How lucky can you get? My friend and Torito Chef Carlos Hernandez has invited me to cook with him at the Montreal High Lights Festival. This year’s ninth annual winter festival includes 14 Toronto chefs strutting their stuff in key Montreal restaurants. We’re going to be in very esteemed company. The other invited chefs are [...]

This is how I learned about Pilar coming to town, which is exciting in itself. I got a call from Andrew Gardner, my old friend from my days at Xango, who’s now part of the management team at Reds Bistro. He and Reds Chef Michael Steh, invited me to come and talk to them about [...]

I don’t know what all the fuss was about .Gourmet devotes their September issue entirely to Latino Food, and according to Editor Ruth Riechl, in her interview with the Reuters News Service, it didn’t sit well with some of her readers. She says she got comments like, “This is disgusting. We never eat this kind [...]

I’ve been stewing over this post and then putting aside and then picking it back up for a couple of months now. Wouldn’t you know it: just as I get ready to post, the Globe does a piece on sherries. And then my friend Tammy tells me yesterday that the Vintages site is featuring Spain [...]

I got an email from Michelle Eliot in Vancouver. She’s the associate producer of Sounds Like Canada on CBC Radio One. They were producing a summer series about a teen chef prodigy named Neil Flambé (their answer to Harry Potter, she said). They were looking for some veteran chefs to interview them about the dish [...]

Back in May I dropped in to say hi to my old friend Trevor Berryman. I first met Trevor in 1998, when he hired me as his Executive Chef at Xango. We made some real magic there. We got recognition as the best Latino restaurant of 2000, and added a star to our Toronto Life [...]

I got an interesting a call from Jessica Loving the other day. Jessica is Inniskillin’s brand manager. We met last year when I put on a cooking demo that focused on ice wine. The spectrum of ice wine’s tasting notes is astounding. I don’t think people realize the breadth or diversity of ice wine’s flavour [...]