JasonParis
Moderator
From this month's Toronto Life...
High Five
Four years in the making, the ROM’s new dining operation is one of the most anticipated restaurant launches in recent history. Can it live up to the hype? By James Chatto
By James Chatto
ROM service: chefs Caesar Guinto, Lauren Boyington and Teddy Corrado in C5 on the top floor of the new Crystal
Image credit: Margaret Mulligan
Restaurant names that need to be explained to make any sense are either cleverly exclusive or deeply annoying. It depends, I suppose, on whether you’re in the know. C5 opened last month at the Royal Ontario Museum, tucked up under the soaring, pointy eaves of the Michael Lee-Chin Crystal. The name sounds like buttons you push on a jukebox or vending machine, until someone explains it’s short for Crystal Five, a clearer reference to the restaurant’s location on the fifth floor of a structure shaped like five interposed polyhedrons. But as those who remember JK ROM will attest, the museum has a fetish for acronyms and abbreviation was inevitable. Which is a shame. C5 is such a blandly forgettable name for a room that is anything but.
I first saw it in mid-May, when there was still scaffolding up and our little group of chefs and administrators had to wear steel-toed galoshes and hard hats (the latter providing protection from a stray pigeon that had found its way into the space). I was drawn to the angular, slanting windows and the unusual view of the metal roof on the original 1914 building (future plans include a terrace for outdoor dining) and, beyond it, the top storey of the Royal Conservatory of Music’s own dazzling renovation and new concert hall. But C5’s chef designate, 33-year-old Teddy Corrado, stood with his back to the light. He only had eyes for the plastic-wrapped open kitchen, gazing at his Thermomix and brand new chrome-topped plancha grill like a father watching his newborn through the nursery window, desperate to establish a rapport.
It is an exceptionally well-equipped place to cook, but it pales beside the vast kitchen in the basement next to Food Studio, the museum’s new cafeteria. That facili*ty was completed last summer to service not just the cafeteria, but also to fulfill all catering needs for parties of up to 4,000, and to handle C5’s basic prep. Corrado has been working down there for the past eight months, while the museum’s renovations were being completed, experimenting with ingredients and perfecting recipes for C5’s menus. This, he admits, is the opportunity of a lifetime, handed to him by Connie MacDonald, the ROM’s senior director of hospitality, restaurant and retail services, and by Restaurant Associates, the savvy New York company MacDonald brought in four years ago to set up and run the restaurants.
Back then, I remember wondering whether a big American corporation was quite what the museum needed, for I have a great affection for the ROM. I first stepped through its noble stone entrance almost 30 years ago, escaping the rain and with a couple of hours to kill. I loved the rotunda with its gold mosaic dome and the totem poles in the stairwells, though I don’t think I penetrated very far. The mineralogy gallery just to the left hijacked me—so many splendid specimens organized in a traditional Victorian way, packed close to impart the maximum amount of know*ledge. In those days, people still thought of a museum as an intellectual resource rather than a place of entertainment. Space was to be filled with as much of the collections as possible, not left empty as some kind of architectural self-indulgence. But that was before the great dumbing down of the 1990s, before the ROM decided its target audience should no longer be adults but children with alarmingly curtailed attention spans.
The ’90s did see one improvement to the museum: the opening of JK ROM. The kitchen was small and under-equipped and the lack of its own street entrance meant evening events were a logistical challenge, with extra security needed to usher guests through the museum. Still, Kennedy achieved a great deal, putting the museum on the city’s culinary map, and bringing his ecologically aware, pro-organic activism to the menus. JK ROM lasted almost nine years, serving its last lunch on April 30, 2003. Soon after, the wreckers began to make way for the Crystal, and the museum entered a new culinary dark age, with the only food available coming from a Druxy’s franchise in the basement. MacDonald, meanwhile, was not sitting idle. “I was on a committee of senior management and we tendered the business,” she recalls. “There was little response from Cana*dian companies. Maybe people were scared by the size of the undertaking—large events, the restaurant, the 350-seat Food Studio. Jamie Kennedy thought about it for a long time, but it felt too big. In the end, Restaurant Associates was the perfect choice. Jamie came to New York with us to meet them. He said he couldn’t leave us in better hands.”
