Canada’s go-to seafood chef battles for life, builds his legacy
Talking to John Bil will change the way you look at seafood.
The co-owner of Honest Weight seafood restaurant and shop in the Junction got his start shucking and sorting oysters at an oyster farm nearly three decades ago. Since then, he has become the go-to seafood guy for some of Canada’s top restaurants such as Joe Beef, La Banane and Cabane à Sucre, the sister restaurant of Au Pied de Cochon.
Bil champions B.C. spot prawns, gulf shrimp and Ontario-raised shrimp over the cheaper black tiger variety that are harvested overseas often under questionable environmental and labour practices.
He recommends mussels to his regular customers because they’re both affordable and sustainable.
The 49-year-old is putting his knowledge into a book, equipping seafood lovers with information on fishing practices, advancements in aquaculture and what it’s like to work in the fishing industry.
“It’s a passion project, whether it’s because I feel like I have limited time or it’s something I can leave behind, not to sound morbid,” he says from his home in the St. Clair Ave. W. area.
His lifelong goal is educating people on consuming sustainable seafood, but he’s not sure if he’ll be around much longer to continue his mission. Bil has Stage 4 melanoma, the most advanced stage of skin cancer, and it has spread to other organs and tissue.
These days, the former competitive cyclist and marathon runner can’t bike as far or run as fast as he’d like; part of his lungs have been removed along with two feet of intestine. There are days when he can’t get out of bed, when he has no desire to eat.
He needs another surgery to remove yet another tumour from his intestine. Over the past year, he has stepped back from his restaurant letting co-owner Victoria Bazan take over most of the management duties.
But Bil has outlived his original prognosis by a year, and has no plans to stop satisfying his obsession of championing the best seafood. The go-to guy The Toronto native grew up around farms, but never worked on one, although he always wanted to. After shucking oysters for two years at the Toronto dining institution Rodney’s Oyster House, in 1992 he drove to Prince Edward Island and got a job at an oyster farm cleaning mollusks in a cold and wet industrial building.
“I realized how important seafood is to those towns and the fabric of the Maritimes,” he says. “We can buy super cheap products from other countries, but then those towns that rely on the lobster or mussel plant wouldn’t exist. It became so important to promote these products.”
Five years later he was selling oysters — driving to Boston, New York, Toronto and Montreal to meet with chefs. During one trip to Montreal in 2000, Bil befriended Dave McMillan and Fred Morin, two chefs who five years later would enlist Bil to help open Joe Beef, now considered one of Canada’s best restaurants.
“Canada is one of the best places in the world to eat seafood and he’s one of the reasons why,” says McMillan, recalling how Bil would drive for hours to meet with a farmer to try some obscure species of oyster before bringing it to the restaurant. While Joe Beef was getting ready to open, Bil lived in Morin’s parents’ basement.
Morin later introduced Bil to Au Pied de Cochon’s celebrated chef Martin Picard and Bil was soon working the seafood bar at Picard’s offshoot restaurant Cabane à Sucre, a rural sugar shack an hour’s drive south of Montreal. Not wanting to make the long commute, Bil cleared a shelf in a closet at the restaurant and turned it into a bed, unbeknownst to Picard.
Bil’s accommodations were upgraded in 2010 at his next endeavour: The Michelin-starred M. Wells Steakhouse in New York City, coowned by Hugue Dufour, a former chef at Picard’s restaurants. While the place was coming together, Bil lived in an Airstream trailer parked inside the restaurant. By now, Bil had a reputation among his chef friends as the guy who’d swoop in to do the odd jobs necessary to open a restaurant when time and money were running out.
A week before M. Wells was to open, Dufour was down with the flu so Bil took to overseeing the construction of a trout tank, rigging up the filter system and transferring 80 live trout from the hatchery in Long Island back to the restaurant in Queens. He spent the night adjusting the water pump and filter to make sure the fish stayed alive.
Bil returned to P.E.I. to open Ship to Shore, a seasonal seafood restaurant that En Route magazine named one of the best new restaurants of 2009 for highlighting the best of what the Maritimes has to offer. Keep on shucking It was during an oyster off-season visit in Toronto in 2013 that he noticed a bump on his back.
“I went to a clinic and two weeks later I got a call from Sunnybrook (Hospital) that it was cancerous,” he says. The cancer has spread to his lymph nodes. After a round of chemotherapy, the cancer was later found in his lungs.
He stayed in Toronto for treatment, but he didn’t slow down. He opened Honest Weight with Bazan in Janu- ary 2015. Diners loved it for its simple preparation of seafood — panseared, raw or steamed — that showcased the fishes’ flavours.
It was here that Bil met his wife, Sheila Flaherty, a wine importer he knew through the food industry. She came to the newly opened restaurant with a congratulatory bottle of wine as a gesture of good will. In return, he asked her out.
“It’s a very unconventional first date when someone tells you they have Stage 4 melanoma,” she says. “But it wasn’t a reason not to pursue someone I had a big crush on. Who knows what’s going to happen to any of us? So we went on the second, third and fourth dates, and we got married last October.”
Flaherty describes Bil as someone who pushes the restaurant industry, whether it’s providing a memorable dining experience or improving working conditions in an industry notorious for low wages.
His servers and cooks already make above the current minimum wage and tips are pooled to get rid of the wage discrepancy between the front and back-of-house, resulting in the average wage being $20 to $25 an hour. He and Bazan also reimburse employees for dental work.
“This goes back to treating people who make your food well, whether they’re cooks or farmers,” he says. “You have to care for both.”
In return, the restaurant industry has rallied around him. Last summer, as part of the Luminato arts festival, he and Morin turned the control room of the abandoned Hearn Generating Station in Toronto’s Port Lands into Le Le Pavillon, a luxurious French restaurant. To build a fully functioning restaurant on the second floor of an abandoned power plant that had no kitchen, running water, or even a staircase to safely climb up was a logistical nightmare, but once everything was built to code — as McMillan puts it — “For two weeks it was the best restaurant in Canada.”
Diners literally ran into the Hearn to put their name on the restaurant’s wait-list, which was booked in minutes. Restaurant industry heavyweights such as The Black Hoof owner Jen Agg, Niagara College chef Michael Olson, and Montreal’s Nora Gray owners Ryan Gray and Emma Cardarelli worked as cooks and hosts. Just as Bil was there for his friends when they needed him, the restaurant community remains loyal to him.
McMillan has flown into town to be with a recuperating Bil at his home. When Bil was recovering from surgery at Sunnybook Health Sciences Centre last winter, Morin drove from Montreal to cook a steak dinner over a charcoal grill on the back of his truck in the hospital parking lot.
Not to be outdone, the owners of Edulis, Tobey Nemeth and Michael Caballo, sent lunch — truffle soup and prunes soaked in Armagnac — to the hospital’s oncology wing.
Bil has accepted that he likely won’t be around in the next two or three years, but continues to work on his book, help chefs with pop-ups around the city and build his decades-long reputation for upping the quality of seafood in Canada.
“Having opened Honest Weight and having done Le Pavillon, I think the takeaway won’t be that I have cancer,” he says. “I hope the story is about what I’ve done, not what I have.” karonliu@thestar.ca