A Little taste of Indonesia
Yonge and Davisville restaurant sure to become more high-profile after appearance at food festival
Iron Chef Masaharu Morimoto is coming to Taste of Toronto, but I’m rooting for the chef couple that runs Little Sister.
Michael van den Winkel and Jennifer Gittins’ Indonesian food bar is a year old and doing well, despite its relatively low profile at Yonge and Davisville.
That should change after the Little Sister crew makes 7,000 portions of babi panggang (roasted pork belly), ayam bakar and urab (grilled chicken and Balinese vegetable salad) and compressed watermelon salad for the four-day Taste festival.
“We bill ourselves as 100 per cent authentic Indonesian made by a Dutchman,” is how Gittins puts it. “One of our Indonesian chefs learned to make Indonesian food from a Dutchman in Canada. We just crack up every time we talk about it.”
Gittins was born in Toronto. Van den Winkel grew up in Amsterdam eating Indonesian food. They met in England as travellers and own nine-year-old Quince Bistro.
You can find Indonesian dishes here and there in Toronto, but Little Sister figures it’s the only fullfledged Indonesian eatery. It bills itself as a food bar with 22 small, shared, street-inspired Indonesian skewers, snacks, sides and traditional stews. Spice blends are homemade, most dishes take several days to prepare and Little Sister is unexpectedly popular with neighbourhood families.
Little Sister accepted an invitation to join Taste of Toronto to build its brand and reach out to 20,000 people, many of whom live downtown and don’t always think to travel to midtown to eat.
Taste of Toronto returns July 2 to 5 for its second year at Fort York. Advance entry tickets start at $19 to $25 and you must book a half-day “session time.” The festival is cashless so you buy “crowns” (preloaded onto a card) as dining currency.
Morimoto, who’s opening his first Canadian restaurant in Toronto later this year, plans to make uni carbonara and toro tartare. More than 30 chefs will join him at the event, including Lynn Crawford, Alvin Leung and Eric Chong from R&D, and the Kinka family from Guu Izakaya/Sakabar. There are cooking demos and interactive classes as well.
Little Sister is modifying its popular compressed watermelon salad for the festival, adding cucumber and replacing the fish sauce in the sambal oelek vinaigrette with vegetarian-friendly miso paste for umami.
Van den Winkel uses a vacuum sealer to compress thick slices of watermelon to muddle in cocktails and transform into salad. This intensifies the colour, cuts down on water loss and preserves the fruit for several days. Since this doesn’t really change the flavour or texture, you don’t have to compress at home.
The chef’s best kitchen trick for this dish involves peeling and freezing knobs of ginger, and then grating them from frozen as needed with a Microplane rasp.
“See how it’s fluffy right now? I don’t really pack it down when I’m measuring it. If you do, you will have too much ginger.”
To be clear, watermelon and cucumber salad is not an Indonesian recipe. But Indonesians eat a lot of watermelon, fresh ginger and sambal oelek, ground fresh chili paste. And it’s a perfect dish to get the summer of 2015 started in Canada.