Mea Culpa

On May 11, 2010, I posted a picture of Sir Admiral Charles Kingsmill, the founder of the Canadian navy. Well, I always thought it was him. He's been hanging on the wall for years. But it turns out, the Admiral's direct descendants, Patti and George Kingsmill (the Admiral's grandson, son of Diana, famously mentioned in The Moon is a Balloon, by the actor, the late David Niven), inform me that the gentleman in the picture is the admiral's father, John Juchereau Kingsmill. So here he is again, J.J. Kingsmill(1829-1900), for more than 25 years the judge of Bruce County, Ontario.

The Chinese philosopher Sun Tzu wrote " . . . if you do not know your enemies nor yourself, you will be imperiled in every single battle." Hell, I don't even know my family; I'm screwed.

Food: The perfect autumn soup

Stilton and Port Soup
From Home Bistro, creating the best of restaurant cusine in your kitchen
for more, go to dkci.ca.


PREPARATION TIME:
30 MINUTES COOKING TIME:
1 ½ HOURS SERVES: 4

The town of Stilton was located on the 1700s’ carriage route between London and Edinburgh and the traders would spend the night at The Bell Inn. The owner, Cooper Thornhill, served a cream cheese he and locals called “the Stilton cheese.” It was a huge hit. No dummy, Thornhill arranged for the traveling traders to sell it in London for him, and “Stilton” became famous. Today, the semi-hard, blue veined marvel is known as “the King of English Cheeses.” At the same time Copper Thornhill was making history, the English and the French were at war (again) and French wine was unavailable to the Brits. Can’t have that, so they signed a treaty with Portugal in 1703 to import their wine cheaply. Alas, it often spoiled en route. So the vintners in the Duoro Valley fortified it to preserve it for the journey. And port, as we know it, was born. A little nob of Stilton, at room temperature, taken with a sip of port, is one of the greatest marriages of wine and food you will ever experience. This Fall soup variation is no less decadent or delicious.

3 tbsp butter
2 cups roughly chopped onions
2½ cups finely hopped celery
3 tbsp flour
3 cups chicken stock
Salt & pepper to taste
¾ cup whipping cream
½ lb Stilton cheese
4 tsp tawny port
Pinch of nutmeg45 mL
500 mL
625 mL
45 mL
750 mL

180 mL
225 g
20 mL

Over medium-low heat in a large pot, heat butter and cook onions and celery until they are limp but not brown, about 15 minutes. Stir in flour and cook, stirring, until flour turns a light brown, about 10 minutes. Add stock; stir up flour crust on bottom of pan. Bring to a boil. Skim. Simmer 1 hour with a cover half on. Purée soup, then strain through a fine sieve into a clean pot. Adjust salt and pepper to taste.
Divide the soup among 4 oven proof bowls. To each bowl add 3 tbsp (45 mL) of the cream and 1 ½ oz (4 g) of the crumbled Stilton—just a little more than 2 tablespoons ( 30 mL). Bake at 400ºF (205ºC) for 5 minutes to melt the cheese. Top with remaining Stilton and 1 tsp (5mL) port, and dust with nutmeg.
You can make it ahead of time to the salt-and-pepper point and, divide it among 4 oven proof bowls and refrigerate. When the soup is cooled, add the Stilton and cream and refrigerate again until 30 minutes before service; then pop the soup into the oven at 350ºF (175ºC) for the 30 minutes, top with remaining cheese, swirl in port, dust with nutmeg and serve.

Don't stint on the cheese or the port. In fact, taste it before popping it into the oven and add more of either to taste.

Le Fooding V: Starting a restaurant

A friend called a week or so ago. His daughter decided to open a coffee shop and had found a great location. No menu but, really, it’s a coffee shop and it’ll have competitive prices. All she needed to know, he said, was if I could help her with some suppliers, equipment, tables, chairs, that kind of thing.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard this. It’s so depressing. Four out of five opening this way fail, usually bankrupting the owners. A branch of psychology should be endowed to discover why restaurants attract those who throw themselves off cliffs without wings or a parachute. Everybody thinks they can do it. Very, very few can and all the statistics from the last fifty years notwithstanding, very, very few believe that. Statistics are for other guys.