If you’ve ever had lunch in a major U.S. gallery or museum, you’ve probably ex*peri*enced Restaurant Associates. They operate the food services in the likes of the Met, the Guggenheim and the Morgan in New York, the Smithsonian and dozens of other establishments, not to mention corporate dining operations for such companies as Google. But they started out 50 years ago with high-end restaurants, and have made a conscious effort to retain a sophistication and a passion for quality that seem to impress every independent chef who sees them in action. Andrew Ziobro is vice-presi*dent of project management for Restaurant Associates and the man in charge of the ROM’s culinary evolution. He was a chef in an earlier career and he understands what a chef needs. The ROM is the company’s first Canadian project (Restaurant Associates is contracted to operate the museum’s food services, and provides the ROM with a percentage of sales), but they’re treating it in much the same way as they did the new High Museum of Art in Atlanta, building state-of-the-art kitchens and dining rooms, then peopling them with local chefs and personnel and using local suppliers. “We write a large cheque for the set-up, but not a blank cheque,” says Ziobro. “Yes, we’re talking millions. And we give a ton of support for the six weeks before and after they open, bringing in a whole SWAT team of top chefs and sous-chefs from New York to help run each station in the kitchen, helping wherever they’re needed, making sure standards are high. Then we leave and let the people we’ve hired carry on.”
In the fall of 2005, Teddy Corrado received an invitation: come down to the ROM and audition for Ziobro and his fellow VPs from New York. Corrado had spent years working with Guy Rubino and Lorenzo Loseto at Zoom, Rain and Luce. It was Loseto who suggested his name to Connie MacDonald. “I was one of many they auditioned,” he remembers, “though they timed it so none of us saw who else was invited. They had set up a kitchen and I just started to cook.” He tenderized octopus in a sous-vide pouch, then finished it on the grill, pairing it with a salad of garbanzo beans and preserved lemon, and topping off the plate with an espelette aïoli. He laid sweet black cod over a lentil and mango salad with a rich lobster hollan*daise, poached spears of white asparagus in soy, mirin and balsamic until they turned black, then sliced them to reveal their white interiors. Both dishes will feature on C5’s menu.
“He simply blew us away,” says Ziobro. “One of the best tastings I’ve ever experienced. So contemporary and so talented. We offered him the job.”
Realizing he still had a year before the ROM would be open for business, Corrado went to work at George for Loseto. Last October, he moved to the ROM.
Though C5 and its fifth-storey kitchen were no more than a twinkle in the architect’s eye, Food Studio was long since finished. Created where the museum’s old design studio and carpenter’s shop used to be, it brings back the enormous windows that look out onto the trees and lawns of Philosopher’s Walk. Passersby can peek in and see a dozen cooks at work in a space big enough to service a good-sized hotel. That day in October, however, Corrado stood there alone, looking at the Thermomix (a $1,600 device that cooks as it stirs), the gelato machine and the Pacojet (for turning anything into sorbet), the induction circulators and the $40,000 combi ovens that steam or bake or do both at the same time. At Luce he had improvised sous-vide cooking with a thermometer dangling over the lip of a saucepan. Now he had thermal regulators and a Cryovac machine—all the equipment a chef could desire.
“I sat down with Connie and Andrew and we talked about what we wanted to achieve here—food that reflected the multi-ethnicity of Toronto and the global scope of the museum, but that was also eco-friendly and used as much local produce as possible.”
Restaurant Associates left the menu to Corrado while retaining final approval. He already had relationships with the suppliers he wanted to use: Cumbrae Farms for meat (especially the rib-eye aged 60 days), Taro for fish, Cheese Boutique for cheeses, Mario Pingue for his boar prosciutto.
