Chef adds Canadian flavour to Barbados food festival
Campagnolo’s Craig Harding to showcase expertise in Italian fare as a marquee guest at prestigious Food & Wine & Rum fest
Swimming trunks, check. Blender, check.
Whatever else Craig Harding is packing this week, though, the Vitamix is most definitely going in the carry-on. “It’s my desert-island kitchen tool,” he prefaces, going on to gush about his high-performance appliance.
An island, minus the desert, is precisely what lies in wait for the Toronto chef, the force behind the everpopular and very definition of a neighbourhood res- taurant, Campagnolo, on Dundas St. W. Chosen to be a marquee guest at the prestigious Food & Wine & Rum Festival, held annually in paradisical Barbados, Harding plans to make the most of his blending.
“The secret to a good pasta,” he tells me, as the happy din inside his restaurant grew a few nights back, “is you have to dry it well. The noodle has to be so dry you can barely roll it.”
And so, purée he shall, when he whips up a “sweet potato agnolotti with spring lamb and Pecorino Toscano.”
The agnolotti will be part of a wham-bam dinner he’s serving up Saturday for what is the centrepiece gala of the fest.
Set to occur at the Cliff, a restaurant stooped just above the crashing of the waves — on many a shortlist of the world’s most beautiful restaurants — it’s a dinner that’s been hitherto been presided over, in previous years, by such food-world darlings as Tyler Florence, the celebrity chef from San Francisco.
In other words: Harding is in very good company, and this honour constitutes just the latest notch on the Canadian’s rapid rise. (For the record, he’s also plotting to bring the “Pecorino Toscano” in his carry-on!)
When Campagnolo (translated as “country bumpkin”) opened five years ago, it poofed on a stretch of Dundas still relatively derelict.
It was also the one thing Toronto hardly knew it needed: another Italian resto. By serving up food, however, that’s graceful and yet unshowy, in a space that’s un-finicky but still refined — courtesy of a chef who has a Charlie Brown smile and an obvious passion for his craft — it has morphed into a must-do.
It regularly attracts such local gourmands as celebrated plastic surgeon Trevor Born, but also such in-town celebs as Will Ferrell.
And not only is Harding (who cut his teeth at Far Niente and Canoe) known as a chef’s chef — Cory Vitiello frequents often — but he also cinched the ultimate nonna cred when Italian culinary goddess Lidia Bastianich showed up one night to have a bite. Onward to Barbados. What is Mr. Campagnolo looking most forward to?
Well, for one, seeing the island, including sites such as Oistins, the famous market. It marks his first visit. Another maiden voyage will involve fiddling around with barracuda, which, too, is part of his menu at the Cliff, together with its resident chef, Jeremy Dupire.
Because it’s a bony species, Harding tells me, “we’re gonna treat it like a snapper or a mackerel . . . give it a light cure and serve with pineapple. It’ll be a cross between Mediterranean and using the local fruit.”
All in all, the dinner he’s conceiving will be an enviable mélange: while the host restaurant (and chef ) is French, and the island itself has specks of both British colonial and Bajan, he’ll be bringing forth both Italian and Canadian to the mix. Expect some maple syrup, in other words!
And having now made it in both The 6 and in the Caribbean, what’s next for Harding? Might it be a second restaurant? He tells me he’s thinking about it. For more information on the Barbados Food & Wine & Rum Festival, visit foodwinerum.com.