Six of Toronto’s most inspiring home decor blogs

American food mega-blog Eater is coming to Toronto in the fall

Welcome to Word

Tell me about your upcoming trip.
On April 10, I’ll be putting my boots on the ground at the Ukraine-Poland border, working with the World Central Kitchen and the United Nations World Food Program. I figured I’d get hands-on with assisting, directing and doing whatever it may be to facilitate as many meals as I can with the top chef in the world. You know, chef Andrés is a celebrity, he’s been around, but he’s also helped a lot when it comes to natural disaster relief.

How did you get involved?
They reached out to me through Hot Docs. Chef Andrés has a documentary premiering and they’ve asked me to be a speaker for it. That’s when the collaboration started. I offered my services and I told them how my app could help displaced and travelling people in need of food.

What’s the first thing you’re doing when you land?
Picking up my truck and heading straight to the location that’s been designated to me. Everything else is undisclosed at the present time.

How will the skills and expertise you’ve developed help on the ground in Poland and Ukraine?
With Feed It Forward’s farm logistics, warehousing, kitchens, restaurants and grocery stores, I’ve covered each little area of how and where food comes from and moves around. I know exactly how it can be repurposed, reutilized or recycled. I’ve also lived through two hurricanes—Andrew and Hugo—and I’ve seen what destruction does to communities. If I can do my little part, I’m going to do it.

What will the facilities be like?
I’m really well-versed in shipping containers that can be transformed into kitchens, so my goal is to eventually create and deliver such things. But in the interim, we’ll be working in the emergency field kitchens, established and staffed by the World Central Kitchen.

How does your family feel about you going?
Valid question. They’re all a little worried but ultimately fine with it. They know I have a lot of experience, and that I’ll be able to be cool and calm, and do what I have to do. I’ve taken all the precautions. And my 27-year-old daughter, who’s my best friend, will be coming on my next trip there.

You’re not just bringing your know-how to the conflict zone, you’re also bringing your Feed It Forward app, which helps people in need of food find it for free.
It’s really amazing to be able to bring the Feed It Forward app, recently translated into Polish and Ukrainian, to the region. Ukrainians are displaced, traveling across borders and looking for their next meal. I figured my app would be the perfect fit, to help them find out where there will be free food waiting for them, and also for people who are looking to donate food.

What’s new for you here at home?
We’ve created an electronic wallet for people who would like to shop with dignity. For every dollar that’s donated, 50 cents goes into the wallet of someone in need. So they’re just able to shop the grocery store and take what they need. Points are added or deducted from their e-wallets, then they can leave with a smile and not worry about being embarrassed. I’m also so excited because this year we are up to three farms, from two. And we’ve co-created a new program helping feed kids in Hamilton, on top of a collaboration with OCAD supplying food that was destined for the landfill to two community fridges that students can access for free. I’m gifted with angels around me—now I just have to find the financial angels.

Which brings me to: How can people help out with what you’re doing?
I am the last guy to ask for money—Feed It Forward’s not funded whatsoever—but I was told verbatim “don’t be afraid to ask for money.” I now know we can do so much more when we have it. So I invite people to participate by donating the money they can to support families in need at feeditforward.ca.

A look behind Toronto’s pop-ups, dinner series

Rogue chefs are making some of the city’s most creative food in restaurants that are here today, gone tomorrow
BY MATTHEW FOX

On a late-February evening, 24 of us were huddled around two dimly lit communal tables at Ortolan, a tiny restaurant at Lansdowne and Bloor. We were there for Boxed, a four-hour, eight-course pop-up dinner—one of dozens of one-night-only culinary shows happening in Toronto right now.

Pop-ups, dinner series and roving restaurants have multiplied over the last couple of years, as the city’s up-and-coming chefs have broken out of the traditional culinary training model. Instead of working their way up through the kitchen ranks at old-guard establishments, they’re making their names by cooking audaciously experimental food in makeshift kitchens, and using social media to promote themselves.

The Boxed pop-up series is run by Matthew Sullivan, who, at 28, has staged in some impressive kitchens, including the Gramercy Tavern in New York and the Fat Duck in England. I had been following him on Twitter for weeks, reading micro-dispatches from his life and hoping for some news on how to secure an invite to his next dinner. Finally, a week before the event, Sullivan tweeted cryptically, “There may or may not be an upcoming dinner with five or six spots left.” I emailed him immediately and snagged two seats for $90 each—a high-risk investment, considering I had no idea what my $180 was buying me (he kept the menu a secret until the guests were at the table).