He had also chosen his sous-chefs, Michael Smith and Luigi Encarnacion.
“We spent weeks perfecting our bread recipes,” he remembers, “and making ice creams, doing molecular stuff, espresso caviar using alginates. We brought Steven Alexander from Cumbrae’s in to butcher a whole lamb. Fun.” Some of their ideas ended up on the menu of a temporary café set up beneath the mosaic dome in the old entrance hall. I had lunch there and loved the charcuterie plate, especially an unusually runny but delectable chicken liver mousse, whipped up in minutes in the Thermomix.
“We opened Luce in about a week,” Corrado recalls. “Here was the opposite. I had a year to think about it and months to prepare, planning new menus for lunch and dinner, brunch and the bar.” Luxurious, but nerve-racking, too.
Before too long, he had help. Caesar Guinto joined the team in March as chef in charge of catering and special events. Guinto started his career as a pastry chef at Auberge du Pommier and Herbs, cooked on the line at Otago and Messis, and was executive chef at Spiral. He worked in Ireland for five years, then got into catering when he returned to Toronto, first as sous at Rhonda Litwack Fine Foods, then as the chef for Gibson & Lyle. “We did a lot of events at the ROM, and that’s how Connie got to know my work.”
MacDonald knew Guinto had the sophistication, imagination and skills to wow 4,000 people at a time. One evening when the president of Restaurant Associates was in town, she set up a catered dinner at the museum and hired Guinto to do it. Not much later, he was offered the job.
Lauren Boyington was the final member of the trio to come on board, taking over the Food Studio at the beginning of May. Boyington had apprenticed under Jamie Kennedy at Palmerston, where she ended up as sous-chef, then did breads and pastry for Chris McDonald at Massimo Rosticceria. After her daughter, Rachael, was born, she cooked at Giovanna and Borgo Antico, and was sous-chef for Gary Hoyer at Millie’s. Through it all, she has been an active environmentalist, a founding member and past president of Knives and Forks, and the creator of a company called Wild Culture Food Guerillas, cooking for outreach and non-profit organizations. She was in the kitchens at Coca when Restaurant Associates starting calling her in February. “For me, the carrot was the ROM,” she says. “As a child, as a university student and also as a parent, the ROM has been huge in my life, and I was also part of Jamie Kennedy’s catering brigade, so I did tons of events here.”
Connie MacDonald sees Boyington’s eco-friendly integrity as an asset. “It’s so important to have someone like Lauren in charge of the Food Studio,” she says. “It’s a long-term project and her honesty will help prevent it from sliding back into an ordinary cafe*teria concept.” The Studio is off to a flying start with a focus on regional, seasonal, organic-where-possible produce and a cooking station right out in the middle of the room where Boyington or her two sous can showcase specific ingredients. And, as at the restaurant at the AGO, menus will be exhibit specific. Come the fall, for example, Boyington will be playing with iconic Cana*dian ingredients to coincide with the opening of the new Canadian galleries.
As will Corrado and Guinto. Like the emphasis on fresh, local foods, the shared interest in themes will further the notion of ROM food as a coherent brand with a specific quality and style. In early May, just before preparations for the grand opening became too hectic, the three chefs flew to New York to see some of Restaurant Associates’ other projects in operation.
“I was amazed by the aesthetic and the quality standard,” says Corrado. “They took us to the Google office—satellite kitchens, pantries all over the place…”
“I was impressed by how important provenance was to them,” adds Boyington. “Which farmer, which artisanal bakery... I was cracking a grin the whole time.”
Museology and the way collections are curated is changing, infiltrated by green concerns and the importance of conservation over mere acquisition. The new food program reflects that. Down in the Food Studio, plates and cups are all biodegradable. In C5, Corrado is already working on a 150-mile “greenbelt” menu. Next year, Connie MacDonald and the chefs will host a slow food convivium, timed to coincide with an exhibit about Charles Darwin.
