CONVICTION (609 King West, at Portland, 416-603-2777) Complete brunches for $40 per person (dinners $85), including all taxes, tip and a glass of wine. Average main $17/$30. Open for brunch Sunday 11 am to 2 pm, dinner Tuesday to Saturday 6 pm to midnight. Closed Monday. Licensed. Access: 11 steps at door, washrooms on same floor. Rating: NNNN
Marc Thuet is a famously cantankerous French chef with a King West bistro and an equally legendary potty mouth. His hot-tempered Serbian wife and business partner, Biana Zorich, is a notorious control freak.
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Together, they’ve created Conviction Kitchen, some of the most watchable food TV of the new fall season. Like most reality series, Kitchen’s premise – fancy-pants resto hires a dozen ex-cons and crack-heads as cooks and wait staff, conflict and swearing ensue – appears to be pure contrivance. In real life, most of the obligatory “walking time bombs” enlisted for the show wouldn’t normally make it past the maitre d,’ let alone be hired to work there.
To test whether Thuet and Zorich’s conviction to Conviction – the restaurant rather than the show – is genuine, the Literary Device and I, along with our own Troubled Balkan, make reservations for the beanery’s first brunch. A gospel brunch, no less.
Instead of the mayhem we expect after watching the first couple of episodes, we find no kitchen on fire, no one missing their teeth and no customers being beaten with baseball bats.
We do, however, recognize the blond guy with the Kanye West hairdo who broke into tears when Thuet required him to literally deconstruct a cute bunny rabbit. And the holy-rollin’ Bible-thumpin’ choir we’d imagined turns out to be bluesy jazz chantoosie Coco and a karaoke machine. So much for reality.
Not long ago, Thuet owned brunch in this town, both here and at his now-defunct Atelier. Today, the former Bite Me is virtually empty. Luckily, Thuet’s Sunday lunch card is little changed, though it now bills itself as “brunch around the world.” As before, it starts with the house’s superb bread assortment ($13), a linen-lined wicker basket packed with pain au chocolat, flaky brioche, sliced fruitcake and multigrain walnut loaf. We’re stuffed already.
Listed as a starter, the Device’s generously portioned house-smoked salmon (“from St. Petersburg,” $16) over buckwheat blini, finished with caviar and creme fraiche, could easily sate three, its side salads of truffled frisee and shredded red radish doused with both basil and walnut oils.
I’m so visually stunned by my plate of Charcuterie Maison (“from Alsace,” $15) that I’m unable to concentrate on the names of the salami and salumi our exceptionally informed server rattles off – things like dry-cured Bundnerfleisch, maple-glazed Kessler sausage and Hungarian Chorizo – that they may as well be caribou carpaccio and larks’ tongues in aspic as far as I’m concerned. Fabulous stuff.
Even more impressive, the Balkan’s pair of deliciously eggy crepes come overstuffed with boudin noir blood sausage and sweetly caramelized apple, their three-stage reduction of veal stock, wine and port laced with speck and pearl onions (“from Lyon,” $17). But where’s Thuet’s signature tripe a la mode, the Alsatian stew that briefly made Atelier one of Toronto’s top brunch spots?
“Oh fuck,” shrugs Thuet. “I completely forgot about that.”
Although he’s shuttered his Liberty Village outpost, he’s just launched two new gourmet takeaway cafes, one on Yonge across from the Summerhill LCBO, the other on the ground floor of One King West (see listings, page 32).
“I realized that there are chefs who can run a lot of restaurants and chefs who shouldn’t have more than one,” says Thuet, who’s also just signed a deal with Penguin for a non-Conviction cookbook to be published next fall. “I can’t be everywhere.”
Conviction Kitchen airs Sunday nights at 10 pm on Citytv.
