Pho Viet Noodle, Toronto chef

Good morning,

Every September, during the regional culinary championships, the finals of the Canadian Culinary Championships here in Ottawa seem like a world away. Now here we are. 

The upcoming weekend will be a delight for attendees and a pressure cooker for Canada’s finest culinary talent and their teams. Ten regional finalists from across Canada will convene over two days and test their skills over three separate competitions.

Today, the executive chef of Toronto’s  Park Hyatt sat down with me to talk about his rise to chefdom. 

Yet as this is Ottawa in winter, we first take a look at some warming comfort foods from one of the city’s newer Vietnamese restaurants.

Grab your soup spoons.

Ralf Joneikies, food and drink editor. [email protected]

VIETNAMESE

A fragrant winter warmer

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You may have noticed that sometimes changes to storefronts are so frequent that you don’t see that one business has been replaced by another. The address of today’s restaurant housed the ill-fated Quebec business Maniac Chicken and before that, Carben. 

This Vietnamese restaurant opened about a year ago, and from my visit, it appeared that this is the food the neighbourhood was craving. During my Saturday lunch, with people coming and going, the restaurant was never less than half full.

It was a little brisk when we stopped in, so I was very much in the mood for a warming bowl of comfort food. As I’m always up for testing an untasted spring roll, I began with the deep-fried shrimp roll.

Sadly there was no revelatory taste sensation. I can only say that it was perfectly fine but had spent too much time in the fryer. The wrapper was dense and a little tough, with the overall experience being generic.

A much better experience came with the shrimp wontons. The shrimp was sweet and texturally light with just the right amount of seasoning to make them a craveable bar snack. 

Finally, what I appreciated most about these fried items was that the oil used was clean and had no bitterness. This family-run business has some kitchen standards.

I’ve not done any sort of comparison of the most popular dishes in world cuisine but I imagine that the Vietnamese vermicelli bowl must be amongst the healthiest dishes out there.

It’s a customizable dish with warm rice vermicelli noodles topped with some sort of grilled meat or veg, cold and colourful vegetables where freshness is paramount and a couple of hot spring rolls (pork, shrimp or veg). The entire dish comes to your table fragrant and inviting with a series of flavour and texture contrasts. For those concerned about their health, it’s almost completely fat free. 

Pho Viet got it right with perfectly cooked noodles, fabulous grilled chicken with a lemongrass accent and two memorable pork spring rolls. They were so good, it put to bed the memory of the lacking spring rolls just moments before. Easily a highlight of the lunch and a recommendation.

Pho tai bo vien is a version of the classic soup that comes with both rare, lean sliced beef and very springy beef meatballs.

For me, both the broth and noodle quality are of paramount importance. Low-quality noodles will release their starch into the broth very quickly, becoming sponges and turning your soup into porridge. This was not an issue here.

Then there was the broth. I was pleased to learn that they cook it sufficiently for maximum beefy goodness without needing to rely heavily on too much MSG. 

MSG is a fairly standard ingredient in almost all Pho (with rare exceptions) and is viewed as part of the overall flavour profile. Yet it’s almost always overdone, causing you to drink more water than the amount of broth you’ve just consumed.

With their version, Pho Viet Noodle has placed itself in the upper rankings of my favourite Pho in Ottawa. Enjoying this cuisine as I do, I’m too often met with a standard averageness that is the gustatory equivalent of shrugging, “oh well.”

This was some robustly seasoned Pho with star anise, cinnamon, cardamom and coriander jumping out to greet you. It was balanced and fortifying, not overly salted and delivered harmony in every slurp. It also helped that all the toppings were supremely fresh.

Looking at the interactions around the room, it became obvious that this family had won the favour of locals as many were clearly regulars. 

While I always wish to stumble upon a Vietnamese eatery with a more adventuresome menu, Pho Viet Noodle does the classics well. This was certainly a happy discovery.

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CHEF PROFILE

Toronto sends its best

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Trading stories around one's beginnings in cookery is an inevitability when chatting with a chef. During the course of a conversation, other memories surface, and you’re both off to the races with a more informal and personal discussion.