Whether or not you think it a waste of space, the Crystal marks an evolution for the ROM, an architectural metaphor for its new attitude, more sophisticated than the dumbed-down museum of the 1990s, but also bursting open the traditional ivory tower of preceding decades and centuries. The walls that separated the city and its museum are removed both physically and intellectually. C5 has its own access to Bloor, and Corrado plans to invite talented young Toronto chefs to cook at special events in his open kitchen for all the world to see.
For all three chefs, the weeks leading up to the Crystal’s June 1 debut were a blur. Corrado was desperate to get into his kitchen at C5. Guinto could be seen unpacking shipments of equipment in the cafeteria and working on his menus. Boyington was interviewing and hiring morning and afternoon, juggling logistics, waking up in the morning to find scribbled notes by the bed, written at various points of a restless night.
The gala was a triumph, featuring a dinner for 540 supervised by Guinto and Tim McLaughlin, Restaurant Associates’ executive chef of catering, who flew in to make sure the opening went smoothly. After the meal, another 700 guests spilled up onto all five levels of the Crystal, where Guinto had set up a network of food stations offering his own creations—everything from Filipino Sinagang (shrimp, salmon and vege*tables in a sour tamarind broth) to bite-size foie gras bonbons to roasted lamb chops with apricots. Corrado, meanwhile, had finally cooked his first meal in C5’s kitchen on May 30, a dinner for 90 in honour of Michael Lee-Chin and his family, Hilary Weston and the ROM’s principal donors. That, too, drew rave reviews. The first course was hokkaido scallops with duck crackling, paired with sautéed sea asparagus, artichokes and chanterelles in a lychee and black bean sauce. The Cumbrae Farms rib-eye was the main event, marinated in aji amarillo and served with whipped boniato, morels and grilled Ontario ramps.
Gastronomy is an art form that Toronto does well, and it is essential that it should be a major part of the city’s current cultural renaissance. The ROM has stepped up to the plate, putting its future into good hands. Corrado, Guinto and Boyington are not yet household names, but they have been given an extraordinary opportunity to excel. While all eyes are on the ROM, this is their moment.
High Five
Four years in the making, the ROM’s new dining operation is one of the most anticipated restaurant launches in recent history. Can it live up to the hype? By James Chatto
By James Chatto
ROM service: chefs Caesar Guinto, Lauren Boyington and Teddy Corrado in C5 on the top floor of the new Crystal
Image credit: Margaret Mulligan
Restaurant names that need to be explained to make any sense are either cleverly exclusive or deeply annoying. It depends, I suppose, on whether you’re in the know. C5 opened last month at the Royal Ontario Museum, tucked up under the soaring, pointy eaves of the Michael Lee-Chin Crystal. The name sounds like buttons you push on a jukebox or vending machine, until someone explains it’s short for Crystal Five, a clearer reference to the restaurant’s location on the fifth floor of a structure shaped like five interposed polyhedrons. But as those who remember JK ROM will attest, the museum has a fetish for acronyms and abbreviation was inevitable. Which is a shame. C5 is such a blandly forgettable name for a room that is anything but.
I first saw it in mid-May, when there was still scaffolding up and our little group of chefs and administrators had to wear steel-toed galoshes and hard hats (the latter providing protection from a stray pigeon that had found its way into the space). I was drawn to the angular, slanting windows and the unusual view of the metal roof on the original 1914 building (future plans include a terrace for outdoor dining) and, beyond it, the top storey of the Royal Conservatory of Music’s own dazzling renovation and new concert hall. But C5’s chef designate, 33-year-old Teddy Corrado, stood with his back to the light. He only had eyes for the plastic-wrapped open kitchen, gazing at his Thermomix and brand new chrome-topped plancha grill like a father watching his newborn through the nursery window, desperate to establish a rapport.
