The Last Schmaltz by Anthony Rose Chris Johns & Chris Johns

Author:Anthony Rose,Chris Johns & Chris Johns
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Random House LLC
Published: 2018-10-08T16:00:00+00:00

Unlike Fat Pasha, where the concept for the menu was agonized over, Anthony knew right away what he wanted the food to be at Swan. The restaurant would pay tribute to the formative years he spent learning to cook in California and the chefs out there who influenced him: Bradley Ogden, Jonathan Waxman, Mark Franz, and Jeremiah Tower.

“Swan was our fifth place, and I guess I was feeling nostalgic,” he recalls. “California taught me to cook. Sure, I’d worked in places here in Toronto before that, but the kitchens I came up in were very old-school, lots of yelling, lots of screaming, lots of chefs throwing things. When I moved to California in 1993, I thought that’s just how a kitchen had to be, but the thing is, it wasn’t. It was very casual. Don’t get me wrong, we worked really fucking hard, but there was respect.”

The California Culinary Academy in San Francisco gave the 21-year-old cook his first serious academic exposure to cooking. Everything at school was based in traditional French standards—Escoffier, the classics. As part of his training, Anthony took an externship at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel, cooking the kind of California fusion food that was in fashion at the time, but it was his next two positions that really turned him on.

“I went to work with Bradley Ogden at the Lark Creek Inn,” Anthony says, “which to me is still one of the most perfect restaurants in the world. You’re sitting there in Marin County, eating your roast chicken with mashed potatoes and watching a family of deer roam through the creek. It’s incredible.” Following that, Anthony spent five years at San Francisco’s influential Farallon restaurant under chef Mark Franz, who had previously been the chef at Stars with culinary legend, Jeremiah Tower. “I learned what California cuisine was at Farallon: simple food carefully prepared using mostly local ingredients in a modern way. That wasn’t happening in Canada or the US at the time, and it was a really important change,” Anthony says.

Fresh, local, and simple were the aesthetics Anthony brought to Swan, and for a while, it worked. “We started out strong,” he says. “Breakfast and lunch were consistently busy, but dinner never seemed to happen. You can’t pay the bills off $14-average checks. You’re on Queen Street and it’s expensive. We were drowning.”

Then the review came out. A few months after Swan’s opening, the Globe and Mail—Canada’s leading national newspaper—published a punishing review of the restaurant, calling the place, among other things, “generally appalling.” It was by far the worst review Anthony had ever received, and, he admits, “it kind of freaked me out.”

“The worst thing I did at that point was change everything,” he says. “We thought that we had to plug this hole or we’d drown. We made it more like Rose and Sons on Dupont, our original location, and that was a huge mistake. Instead of this idea of California cuisine, we went back to the same comfort food we were known for uptown.

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