Chef Jonathan Williams of Joni restaurant in Toronto’s Park Hyatt hotel caught the kitchen bug when he was 16. Now, 20 years later, he is the executive chef at Joni, bringing modern sensibilities and his love of Japanese fermentation to his celebrated menu.

Ottawans attending this weekend's Canada’s Great Kitchen Party will have the opportunity to indulge in one of his signature dishes and meet the man himself. More on that later.

We traded stories of our beginnings, and his response to the experiences of restaurant kitchens was a little different from my own. I’d found one particular environment so openly hostile, it was evident that this was not the life for me.

“Things can get chaotic in kitchens”, he said, “but that chaos leads to order, which then gives diners pleasure. 

“I started off washing dishes and making sandwiches at a restaurant in New Market and despite the angry shouting, I loved the fast-paced environment. What I’ve found is that hospitality attracts genuinely nice people.”

In another job at Moxie’s, he’d been rising through the ranks when he decided that he wanted to learn to “cook real food from scratch” and enrolled in the culinary management program at Niagara College. It was there that he met Carl Heinrich.

Heinrich was an expert butcher well well-versed in charcuterie, and had won season two of Top Chef Canada. With his own interest in charcuterie, Williams was keen to work with Heinrich and recalled his “interview” with him.

“It was at a Tragically Hip concert in Fort York. I cleaned the deep fryers and we cooked thousands of burgers and I got to listen to the band. It was one of the best work days ever.”

When Heinrich opened Richmond Station in Toronto in 2012, he brought Williams on as his sous chef.

Eager to gather international experience, he moved to England for three years, where he worked at the two Michelin-starred The Clove Club and Heston Blumenthal’s Dinner. 

For me, Heston Blumenthal is the only chef of the last century that I would consider a genius. There have been many great chefs over the decades but not Rene Redzepi, Ferran Adria or Grant Achatz, as remarkable as their talents are, has the uncommon mind of Blumenthal.

To his credit, Jonathan Williams has made efforts to offer a credible take on Heston Blumenthal's famous fish and chips at Joni.  Blumenthal invented the triple cooking of fries (now widely accepted as the singular expression of this dish) and I had the pleasure of having this at Blumenthal's The Perfectionist Café at Heathrow. I’ve never had better. On the next Toronto visit, I’ll be sure to indulge.

I asked him what so many Canadians have sometimes asked themselves what defines Canadian cuisine? Butter tarts, poutine, Nanaimo bars and tourtiere often come to mind but his answer was as simple and logical as it gets “local and seasonal”. To that end Williams has partnered his restaurant with the 100 Km Food Initiative, which brings local food producers and restaurants together. Good for the environment, good for farmers and even better for patrons.

With an expert background in charcuterie, his competition dish this weekend will feature a beef short rib pastrami with horseradish cream, rye crumble, and a "very good carrot". The preparation of the carrot sounded elaborate but in short involves cooking and rehydrating organic carrots in carrot juice, then glazing them with a reduction of carrot juice seasoned with ice wine vinegar for a sweet and sour flavor that mimics barbecue sauce.

It’s this level of meticulousness and technique that most of us lucky consumers never really think about. We pop these attractive morsels into our mouths, seldom contemplating everything that went into its creation.

Like all accomplished chefs, Jonathan Williams has had a long culinary journey, one of education and experiences that has culminated in giving voice to his unique expression in the kitchen. 

For some people, great food is sometimes described as a “religious experience”. If there’s even a modicum of truth to that, perhaps the next bites we take are also an act of communion.

FROM THE ARCHIVE

At Ek Bar, a top chef elevates Ottawa’s culinary scene

After a while in this business, your body, rather than just your palate, tells you when the food is first-rate. When a dish is so flawless, it bypasses the critical faculties and is just understood to be the pinnacle expression of said dish. You just don’t know how it could be better. I call this “effortless eating”.

That was my experience at Ek Bar, where Indian cuisine has a few other Asian and even Mexican influences that never demonstrate a misfire. Once more, Chef Teegavarapu Sarath Mohan shows Ottawans why he’s one of the city’s finest chefs. He’s previously helmed the critically acclaimed restaurants Vivaan and Kātha.

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