It is an exceptionally well-equipped place to cook, but it pales beside the vast kitchen in the basement next to Food Studio, the museum’s new cafeteria. That facili*ty was completed last summer to service not just the cafeteria, but also to fulfill all catering needs for parties of up to 4,000, and to handle C5’s basic prep. Corrado has been working down there for the past eight months, while the museum’s renovations were being completed, experimenting with ingredients and perfecting recipes for C5’s menus. This, he admits, is the opportunity of a lifetime, handed to him by Connie MacDonald, the ROM’s senior director of hospitality, restaurant and retail services, and by Restaurant Associates, the savvy New York company MacDonald brought in four years ago to set up and run the restaurants.
Back then, I remember wondering whether a big American corporation was quite what the museum needed, for I have a great affection for the ROM. I first stepped through its noble stone entrance almost 30 years ago, escaping the rain and with a couple of hours to kill. I loved the rotunda with its gold mosaic dome and the totem poles in the stairwells, though I don’t think I penetrated very far. The mineralogy gallery just to the left hijacked me—so many splendid specimens organized in a traditional Victorian way, packed close to impart the maximum amount of know*ledge. In those days, people still thought of a museum as an intellectual resource rather than a place of entertainment. Space was to be filled with as much of the collections as possible, not left empty as some kind of architectural self-indulgence. But that was before the great dumbing down of the 1990s, before the ROM decided its target audience should no longer be adults but children with alarmingly curtailed attention spans.
The ’90s did see one improvement to the museum: the opening of JK ROM. The kitchen was small and under-equipped and the lack of its own street entrance meant evening events were a logistical challenge, with extra security needed to usher guests through the museum. Still, Kennedy achieved a great deal, putting the museum on the city’s culinary map, and bringing his ecologically aware, pro-organic activism to the menus. JK ROM lasted almost nine years, serving its last lunch on April 30, 2003. Soon after, the wreckers began to make way for the Crystal, and the museum entered a new culinary dark age, with the only food available coming from a Druxy’s franchise in the basement. MacDonald, meanwhile, was not sitting idle. “I was on a committee of senior management and we tendered the business,” she recalls. “There was little response from Cana*dian companies. Maybe people were scared by the size of the undertaking—large events, the restaurant, the 350-seat Food Studio. Jamie Kennedy thought about it for a long time, but it felt too big. In the end, Restaurant Associates was the perfect choice. Jamie came to New York with us to meet them. He said he couldn’t leave us in better hands.”
If you’ve ever had lunch in a major U.S. gallery or museum, you’ve probably ex*peri*enced Restaurant Associates. They operate the food services in the likes of the Met, the Guggenheim and the Morgan in New York, the Smithsonian and dozens of other establishments, not to mention corporate dining operations for such companies as Google. But they started out 50 years ago with high-end restaurants, and have made a conscious effort to retain a sophistication and a passion for quality that seem to impress every independent chef who sees them in action. Andrew Ziobro is vice-presi*dent of project management for Restaurant Associates and the man in charge of the ROM’s culinary evolution. He was a chef in an earlier career and he understands what a chef needs. The ROM is the company’s first Canadian project (Restaurant Associates is contracted to operate the museum’s food services, and provides the ROM with a percentage of sales), but they’re treating it in much the same way as they did the new High Museum of Art in Atlanta, building state-of-the-art kitchens and dining rooms, then peopling them with local chefs and personnel and using local suppliers. “We write a large cheque for the set-up, but not a blank cheque,” says Ziobro. “Yes, we’re talking millions. And we give a ton of support for the six weeks before and after they open, bringing in a whole SWAT team of top chefs and sous-chefs from New York to help run each station in the kitchen, helping wherever they’re needed, making sure standards are high. Then we leave and let the people we’ve hired carry on.”
In the fall of 2005, Teddy Corrado received an invitation: come down to the ROM and audition for Ziobro and his fellow VPs from New York. Corrado had spent years working with Guy Rubino and Lorenzo Loseto at Zoom, Rain and Luce. It was Loseto who suggested his name to Connie MacDonald. “I was one of many they auditioned,” he remembers, “though they timed it so none of us saw who else was invited. They had set up a kitchen and I just started to cook.” He tenderized octopus in a sous-vide pouch, then finished it on the grill, pairing it with a salad of garbanzo beans and preserved lemon, and topping off the plate with an espelette aïoli. He laid sweet black cod over a lentil and mango salad with a rich lobster hollan*daise, poached spears of white asparagus in soy, mirin and balsamic until they turned black, then sliced them to reveal their white interiors. Both dishes will feature on C5’s menu.