Here’s the sane way to get started, whether you’re a businessman or an artist at the stove.

1) Create a menu.
2) Price the dishes according to their actual food costs multiplied by three.
3) Calculated how much each diner will spend (cheque average) using the pricing on the menu.
4) Figure the number of seats you’d like in the restaurant – a factor of everything from the comfort level (ability) in the kitchen and the number of staff it will take to produce the food, to the style of the restaurant (formal sit-down, cash and dash coffee shop?).
5) Look for a neighborhood that wants what you are proposed to cook.
6) Find a site zoned for restaurants that fits the size you want;
7) Multiply the number of seats you can put in there, multiply by 300 days, multiply by the cheque average, multiply that by 0.08, divide by 12. That’s the maximum amount a successful restaurateur will spend on monthly rent and applicable taxes.

The menu is the most important facet of the business. It’s the only thing that makes money. Everything else is an expense. The menu determines everything from how much money you can generate, what equipment you need, the number of seats, the staff, the type of food and its cost to you, the people that will likely buy your food or drink, and what you can afford for the only non-negotiable cost after signing a contract, the rent.

Four types of people get into the restaurant business these days: Someone who likes to cook and has a passion for it; someone who thinks he can make a good business out of one; someone who loves the idea and the social scene; and someone who is creating employment for himself.

If you think it would be cool to open a restaurant, spend your money frequenting someone else’s place. Do not go into the business. You will fail. You will be miserable.

If you are creating employment for yourself, buy a good franchise.

If you are a businessman, find a neighborhood, canvass that neighborhood and determine exactly what type of restaurant the neighborhood wants and needs, create a menu and then hire a chef to produce it.

If you’re a chef, create a menu you want and then find a neighborhood that will buy what you’re cooking and go from there, following the initial steps listed above.

The frustrating thing is that these are just the basics. I hear people all the time saying they’re going to open a place and franchise it because they’re smart enough to know they’ll make very little money on one store but they’ll make multiples of cash of that by franchising. True. If they can find suckers to run the franchises for a return they didn’t find acceptable in the first place. But that’s another psychological hurdle to overcome at another time.

Le Fooding IV: Restaurant infancy

The picture of restaurants in North America, in general, is dismal. You only have to drive outside the city and into a small town anywhere. Are you confident you can find a terrific meal? Or are you filled with anxiety? Stop anywhere in Europe, however, especially in France and Italy, and it’s exciting, exhilarating, thrilling because you can pick almost any place and the food will be good to spectacular. Why is it not true here? Because when someone loves food and knows how to cook opens a restaurant, they haven’t a clue about the business side and fail. When a businessman opens a restaurant, he or she knows zip about food. We are not old enough, it is not in our culture yet, to demand good food.

It’s not surprising, really. The average North American has no idea what he puts in his own mouth three or four (or five) times a day, why should we expect he or she will know what to put in ours? And the person who has spent years training to smell, feel, touch and taste to buy the best and then use those senses and a place in the back of the brain that prompts him/her to combine them, smooth them, heat them and present them on a plate as if he were drawing a painting every ten minutes, is not in the slightest interested in tracking the percentage of gross he can afford for rent and taxes every month.

For the young in the business, it’s a right brain/left brain problem. And it hasn’t helped them that they grew up eating crap. Only those who gave grown up in the restaurant business have the implanted genes or have absorbed the aspects of the business by osmosis to be able to react instinctively to the myriad of cues that pop up every five minutes without being mortally distracted from the goals of each discipline, whether it’s the food or the business side.

I’m not being snobbish here. It applies to everything from the best hot dog cart to a five star temple of gastronomy.

Sadly, even on the business side, the majority of restaurateurs are hopeless. There’s no history of learning by example in North America.