The crowd—food obsessives, thick-armed hunks with their exceedingly chic girlfriends, and bloggers sharing stories of previous pop-ups—nodded along to soft reggae playing in the background and delighted in assessing every dish, like chicken tails with dried scallops and congee, a strange and satisfying take on Chinese brunch. Each course came with unusual wine pairings from Zinta Steprans, who, in a T-shirt and jeans, gave the sommelier gig an effortless air. A dish of Lovell trout and beef tongue must have been a challenge to match, but she nailed it with a Bulgarian Domaine Boyar chardonnay.

Daniel Usher, one of Ortolan’s co-owners, is friends with Sullivan and ceded control of the place for the night. The two cooks laughed in the open kitchen as they plated the next course, lamb’s brain won tons in shiitake broth. When it hit the tables, the bloggers whipped out their cameras.

For chefs like Sullivan, pop-ups are a great way to bolster their personal brands. The buzz can lead to new opportunities in well-established restaurants or, as is Sullivan’s hope, to a fan base when they open a new place. He held the first instalment of Boxed at The Mascot, a café in Parkdale, last summer. The café doesn’t have a kitchen, so Sullivan prepped all five courses at a nearby grilled cheese shop with two butane stoves and two panini presses, one of which he used to sear an 80-day dry-aged steak. With the help of servers, he ran the food across a busy stretch of Queen West to diners in The Mascot’s thrown-together dining room. The event was like live theatre—anything could go wrong, but somehow it didn’t. The food was spectacular.

That feat, in part, prompted Sam Kalogiros, the owner of Yorkville hot spots Maléna and L’Unità, to hire Sullivan as executive chef of both restaurants last fall. Sullivan upgraded the menus there, refining some of his dishes from Boxed, but left after just four months and continued his pop-up project. “I was proud of every dish I created at Maléna,” Sullivan says, “but pop-ups give me more creative freedom.”

Over the last few months, I attended four pop-up dinners, and at each one, the chefs tried out daring dishes. During a $150, six-hour marathon dinner hosted by the Group of Seven, a collective of Toronto chefs who run a monthly supper series, each course was made with what they called “odd bits” of animals. Rob Gentile, the chef at Buca, an Italian spot on King West, wowed the 35 diners with a pig’s-blood custard tart. Mark Cutrara, of the nose-to-tail place Cowbell, earned a toast for his pig testicle sausage on a slab of tongue. Both dishes were divine, but, owing to their off-putting ingredients, won’t appear on restaurant menus any time soon. There were also duds, like a leaden tripe stew that sparked a debate: some diners were disappointed, but for the rest of us, the failure boosted the chef’s cred—the food may not have been great, but it was gutsy.

These events don’t require much in the way of set-up expenses. They’re held either in already established restaurants on Sundays or Mondays—off-nights in the business—or in low-rent spaces that barely qualify as restaurants. Andrew Richmond, a digital designer and fledgling chef, has held 18 instalments of La Carnita, a pop-up taqueria, since last summer. Although there are laws about selling food prepped in non-commercial kitchens, Richmond circumvents them by making access to the food contingent on buying a $10 piece of art. Ostensibly, you buy the art, and the tacos come as a bonus. Downtowners have become obsessed. For one incarnation at Richmond’s King and Spadina design studio, he tweeted the time and location just 10 minutes before lunch. Some 150 office dwellers descended on the place, consuming 450 tacos in less than 90 minutes, at which point supplies ran out and the pop-up was shuttered.

Likewise, last February, in an old Jamaican restaurant at Queen and Spadina, Jon Polubiec, the former chef at Rosedale haunt Mistura, set up a sandwich shop called Come and Get It, furnishing the place with bric-a-brac, pressboard counters and picnic tables. Posts on food blogs have ensured a constant stream of business. It could become a thriving midday restaurant. But it won’t. The building’s owner cut Polubiec a deal on the rent because he plans to raze it for condos before summer.

Pop-ups may be a little gimmicky (“For a limited time only” is, after all, one of the oldest marketing ploys), but in a city flush with haute pizzas and burgers, they signal a refreshing return to culinary risk taking. As diners, we’re willing to trade comfort for the rush of being the first—and quite possibly the last—to taste a chef’s creations.