“He simply blew us away,” says Ziobro. “One of the best tastings I’ve ever experienced. So contemporary and so talented. We offered him the job.”
Realizing he still had a year before the ROM would be open for business, Corrado went to work at George for Loseto. Last October, he moved to the ROM.
Though C5 and its fifth-storey kitchen were no more than a twinkle in the architect’s eye, Food Studio was long since finished. Created where the museum’s old design studio and carpenter’s shop used to be, it brings back the enormous windows that look out onto the trees and lawns of Philosopher’s Walk. Passersby can peek in and see a dozen cooks at work in a space big enough to service a good-sized hotel. That day in October, however, Corrado stood there alone, looking at the Thermomix (a $1,600 device that cooks as it stirs), the gelato machine and the Pacojet (for turning anything into sorbet), the induction circulators and the $40,000 combi ovens that steam or bake or do both at the same time. At Luce he had improvised sous-vide cooking with a thermometer dangling over the lip of a saucepan. Now he had thermal regulators and a Cryovac machine—all the equipment a chef could desire.
“I sat down with Connie and Andrew and we talked about what we wanted to achieve here—food that reflected the multi-ethnicity of Toronto and the global scope of the museum, but that was also eco-friendly and used as much local produce as possible.”
Restaurant Associates left the menu to Corrado while retaining final approval. He already had relationships with the suppliers he wanted to use: Cumbrae Farms for meat (especially the rib-eye aged 60 days), Taro for fish, Cheese Boutique for cheeses, Mario Pingue for his boar prosciutto.
He had also chosen his sous-chefs, Michael Smith and Luigi Encarnacion.
“We spent weeks perfecting our bread recipes,” he remembers, “and making ice creams, doing molecular stuff, espresso caviar using alginates. We brought Steven Alexander from Cumbrae’s in to butcher a whole lamb. Fun.” Some of their ideas ended up on the menu of a temporary café set up beneath the mosaic dome in the old entrance hall. I had lunch there and loved the charcuterie plate, especially an unusually runny but delectable chicken liver mousse, whipped up in minutes in the Thermomix.
“We opened Luce in about a week,” Corrado recalls. “Here was the opposite. I had a year to think about it and months to prepare, planning new menus for lunch and dinner, brunch and the bar.” Luxurious, but nerve-racking, too.
Before too long, he had help. Caesar Guinto joined the team in March as chef in charge of catering and special events. Guinto started his career as a pastry chef at Auberge du Pommier and Herbs, cooked on the line at Otago and Messis, and was executive chef at Spiral. He worked in Ireland for five years, then got into catering when he returned to Toronto, first as sous at Rhonda Litwack Fine Foods, then as the chef for Gibson & Lyle. “We did a lot of events at the ROM, and that’s how Connie got to know my work.”
MacDonald knew Guinto had the sophistication, imagination and skills to wow 4,000 people at a time. One evening when the president of Restaurant Associates was in town, she set up a catered dinner at the museum and hired Guinto to do it. Not much later, he was offered the job.
Lauren Boyington was the final member of the trio to come on board, taking over the Food Studio at the beginning of May. Boyington had apprenticed under Jamie Kennedy at Palmerston, where she ended up as sous-chef, then did breads and pastry for Chris McDonald at Massimo Rosticceria. After her daughter, Rachael, was born, she cooked at Giovanna and Borgo Antico, and was sous-chef for Gary Hoyer at Millie’s. Through it all, she has been an active environmentalist, a founding member and past president of Knives and Forks, and the creator of a company called Wild Culture Food Guerillas, cooking for outreach and non-profit organizations. She was in the kitchens at Coca when Restaurant Associates starting calling her in February. “For me, the carrot was the ROM,” she says. “As a child, as a university student and also as a parent, the ROM has been huge in my life, and I was also part of Jamie Kennedy’s catering brigade, so I did tons of events here.”
