Pickle Barrel
EVEN THOUGH his new TV show is
called The Heat, chef Mark McEwan
is perhaps the coolest chef you’ll
ever meet. He is one of Toronto’s
most prolific epicurean superstars
— his two wildly successful
restaurants have quite literally
helped to set the city’s fine dining
bar and quite high at that. He runs
one of the city’s largest and most
sought-after catering businesses
and is also busily preparing to
launch a brand-new restaurant in
Yorkville this spring.
Yet, as he sits on one of the comfortable dining room chairs at his North 44 restaurant at Yonge and Eglinton on a recent August morning, recounting the previous night’s shoot for the final episode of his show, he looks neither fazed, frazzled nor fried.
“We did the show in a Forest Hill home for a daughter’s 25th birthday party,” he says, calmly sipping a black coffee. “She wanted me to do Mexican. Well, I don’t do Mexican. And the mother wanted it inexpensive just sort of a fun dinner and not too complicated. But I didn’t want to do that. So I disguised a lot of the food, namewise. We did rockfish “Veracruz” and oxtail empanadas and fresh doughnuts. It was a complicated menu, but the food tasted good!”
Taste is paramount for McEwan, who eschews culinary theatrics for simple ingredients, artfully prepared. The 49-year-old quietly built his reputation on North 44, which he opened in 1990. Sixteen years later, he has a solid command of the city’s fine dining scene. With his uptown restaurant acting as the hub — and the downtown cousin, Bymark, which opened in 2000 to serve the Bay Street crowd — McEwan’s dining and catering empire truly serves appetites in every part of Toronto.
Five years ago, McEwan moved from Richmond Hill to Forest Hill with his wife and two children, and he’s clearly pleased with the neighbourhood. “I love the fact that I’m in the heart of the city. I can walk to Bloor with the dogs, go to the park, go to good restaurants, go for art and antiques and don’t have to get in the car. You feel a part of urban life in this part of Toronto, but it’s a soft urban experience. Whereas living in the middle of Manhattan — people think they want that experience, but it can be harsh. Here, yes you get the din of the city, but it reminds you of where you are.”
With ONE Restaurant, opening next year at The Hazelton Hotel, McEwan will once again work with his wife, Roxanne McEwan, who will handle the front of house. It seems the business runs in the family: His 21-year-old son is also studying to become a chef.
While it’s his cooking that puts the food on the table, so to speak, there’s no question McEwan is also a skilled businessman, having built a company that currently employs about 140 people. He began his career in the mid-1970s, having graduated from George Brown and interning at the Constellation Hotel. In 1981 McEwan joined the Sutton Place as executive sous-chef. Two years later, he was appointed chef, and he cooked for Pope John Paul II when he visited Toronto in 1984.
McEwan’s status grew at Pronto, which he acquired in 1985 (he sold his interest in 1992). He was also involved in Terra between 1996 and 1999. He has seen Toronto evolve — perhaps “mature” is a better word — where taste and food knowledge is concerned. “I’ve gone through every single trend that the city’s gone through. And if I never go through another one I will be very happy. We’ve arrived at a point where clients in the city are beautifully travelled and experienced — and chefs are worried more about quality of product and execution and training their staff with tremendous basics.” Having just returned from Italy, where his 17-year-old daughter was doing a stint of summer school, McEwan speaks with reverence about a cuisine that gives him much inspiration. “We were in Florence and Sorrento. I think I depleted the baby octopus population. Simple braised octopus with pasta and cuttlefish and roasted rockfish. It was so beautiful.”
Clearly this is a man who fully enjoys the experience of eating and drinking, and that encompasses not just the flavours but the execution and the theatre of dining. “We stayed at the Savoy in Florence and just watching these bartenders do their job was fantastic. It was like watching a 1930s black and white movie of a bartender. Perfectly dressed, perfect execution on cocktails, great set-up. It was just complete professionalism in how these guys approached their bar. And that to me was more important than the decor and the fact that there was anything new on the menu. There was nothing new on the menu, just what made sense locally from an ingredient standpoint, and it was done based on culture. And it was straight ahead, but it was beautifully executed.”
It’s the quest for perfection that obsesses McEwan at this point in his career, now that he has a good 30 years of experience under his toque. And it comes through in his TV show, debuting Oct. 4 on Food Network Canada. The Heat is a very different kind of cooking show. In fact, it’s not a cooking show at all — you won’t learn much about how to julienne a carrot or how to chop steak tartare. This is about a welloiled catering machine operating at the highest level but without the faux dramatics of a show like Gord Ramsey’s Hell’s Kitchen. You won’t see the chef barking his head off at a petrified, tearful saucier.
Each episode of The Heat depicts a day in the life of a busy catering company and the unique challenge of providing market-fresh gourmet cuisine to any kind of event, from an intimate house party to a major media launch with hundreds of guests. Unlike some other TV food shows, which create artificial story lines and contrived dramatics — “Ooh, we’ve run out of terrine! What will we do?” — McEwan’s show is refreshingly honest. He doesn’t even seem to take the centre stage. There are plenty of subplots involving his staff solving their own little logistical puzzles. Chef rarely scowls, yet you know when The Heat is on — and it makes for great TV. “They like when I get crazy,” he says of The Heat’s producers. “
“The whole concept behind it — and this is how I sold it to them — is that we don’t have to fake anything. It is what it is, and there’s always something going on. There are huge pressures, and it’s complicated. And every time I go to a party, people want to know, how’d you feed 500 people. I said, ‘If you could watch the thing happen from a client meeting to a site visit to the preparation to the set up to the execution, people would find it fascinating.’”
In one episode, McEwan designed an intricate seven-course tasting menu that would need to be prepped, cooked and assembled in an art gallery at the Distillery District. The clients were to arrive at 6:30 and finish their meal before 9. When they show up almost two hours late, McEwan’s team has to improvise on the fly in order to deliver the same quality on a vastly tightened timeline.
“We did the opera hall opening
for our opening show. Two thousand
people came to the performance,
600 VIPs remained and went into a
reception area while we set up
dinner on the stage,” McEwan says.
“Not one waiter, not one manager,
not one person had ever done an
event there.I had hat on my head,
and swore like a sailor, but we got
through it, but it was a challenge.” 
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