What’s this got to do with the Fooding movement in France. Well, if you interpret its philosophy and adapt it here, it means you have permission to let the starch out of your shirts and begin to create restaurants that are a few snobby steps lower without sacrificing the cooking side, which should make it less expensive to open up in the first place. It’s a gentle slide to the food slide, where the population is just about ready to accept a meal in a nice, clean, warm atmosphere without “dining” in a Temple of Architecture. In short, we’re just about at the point where people will pay for the food, not necessary because of the privilege of being “seen.”

Before you rush to open up your food-centred place, however, it would probably be wise to learn some essential steps on the business side.

Restaurants: Le Fooding Part III

It’s been thirty years since small independent restaurants became “must” destinations for a new generation of affluent city people. In Toronto both Scaramouche and Pronto opened in 1980. The former gave us the first two “young”, “new” “exciting” chefs who would spawn a mini-revolution – Michael Stadtlander and Jamie Kennedy. The latter was a nouveau Italian Temple with a kitchen and front room staff conducted by Franco Prevedello. Toronto had had several great hotel chefs before, notably those from the Westbury including Tony Roldan who was, perhaps, the first with the charisma of the Galloping Gourmet. And there had always been Winston’s, but only The Money could afford it there.

The impact of Pronto and Scarmouche were profound. Not only did it inspire young chefs, it led to the expansion and eminence of George Brown College and a dozen other culinary institutions. It marked the rapid rise in kitchen quality, more adventurous menus. It spawned offshoots like Dinah’s Cupboard and the David Wood Food Shop. And, most of all, it piqued an intense interest in raw product, exotic ingredients, adventurous challenges.

And it also put restaurants on the map as legitimate forms of entertainment. At first that entertainment existed for the monied who moved from one new place to the next to taste, to talk about the food and, more importantly, to be seen talking about the food (TTS). They were like clubs in Manhattan. When they left one to jump on another, they left behind a legacy of publicity that filled in the empty seats. But it was at this point that other aspects of an operation came to the fore – especially service and value – and when they were wanting, closures were common. This obsession grew for a long time and it established a list of “players.” But it also retold the fable of the nude emperor. The unsaid irony was that the crowd that moved in had better taste buds than the “it crowd” that moved around in search of fashion.

Both Statdlander and Kennedy left Scaramouche and opened their own places. They were not financial successes. Peter Oliver, a businessman, had spotty success because his food did not live up to the increasingly more discriminate tastes (although it must be said that Oliver was and continues to be a sound and practical businessman who adapts quickly and realistically. He entered into partnership with Michael Bonacini, a Anton Mosiman-trained chef from the Dorchester who wound up at the Windsor Arms, to shore up the food side). The marriage of the art of food and business was rarely mentioned let alone understood. And that’s what’s has made the industry boring for decades.

Restaurants are NOT, first and foremost, businesses. What business promises a profit of only 5% to 10% on average to a legitimate entrepreneur? Venture demands 40%. No, operating restaurants is a business, but what restaurants create – just like the French and Le Fooding have been saying all along, and we have not accepted – is an ART. Or in the case of North America to date, a Craft on its way to becoming a widely accepted art.

Name another business that creates art. Artists often create businesses from their art, and often are derided for it. But they had to be recognized and sought after as artists before they could brand themselves in the first place. But marriage of business and food will come of age soon and it shows. Two camps have emerged.

One camp is business first (60% to 90%) with food becoming more important only because the public demands it. This is the franchise camp where menus are changed much more frequently and commonly, new products are introduced to catch a wave of perceived public demand, and food is promoted as a public relations defense.

In the other camp, food is the motivation but the business side is being taken very seriously. It is in this camp the future lies because the chefs, the artists, are unashamed to concede that their imaginations have no place in the business side, which is devoid of emotion. They can’t hope the business side will take care of itself once the public tastes the food. That was the initial Kennedy/Stadtlander stance. The successful ones in this camp, primarily chefs, are setting places up with all the business problems solved before opening. That allows them to imagine and dream about the food side, and it is that luxury that will drive them to innovate, break rules and deliver influential styles and dishes. In other words create the excitement that Le Fooding demands. The strongest will work mentally on a food to business ratio in the 60% to 70% range or abdicate the financial side to a trusted ally and create according to a budget, as Point, Pic and Dumaine did eighty years ago. To put it in another way, they will not cook with $27 bottles of wine unless it makes sound business sense in the net profit of the dish.