Connie MacDonald sees Boyington’s eco-friendly integrity as an asset. “It’s so important to have someone like Lauren in charge of the Food Studio,” she says. “It’s a long-term project and her honesty will help prevent it from sliding back into an ordinary cafe*teria concept.” The Studio is off to a flying start with a focus on regional, seasonal, organic-where-possible produce and a cooking station right out in the middle of the room where Boyington or her two sous can showcase specific ingredients. And, as at the restaurant at the AGO, menus will be exhibit specific. Come the fall, for example, Boyington will be playing with iconic Cana*dian ingredients to coincide with the opening of the new Canadian galleries.
As will Corrado and Guinto. Like the emphasis on fresh, local foods, the shared interest in themes will further the notion of ROM food as a coherent brand with a specific quality and style. In early May, just before preparations for the grand opening became too hectic, the three chefs flew to New York to see some of Restaurant Associates’ other projects in operation.
“I was amazed by the aesthetic and the quality standard,” says Corrado. “They took us to the Google office—satellite kitchens, pantries all over the place…”
“I was impressed by how important provenance was to them,” adds Boyington. “Which farmer, which artisanal bakery... I was cracking a grin the whole time.”
Museology and the way collections are curated is changing, infiltrated by green concerns and the importance of conservation over mere acquisition. The new food program reflects that. Down in the Food Studio, plates and cups are all biodegradable. In C5, Corrado is already working on a 150-mile “greenbelt” menu. Next year, Connie MacDonald and the chefs will host a slow food convivium, timed to coincide with an exhibit about Charles Darwin.
Whether or not you think it a waste of space, the Crystal marks an evolution for the ROM, an architectural metaphor for its new attitude, more sophisticated than the dumbed-down museum of the 1990s, but also bursting open the traditional ivory tower of preceding decades and centuries. The walls that separated the city and its museum are removed both physically and intellectually. C5 has its own access to Bloor, and Corrado plans to invite talented young Toronto chefs to cook at special events in his open kitchen for all the world to see.
For all three chefs, the weeks leading up to the Crystal’s June 1 debut were a blur. Corrado was desperate to get into his kitchen at C5. Guinto could be seen unpacking shipments of equipment in the cafeteria and working on his menus. Boyington was interviewing and hiring morning and afternoon, juggling logistics, waking up in the morning to find scribbled notes by the bed, written at various points of a restless night.
The gala was a triumph, featuring a dinner for 540 supervised by Guinto and Tim McLaughlin, Restaurant Associates’ executive chef of catering, who flew in to make sure the opening went smoothly. After the meal, another 700 guests spilled up onto all five levels of the Crystal, where Guinto had set up a network of food stations offering his own creations—everything from Filipino Sinagang (shrimp, salmon and vege*tables in a sour tamarind broth) to bite-size foie gras bonbons to roasted lamb chops with apricots. Corrado, meanwhile, had finally cooked his first meal in C5’s kitchen on May 30, a dinner for 90 in honour of Michael Lee-Chin and his family, Hilary Weston and the ROM’s principal donors. That, too, drew rave reviews. The first course was hokkaido scallops with duck crackling, paired with sautéed sea asparagus, artichokes and chanterelles in a lychee and black bean sauce. The Cumbrae Farms rib-eye was the main event, marinated in aji amarillo and served with whipped boniato, morels and grilled Ontario ramps.
Gastronomy is an art form that Toronto does well, and it is essential that it should be a major part of the city’s current cultural renaissance. The ROM has stepped up to the plate, putting its future into good hands. Corrado, Guinto and Boyington are not yet household names, but they have been given an extraordinary opportunity to excel. While all eyes are on the ROM, this is their moment.
