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Food Food & Drink

Fine and Dandylion

DANDYLION: 1198 Queen West, 647-464-9100, open for dinner Tuesday through Saturday 5:30-10:30 pm, restaurantdandylion.com, @DandyLionTO


For a while, the wild west of Toronto’s dining scene went off the deep end. Music blared at volumes rivalling the Molson Amphitheatre, restaurants treated guests like they were doing them a favour by serving them, and snack menus designed to give the middle finger to fine dining ended up looking more like lack of ambition in the kitchen. 

Two-month-old Dandylion in Parkdale feels like a return to sanity. You walk in from the cold and instantly get that cozy feeling when you see diners chattering away at little tables for two against the exposed brick wall. You don’t have to strain to hear your date speak. You can bring a vegetarian friend and wish you’d ordered what they did, and leave feeling excited about new dishes that might appear on the small menu next time.

“There is nothing off limits here, and I purposely try not to talk about the food that much because I don’t want to pigeonhole myself,” says chef and first-time restaurant owner Jay Carter. “If we want to make jerk pork one day, then we’ll make it.” 

This explains why a lamb salad dressed with zesty Thai herbs appears beside other starters like seared scallop and artichoke.

Carter spent a decade cooking under Susur Lee and was the executive chef of midtown institution Centro for two years before realizing that diners north of Bloor tend to resist menu changes and leaving in 2012. (Centro closed a year later.)

Despite the fine-dining pedigree, the chef got into cooking 25 years ago not because of a lifelong zeal for food, but rather out of necessity. 

“When I was younger I got into some trouble, and my community service involved washing dishes at a nursing home,” says Carter. “The Italian lady who ran it took me under her wing, and I’d see her cooking with her mother on Sundays, simple but amazing stuff like fresh pasta. They later opened a small restaurant, and I followed them. That’s how I got my start.”

At Dandylion, the menu is tight, with just nine dishes evenly split between starters, mains and desserts, a stark contrast to the menus at the large restaurants Carter used to toil at, not to mention a kitchen staff of just three cooks, including himself.

“Our shtick is that with such a small menu, we need to change it often. We already have people coming back, and I feel terrible if I don’t have anything new to offer them,” he says. 

“Consistency is one of the hardest things to maintain at a restaurant, so we try to carry aspects of a dish that people like on to the next one. If people like the gooey cheesiness of one thing, we’ll put those elements in the next dish. It has to have a bit of salt and acid, a crunch and something soft – every dish has to have a balance of that.

Take the artichoke starter ($17), for example: silky slices of plump scallops rest atop thinly sliced chicory, raw artichoke hearts have been soaked in vinegar and lightly splashed with warm sherry vinegar, and bits of chorizo fried with shallots dot the plate to hit the salty note. Check, check, check and check.

There’s also the vegetarian main: tender sautéed savoy cabbage and maitake mushrooms swim in a warm mushroom broth that mixes oh so well with the oozing, gooey yolk from the poached egg perched on top ($20). Crispy little knobs of granola break up the soft, mellow textures. You just go at it with a spoon, scooping to taste all those flavours and textures in a single bite. 

Save room for the brown butter pear cake that packs a punch of spicy ginger flavour to beat the winter blues ($8).

While the cuisine is hard to pinpoint – there are cues from Asian and old European cooking as well as a heavy use of Canadian ingredients (trout, pork, beets) – texture is the common thread amongst the dishes. Even the fromage blanc, a soft, mild cheese spread that comes with the complimentary house-baked whole wheat, rye and honey loaf, is topped with crunchy diced shallots. Texture matters, and so do healthier dishes relying less on fats and salt.

“I hate salt. It’s often used as a crutch in kitchens, so when you take that away, you start to taste a lot more things.” 

After decades of cooking for others, Carter can finally cook on his own terms.

“I got to a point where no restaurateur would let me come in to do what I wanted. As I grew older and ate at other places and started to notice how the staff interacts, the wine, the temperature of the room, the music, the beer, I eventually wanted a say in that, too.”    

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