kennedy wrote last year in J.K.: The Jamie Kennedy Cookbook: “My French fries bridged the elitism of fine dining with the mass market of fast food.”
The fries were born in Paris when Kennedy, a young chef apprenticing in Europe, bought fries from a vendor at the base of the Eiffel Tower while waiting for a girlfriend who worked inside.
He’d “never been gob-smacked by the quality of a French fry before” and ruminated about their populist appeal. He began to see fries as a metaphor for his desire to appeal to a “broader range of people who might not be able to afford a fine dining meal.”
Kennedy knew he could raise the French fry bar by sourcing local potatoes and oil, and making mayonnaise instead of ubiquitous ketchup.
Inspired by the way Belgian frites are served and the craft paper he saw when taking his daughter Julia to Sunday art sessions at the AGO as a child, Kennedy created brown paper cones stamped with his logo for a final populist touch.
He has served untold orders of fries at his restaurants, catering events and market stand. From 2010 to 2013, he sold them at the Air Canada Centre during Leafs and Raptors games — with both cider and chili mayo — satisfying his “populist dream” to serve quality fries to the masses.
Kennedy’s culinary legacy goes beyond fries, of course. But eating them is as valid to him “as a fancy dining experience” — perhaps even more valid. He hopes they inspire people “to go after their own excellence” as he finds new ways to pursue his own. jbain@thestar.ca
“Jamie is a very simple person. He’s not like a boss. He’s like a friend. That’s why I like it here. He likes us too.” SEEVA THAMBITHURAI WHO HAS WORKED WITH JAMIE KENNEDY FOR 22 YEARS