Chef Jamie Kennedy, centre, works in the kitchen during the lunch rush at Gilead Wine Bar in Toronto on Friday, November 21, 2014.Darren Calabrese
Jamie Kennedy first came to the city's attention 34 years ago, freshly returned from a cooking stint in Switzerland. He was barely into his 20s, a hotel-trained chef with a progressive streak. He'd been put in charge at a promising new spot called Scaramouche.
"Scaramouche is already Toronto's most interesting French restaurant, thanks to Jamie Kennedy's cooking," wrote Joanne Kates. He served "daring" unthickened sauces flavoured with herbs, steamed his vegetables lightly so that they were fresh and natural-tasting, and put saffron and orange zest on his leek and potato soup.
His work was as avant garde as high-end cooking got in Toronto in the early 1980s. "Simplicity hand in hand with brilliance," the headline pronounced. It was as if the boy wonder might single-handedly rescue all of Upper Canada from its flannel-knickered self.
These days, Mr. Kennedy runs a neighbourhood café and restaurant hidden midway down a blink-and-you-missed-it laneway near King and Parliament Streets; the building is also the seat of his catering firm. Gilead Wine Bar has stopped and started its evening service in recent years, at times awkwardly; you get the sense it's been a struggle. The restaurant's latest iteration, a sort of J.K.'s greatest hits, opened in early December last year.
Has Mr. Kennedy still got it? Gilead is excellent at times and maddeningly underwhelming at others. On good nights it's clear that the chef, who published his third cookbook this fall, with HarperCollins, still matters. On the bad nights it can feel like Mr. Kennedy is paying penance still for his mistakes of the past few years.
At the end of the aughts he was one of the most influential and respected chefs in Canada, a founder of Ontario's local-food movement and the captain of a restaurant empire that looked as though it was making more money than any one business could ever spend. He'd been passing a lot of his time in Prince Edward County, though, away from his business. He was expanding too fast, not always wisely, and shirking his company's tax payments.
In 2009, on the verge of financial collape, Mr. Kennedy sold off J.K. Wine Bar, the jewel of his empire, and began a period of divestment. He never did declare bankruptcy; he wanted to do right by his suppliers, he said. That's an admirable choice, but restaurants go bankrupt all the time. It's a part of the business. In choosing not to, Mr. Kennedy denied himself a fresh start.
The Gilead space is a Jamie Kennedy restaurant, unmistakably. The walls are lined with jars of booze-soaked cherries and mustard pickles and there's a chalkboard just inside, jammed with wine specials and the dishes of the day. The music is soft and comfortable, Miles Davis doing Freddie Freeloader; the crowd is genteel and older for the most part but not exclusively; the light, from hanging pendants, glows warm and soft, so that even from the laneway, if anybody happened to be walking by (which nobody does) they couldn't help but want to step inside.
The menus will also be recognizable to the chef's fans: the braised short rib, the hot-smoked lakefish, the J.K. frites that fill the room with the smell of warming thyme and alchemized Yukon Golds.
Yet my first time in the reopened spot, last January, nearly all of what has always made Mr. Kennedy's food so appealing had vanished.
The frites were pure shell, dry and overcooked without even a whisper of the usual creamy-centredness. The soups – carrot soup and a chowder – were so underseasoned you could hardly taste them. These were basic cooking errors, the sort of thing that didn't happen at Mr. Kennedy's peak, when he was able to attract and retain the top cooking talent in the city.
The gnocchi were too heavy, the pork schnitzel nicely made but then served without the lemony acidity to bring it to life. It was a dinner in need of defibrillation: Kennedy, sort of, but dead from the shoulders down.
"Has J.K. changed or have we?" I wrote later that evening. Looking back through my notes I realize how desperately I wanted to give the chef the benefit of the doubt. He'd earned it. He was better than that single night. And January's a brutal month for any fresh-and-local-focused chef.
I went back seven months later, this past August, in what should have been prime time for the sort of bounty-driven cooking that's so integral to the Kennedy brand. That dinner was worse. The crab and corn chowder tasted gritty. The apple-fed pork – the sort of meat that gets a carnivore's pulse racing – had been overcooked into a dry slab that was reminiscent of supermarket commodity chops.
The $26 steak frites, a Tuesday special at Gilead, said the most of all. It was good meat, dry-aged for 60 days. But it was cut so thin that it was more grey on its outsides than Maillard brown – it's hard to sear a piece of beef this gaunt with any conviction. This steak looked like drought and hard times, like ruefulness costed out to the microgram.
Even the summer produce was conspicuously underwhelming – there just wasn't much of it. There was a decent salad and a whole lot of root vegetables, as well as a very good peach tart. But it all felt as though it had been doled out with an eye to modesty, instead of celebration. The most notable vegetable we ate that night was a few tablespoons of fresh corn, a garnish with the pork.
Mr. Kennedy was there that evening, overseeing everything. At 57 years old, he's in his restaurant most nights still, and not merely as a figurehead, but working. He was putting in the effort, working with the sort of integrity you rarely see in a chef who's been at it this long. It wasn't good enough.
I went back early this week, in all honesty dreading it. But everything was different.
It was as if the old Jamie Kennedy had showed up, and his kitchen was firing exactly right. The parsnip soup was delicious – wholesome-tasting in the way of Mr. Kennedy's cooking, but luxurious also. The smoked mackerel was flaky, ivory flesh and fat sweetened over apple wood to candied. It was plated with potatoes that had been seared in duck fat. The frites were the old frites: perfect.
That famous short rib, braised to lustrous softness, was ringed with a beefy red wine reduction. Even the steak frites was excellent, thin still but nicely seared somehow, and sauced with Bordelaise sauce made from stock, wine, butter and bone marrow. It was the sort of sauce that almost nobody knows how to make any more, that nobody knows they should.
There was pear and cardamom cake for dessert – a whole poached pear baked into a cake and then sliced through the middle, beautiful. It was timeless, gorgeous, lively cooking, rooted in technique and tradition, but somehow up-to-the-minute current, too.
And so I can't tell you with any certainty what to expect if you go there. After two lousy visits and one excellent one – and no identifiable reason for the difference; Mr. Kennedy said his kitchen staff hasn't changed – it's too tough a call to make.
But if you go and it's a good night, if Gilead is now on solid footing, you'll be glad you went and you'll be grateful that 34 years in Mr. Kennedy is still out there – all hard work and dedication. If you go there and you get that Gilead and that Jamie Kennedy, I bet you'll want to go back again and again.
Our ratings
No stars: Not recommended.
* Good, but won't blow a lot of people's minds.
** Very good, with some standout qualities.
*** Excellent, well above average with few caveats, if any.
**** Extraordinary, memorable, original with near-perfect execution.