Continued from Part 1: Steve Beckta Restaurant
Eight months later, the capital has become bricks and mortar. This morning, the restaurant is dark, cool and silent like a stage set.
Even in shadow, the Mediterranean tones are soothing: the azure sky splashed on the walls, the amber setting sun on the suede chairs and the field-flower dappled yellow of the maple floors.
The glassware on the tables glints like sun catching on the sea.
Paul Quinn, the general manager, comes out from the back to the bar and offers me a cup of tar-black coffee, then, with a shaky hand pours a cup for himself.
The dark-haired 29-year-old’s eyes are glazed—he’s been working ninety hours a week since the restaurant opened.
He starts listening to the sixteen messages that have been left by the charmingly naive souls who think they can call this morning to book a table for dinner this evening.
In fact, the restaurant will turn away more than a hundred people tonight.
Behind the white Plexiglas window that separates the bar from the kitchen, human figures move.
Chef Steve Vardy and his team are already preparing for dinner—Beckta’s doesn’t serve lunch on Saturdays.
The kitchen is a gleaming contrast to the restaurant seating area: stabblingly bright fluorescent lights, white tiled walls, chrome equipment and the pasty-faces of the cook staff in their whites.
Restaurant staff are largely nocturnal folk whose socializing after work happens when most of us are asleep.
But the most noticeable difference is the heat. What coolness I had found in the restaurant evaporates in here like desert rain on a sun-baked lizard.
Vardy is fanatic about serving food hot so he doesn’t allow air conditioning in the kitchen, and he won’t even allow for the door to be left open.
It’s already 37oC in this small space, the day’s heat is layered over with the heat from the stove top burners, the oven, the food heat lamps and the bodies working feverishly.
Every cooking verb is in action: peeling, slicing, dicing, shaving, measuring, sectioning, cleaning, rolling, stewing, sautéing and baking.
The cooks are organizing the ingredients for their mise en place, the stations where they’ll work tonight to make each dish as the order comes in.
Jeff Durling, the tall, willowy saucier, drops whole chickens into a thirty-litre cauldron of simmering water. He’s making the stock that, eight hours later, will form the basis of the seafood chowder and of the savoury sauce for the braised pork.
Durling, 25, who worked with Vardy at a Halifax restaurant, bubbles with adoration for him like a boy for a Harley-Davidson: “He’s the best chef in Canada man—no, in North America!”
And while there are probably a few more contenders for that title, there’s no doubt that Vardy is talented.
He’s also pedigreed having worked in some of the country’s best restaurants: Toronto’s North 44, Halifax’s Bish and Ottawa’s Domus Café. This is his second executive chef position. Like all the staff here, Vardy is young: just 24.
Vardy has the handsome, tanned, lean look of a professional cyclist. But like most chefs, his hands look twenty years older, lightly scarred by hot pans and errant knives.
He also has the thousand-year stare of the chronically under-slept.
He refuses to characterize his food as one genre or another, though some call it seasonal cooking with a French fusion flair.
Vardy’s bold mix of flavours, textures and temperatures are more Renoir meets Jackson Pollock than any gastronomic school.
Among his signature dishes: caramelized hassleback scallops with kumquats, caper berries, young asparagus, truffled cauliflower purée and yuzu drizzle; charred Alberta leg of lamb and Ontario rack of lamb with spatzle, niçoise olives, coffee mushrooms, roasted garlic and Robert sauce; and “Three Little Pigs”: grilled orange marinated tenderloin, braised pork belly and ham hock, hash browns with pickled red onions, bright lights chard and kobayaki reduction.
It was Beckta’s fiancée, Maureen Cunningham, who introduced Vardy to Beckta, whom she knew through a friend.
At the time, Vardy was working at Café Henry Burger and when he heard they would be dining there Saturday evening, he started preparing their meal Tuesday. By the ninth course, they agreed to work together.
A large man comes through the kitchen, pulling a dolly loaded with six boxes of fresh fruit and vegetables. Vardy signs his invoice and tells him where to put them.
The foundation of his cooking is fresh local ingredients such as foie gras from Mariposa Farms, heirloom tomatoes from Bryson Farms and Christophe Marineau for organic mushrooms.
Working beside Vardy is his sous chef Ross Fraser. Fraser, 21, has a shock of spiky strawberry-blond hair, freckles, mischievous big brown eyes and a natural gift for performing. I ask him why he cooks and he responds, “Gets me chicks.”
Go to Part 3: Steve Beckta Restaurant
