Neeta Marwah's famous yogurt chicken
Without wishing to exaggerate or overstate the case, food people - chefs, restaurant owners, cheese makers, you name it - tend toward yearning.
They long to please others, to bring pleasure to others. Less often, they think about making a living as well. Sometimes they try to do both in the huge aching empty space that makes up most of this country. Part of the problem is geography, and part of it is history.
I recently met a woman in Saskatoon who still remembers the first time she served a customer a scallop. "Is this cheese?" the customer asked. The challenge can be restated another way. Let's say you buy a small restaurant on the east side of Highway 11, about 77 kilometres south of North Bay, and a few kilometers outside Sundridge, Ontario.
For a long time "Sunny Sundridge" was known for one thing: being the home of Mac Lang Chrysler Dodge Jeep, the biggest Dodge dealership in Ontario. What kind of a restaurant are you going to start in a place like that? A burger joint, of course. And so you try that, and for five years it doesn't really work.
Then you have this brainwave: you are going to change the restaurant. Instead of a burger joint by the side of the road in the middle of the god-forsaken northern Ontario forest, you decide to create a restaurant devoted to serving brilliant pasta dishes. Pause here for raucous laughter.
You build a sign. The sign is something Salvador Dali might have dreamed up had he been addicted to crystal meth: a plate of spaghetti, with strands of pasta shooting ten feet up into the air, where they twirl around a 12-foot-long fork.
All this is precisely what Danny Galekovic did in 1983, which is why, against all rational predictions, you can walk into Danny's Justa Pasta restaurant in the middle of nowhere and - if Sue Deschamps, the manager, can find you a table, or you don't mind waiting an hour in Danny's nearby gift shop - have one of the more memorable pasta meals of your life.
There's a guy standing in the lobby at the moment, for instance, who has just driven an hour to pick up some Justa Pasta takeout. "Remember when Mac Lang was the most famous thing about Sundridge? Now it's Danny's Justa Pasta."
Galekovic, another graduate of the transformative George Brown cooking schools, doesn't attempt to follow the 100-mile diet. (If he did, his mainstays would be moose steak and pine needle soup.) His mussels are from faraway New Zealand. The pasta is imported from one manufacturer in Italy. (Galekovic won't say which one). His bread, on the other hand, is made exclusively for the restaurant at an otherwise defunct bakery in Burk's Falls, down the road toward Huntsville.
The menu is nevertheless shockingly ambitious. Today's lunch specials include an oregano-crusted rack of lamb with soba noodles and assorted vegetables in oyster sauce; cream of cauliflower soup with maple beet puree and roasted walnuts; mussels in cumin yogurt sauce with a trio of onions; escargots in brandy peppercorn cream with tomatoes and leeks; and the lunch feature, an admittedly rambunctious-sounding Philly cheese steak cannelloni in tomato sauce. I order linguini with leeks, ramps and two other varieties of onions, marinated roma tomatoes, fresh and roasted garlic, baby spinach and chili peppers in extra virgin olive oil, with a raw egg yolk on top.
"They'll will toss it for you if it grosses you out," Sue Deschamps tells me. The tiramisu (with fresh strawberries and an orange chocolate ganache side) is some of the best I will eat in northern Ontario - and there is a lot of spectacular tiramisu in northern Ontario, thanks to the preponderance of Italian immigrants. (There ought to be a contest.) The restaurant was recently included for a second time in Oberon Press's Where to Eat in Canada.
"It doesn't matter where a restaurant is," Danny Galekovic says, as I make my way to leave. "It's hard. Like most businesses, to do it properly, is very, very hard." I trade him four of the butter tarts I was given at Spencer's Tall Trees Restaurant for the tiramisu, and then I more or less roll out of the joint. I do not stop at the Maple Sugar Home a few hundred metres up the highway. I want to. But I do not.
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This passion for out-of-the-ordinary food leaks out unexpectedly across the country. It isn't just a foodie trend; it's a genuine desire, and a growing one. You have to look, and be patient, and you have to be willing to get lucky, which entails being unlucky more often. For instance, you wouldn't expect to find anything decent to eat in a Travelway Inn in Sudbury, especially in a restaurant called Curious Thymes Bistro (the names people give restaurants and hair salons ought to be a form of psychological test), but Vince Potter, the owner, and Andrew Culligan, the chef, are turning out first rate meals.
Unlike the Alexandria, the Egyptian restaurant in Sudbury, or Pasta e Vino, a "fine-dining" establishment, Curious Thymes (ack!) also keeps its kitchen open to 9 p.m. on weekdays. Down the road in Sault Ste. Marie, an entire generation of cooks is trying to break away from old-style Calabrian-Canadian "Italian" food - that would be your stuffed pasta smothered and baked in sweet tomato sauce. Breaking the food rules in the Soo is like refusing an offer you can't refuse: you do it at your peril.
Ian Brown eats Canada
The Soo, after all, attracted Italian immigrants by the thousands to its once thriving steel and paper mills. You could buy a house for less than the cost of a new vehicle (today a three-bedroom bungalow runs $150,000). To this day, 80 per cent of the local restaurants serve locally made Italian food. There is no Don Cherry's outlet, no Red Lobster, no Keg.
"This is a town where chains come to die," Jennifer Bellerose, the owner of the breakaway Dish Café, informed me.