As I said in Part I, restaurants usually create menus with price points geared to demographics to develop a “best guess” as to how many bums they will realistically put in the seats daily at what cheque average and whether that will cover the costs. That’s the business side. It can pollute the creative side very quickly. More on that in Part IV.

Restaurants: Le Fooding Part II

If Le Fooding is a movement to promote restaurant experiences that are new, exciting, accessible, casual, involving all the senses, then it’s also a movement to break the codified culinary correctness in France. And, the founders say, to save French cuisine from itself.

North America doesn’t have a codified tradition of cuisine, outside the business model – “fat, salt, sugar and you don’t need teeth to eat it.” We’re multicultural. We are populace “influenced by,” not a society that issues decrees, like the French culinarians (and, some would say, its establishment). Any tradition of French restaurants in North America was killed first by Prohibition, denying the excellent French chefs already in Manhattan of cooking with wine, and then by the erroneous interpretation of Nouvelle Cuisine in the 60s and 70s that held up pretentious plates for derision by a population enthralled with the convenience and speed of Swanson TV Dinners. Arguably the only place French cuisine has become and remained a tradition since, in one habitant form or another, is in Quebec (thank god) and possibly in New Orleans with the influence of Cajun cuisine.

The thrust of Le Fooding is also to make dining more “casual?” But when it comes to North America, that is the last thing serious eaters need here. We have been trained to believe quality of life includes the words fast, quick and convenient without regard to ingredient quality beyond its shelf life.

Exciting? Well, Le Fooding is talking in terms of food preparation that breaks the mold. We don’t have a mold. Our most enduring idea of product excitement has been changing the menu to reflect the seasons, something the French have always done. That now should be second nature here and not worth advertising, especially because we have disappointing seasons occasionally (the local asparagus this year was mediocre), the really exciting raw product (white truffles and morels, for instance), are beyond the price point of collective acceptance, and we lack the imagination fostered by a long heritage to create for ourselves.

New? That might seem tough but remember also that Le Fooding wants “all the senses” involved. I will argue that the washrooms at Mildred’s Temple Kitchen in Toronto, despite the negative publicity it generated (worldwide), is thinking in the right direction, namely thinking about everything. The washrooms are individual, large, beautifully and carefully appointed, and the piped-in sound track of an airline captain giving his welcome message to the cabin provides a subliminal message that you might think of having sex in there next time (hence the outrage at a Valentine’s Day promotion). The sense invoked here is one of human nature – a sense of humour. Peter Gatien created large co-ed washroom areas with a bar in New York and at Circa in Toronto. Ditto. New involves looking at the old and rethinking it, even washrooms.

Accessible? When this term is considered by restaurateurs, it’s usually discussed in terms of price point relative to demographics and optimum covers and return. The most overlooked aspect of accessibility when restaurants are being planned, however, is service. Sure, service is considered: Uniforms, numbers per seat, cost and benefits, turnover, management of ~, legal implications . . . Training is almost always conducted as the rote learning of mechanics – tasks, timing, efficiencies, sales . . . The over all picture is rarely discussed. Le Fooding movement is democratizing service, along with everything else. Service must be excellent and for all. And the servers must be allowed to be democratic by the management, the facilities and, most importantly, the menu. At Martin Picard’s famed Montreal restaurant Au Piede de Cochon, an individual can have the nightly special for $110, as it was priced one night, or two can eat with a good bottle of wine for the same amount, tax and tip included. He breaks all the standard rules of pricing a menu to everyone’s benefit. If you’ve seen Picard on Food Network’s The Wild Chef, You won’t be surprised that the service is egalitarian.

What is Le Fooding saying that we can take practically? When I was the restaurant critic for The Toronto Star, people would come into my office (a test kitchen) every day and say, “You’ve got to try this restaurant!” and I would immediately ask what they had to eat. Only one person in five years, sport columnist Frank Orr, could tell me instantly. One person in five years. They’d cast their eyes to the ceiling and think. “Oh, ah, I had the lamb, with beans and . . .” And what did his wife and their other companions eat? No idea. When analyzed, what they all were saying was that the service, food, and atmosphere were perfect and the price matched the entire experience. No one in the party had complained.

In Part III tomorrow, I’ll suggest how things used to be but how to look at Newness in the future to kick start Excitement.

Restaurants: "Le Fooding" Part I

After this weekend you will probably hear a lot more about Le Fooding, a decade-old French movement designed to make the French look at food and restaurants less as a religion or cultural heritage and more as everyday fun and games in good taste. They want the French to lighten up.

Le Fooding prints a restaurant guide to rival Gault Millau and Michelin, a web site (lefooding.com) and they hold picnics in France to make the point that food should be informal and enjoyed by all the senses, with feeling ( the term is an amalgam of food and feeling). Friday and Saturday (Sept. 24-25) Le Fooding goes to New York in the form of a picnic that pits chefs from Manhattan against chefs from and San Francisco. Yup, a publicity stunt for everyone involved. What the chefs serve at the event is of practically no consequence. I’d be surprised if anyone said it was bad but the food is not the point. It’s the circus. Or to be more precise, a non-traditional restaurant atmosphere.

The French regard preparing and serving food as a passionate art. The Spanish regard the art in individual products themselves, the uniqueness of each, and celebrate all variations in cooking and serving them. The Slow Food Movement chefs worship at the table of ingredient and preparation purity. Thinking chefs everywhere demand local, but only if it’s fresh. The 100-mile people demand local whether it’s fresh or not.

Professional restaurant critics, almost to a person, concentrate on food alone and demand that its preparation adhere to how they think it should be prepared (despite their lack of credentials), and how it should taste according to them (despite their lack of credentials).

Cooking and serving food in France is rigid and revered. Marie Antoine Carême (1783-1833) began that history. He was an architect. August Escoffier (1846-1935) set down almost 3,000 recipes and the techniques to be used in kitchens. He was a chef. Three chefs – Fernand Point, André Pic and Alexandre Dumaine – were schooled in Escoffier classics but did not have the kitchen teams or the budgets to pull off dozens of dishes a day, so they simplified their menus, limited them to one or two dishes a day and depended upon local ingredients to determine what those dishes would be. In this regard, they were chefs and businessmen. We wouldn’t know who they were in North America at all if they hadn’t trained a bunch of very talented apprentices named Paul Bocuse, Alain Chapel, Pierre and Jean Troigros and Jean Banchet. These chefs pushed the envelope even more and critics (despite their lack of credentials) called it Nouvelle Cuisine. North American food writers (despite their lack of credentials), codified it for us. Erroneously, it turns out, but it caught the imagination of (largely) the United States. And now we have Le Fooding. What will it mean?

Not much unless we take it apart and cherry pick the aspects that can apply to a multicultural society where a single cooking style and tradition is impossible, if not boring. But it does have practical lessons. Part II tomorrow is about what Le Fooding prionciples and how they can apply here.

Will Le Fooding have any influence here? Probably not because one of its main premises is that the people who go to restaurants want a more casual experience, one that is a feast for all the senses. This, however, is a continent of casual and fast food. That’s not the case in France. Or Quebec, for that matter. We don’t need more fast or casual restaurants. We need good food, well-cooked, and served in an atmosphere that you would want to go back to as easily as you are drawn to McDonald’s now. Because whatever you may think of McDonald’s, it’s got your number about enticing you back despite the food. If you can subvert the attraction of the casual fast food joints now selling billions of cardboard burgers, and recapture the spirit of the food excitement in the 1980s that spawned it all, you may gain from the essence of Le Fooding.

Part II tomorrow, looks at what Le Fooding should mean to restaurants here.