One of the few surviving local Indonesian joints dares open only a few hours a day. And that doesn't even touch on at least 70 independent pizza joints (in a small town of 75,000) specializing in the thick-crusted, square-panned, sweet-sauced pizza that Saultites insist is the best anyone has created since the dawn of Etruscan civilization.
The current reigning champion pizza joint, Aurora's West Side, recently shipped 25 pizzas to the Martimes, and four large to British Columbia, to homesick Saulites. But the stranglehold Italian-Canadian food has had in the Soo is now breaking up. In 2006, after years of decline, the population of the Soo began to creep upwards - reflecting in part the return of younger Saulites such as Ms. Bellerose.
"It's actually more affordable for me to live here in my big small town home," she explained (she has a cottage too, less than 45 minutes away), "and pay to go to Toronto six times a year." She and her husband own not only their own businesses, but the buildings those businesses are installed in. The returnees brought their taste for a newer style of eating with them back to the Soo.
"I have a farmer that I'll be working with this summer who does all organic vegetables and heritage pigs," Jennifer Bellerose told me. "I just met his cow connection, who came in from Alberta." She lists five restaurants and two caterers trying to break the red sauce mould. There is a farmer's market on Wednesdays and Saturdays, often featuring Mennonite fare from nearby St. Joseph Island. Arturo Comegna, the Italian-born owner of Arturo's, Sault Ste. Marie's best restaurant, has gone the other way - true, Mediterranean Italian food, rather than the Canadianized stuff that has clotted arteries for thirty years.
Chef Comegna, a compact knot of take-no-prisoners energy, grew up in restaurants in Italy, and followed his (now ex) wife to Sault Ste. Marie in 1978. Back then he hated the city, but he loved her.
"I tell you, most people here, they don't eat. They just make the motions of going out. I tell you, 99 per cent of the restaurants here, if they went to Italy, they'd close the next day. I'm not kidding. Because it's not Italian. I don't know what it is. But it's not Italian."
He offered me a lamb shank braised osso buco style; it was possibly the best meal I've eaten since I set out on this jaunt. I devoured it on the sidewalk patio while he talked.
He talked about his divorce, his near bankruptcy, his remarriage, his beloved new son, Luca. He showed me the apartment above his restaurant where he lived for years, showed me the Venetian ceilings he built and painted himself. He despaired of ever convincing Saulites that what they were eating was not real Italian food, but he loved cooking too much to stop cooking.
Chef Arturo Comegna tells Ian about his most memorable meal
At the other, poorer end of town, in the old New Marconi restaurant, in what had been the social hub of the Italian community, Dave Guerreiro has opened the Fresco European Grill. Eating at the old restaurant was like dining deep within a large man's descending aortic chamber: red wallpaper, burgundy carpet, red leather chairs, red lamps on each table. "It was like walking into a scene from the Godfather," Dave's sister-in-law Grace Tridico remembers. The mainstays were ribs and spumoni. Dave and his family replaced the floor, lightened the walls with ochre Venetian plaster, and gently, very gently, began transforming the menu.
He kept the penne chicken piccata, the cheese manicotti and the chicken parmesan, and added cod pomodoro, pierogies, and cabbage rolls, to name a few early innovations. In Sault Ste. Marie this counts as revolutionary. The place is packed regardless. His next affront to the town's habits is going to be a tapas bar. "Having lived here for most of our lives," he says, "we know lots of people who wanted to eat more European."
But the most telling story of all is that of Neeta Marwah, who Jennifer Bellerose calls "the biggest food news in Sault Ste. Marie in 40 years."
Ms. Marwah, who was born near Delhi, India, arrived in the Soo two years ago, with her husband, Rajat. Rajat is an executive in the finance department of the Essar Group, the Mumbai-based global steel conglomerate that purchased Algoma Steel, the bankrupt Soo mainstay, in 2008. The Soo was a shock to Ms. Marwah's system after Eastern Europe, where the family had been stationed: Northern Ontarians were almost pathologically friendly compared to Europeans, and the winters were absolutely terrifying.
With the cold and her children at school, and the fact that she doesn't drive, Neeta Marwah became bored. But she loved to cook. Her husband suggested she cook for others. She began by cooking Indian food for a 20-person dinner at a friend's house. Now, six months later, she spends Tuesday and Thursday preparing to cook, on Wednesday and Friday, 40 takeout Indian meals a day. (Her butter chicken alone requires two hours of prep.) There are 22 Indian families in the close-knit Essar community, and 120 Indians altogether in Sault Ste. Marie, but none of her customers are Indian.
She has a following on her Facebook fan site, Indian Food Sault Ste. Marie. Her butter chicken is fantastic, but her yogurt chicken - "that one is very famous," the otherwise modest Ms. Marwah admits, and with good reason. At least once a month she flies to Toronto and drives out to Brampton, where she resupplies all her fresh spices and ingredients, such as kasoori methi (dried fenugreek). Every summer, she and her husband take their two sons back to India. But this summer, locked into life in Sault Ste. Marie, the boys want to stay in town.
Soon, with the language issue, it will be hard to take them back to India for good. You see what I mean about longing and food? Someone takes who she was, in the form of what she ate, and makes an offering of it to the strange new place she finds herself, in the hope it will give someone pleasure. And in return the new land transforms her.