Chic decor, imaginative cooking, polished service. Haute Indian is the next big thing
By James Chatto
So you want to eat at Amaya but lacked the foresight to make a reservation two weeks ago? There is a solution. Show up before six and try for a seat at the bar. Those six precious stools are first-come, first-served, and perhaps luck will smile upon you, as she recently smiled upon me. It was already dark and the rush-hour traffic was thick along Bayview Avenue’s gourmet strip as I pushed open the door of the smart little restaurant. The empty room seemed poised for imminent action, polished and primed, with spirit lamps twinkling on the linen-covered tables and a faint scent of spice in the air. And before I had finished my first curry martini (vodka and lime juice, muddled curry leaves, raw ginger and a dusting of garam masala), the place was stuffed with people—Leaside and Rosedale loud and jovial at the tables, an Indian family from Burlington beside me at the bar (“We’ve eaten everywhere, and this is the best naan we’ve found”), and two more couples perched on the windowsill, wishing we’d all eat more quickly. That night, the 40-seat restaurant served 115. Toronto has embraced Amaya’s “modern Indian” ethos with rare passion.
And it’s not just Amaya. All around town, it seems, our local version of the Indian restaurant, once trapped inside the tired old curry house template, is suddenly bursting free of cliché. Some places have ramped up service and ambience; others are pulling the cuisine in new and exciting directions. The one thing they all have in common is a wish to attract a well-heeled clientele from outside the South Asian community. Amaya does that in spades, with fresh, textured, contemporary cooking. Which is funny, considering that two years ago at Mantra (same owner, same chefs, pretty much the same menu), you couldn’t give it away. Located downtown, on Elm Street, the restaurant died after 18 months of customer-free evenings.
“It wasn’t about timing so much as location,” explains Hemant Bhagwani, Amaya’s co-owner. “The tourists didn’t come, and the lunchtime office crowd wanted a buffet. We failed miserably.” Bhagwani wasn’t used to failure. He left India in his teens for hotel school in Switzerland, then business school in Australia, and opened his first restaurant in Sydney when he was just 22 years old. In Dubai, he created international restaurants for glamorous hotels until he grew bored of working for others. He came to Canada in 2000, working as the sommelier at 360, then starting up a Hakka Chinese restaurant called Chor Bazaar in Brampton. He successfully opened Kama Sutra on Bayview in 2004, then sold it when someone offered a price he couldn’t turn down. “I knew I wanted to come back to Bayview one day.” His business partner and co-host, Derek Valleau, was ready for a place of his own after five years as general manager and sommelier at Crush.
Neither Bhagwani nor Valleau is in the house tonight. They’re both frantically driving around the neighbourhood, delivering tubs of food from Amaya Express, the takeout and home delivery business they opened down the street soon after Amaya’s debut last June. Offering similar fare, it too is an unexpected runaway success.
I’d never heard of an Indian restaurant owned by two sommeliers, but it explains why the wines on Amaya’s list match the cooking so beautifully. Oremus furmint, for example, a dry Hungarian white, is perfect with a bowl of julienned okra fried as crisply as frites and dusted with powdered mango. It’s equally good with murgh satrangi, moist chunks of chicken breast smothered in a vegetable brunoise with a slow-building green chili heat. And my neighbours at the bar are right: the breads are indeed exceptional, thanks to Brij Lal, a talented tandoor cook Bhagwani met in India and brought to Toronto. (They are even better at Amaya Express, where the kitchen has a charcoal-fired tandoor instead of the gas-fired version they have here.) Fresh textures, easy on the cream and ghee, quality ingredients, more items cooked à la minute than slowly braised—this isn’t a new cuisine, it’s how Indian families cook at home. We just aren’t used to it in our restaurants.
For decades, Toronto has been stuck in the rut of an old-fashioned, cheap and not particularly cheerful Indian restaurant scene. We have some good regional places in the western suburbs, but those of us who live in the city are restricted to a less interesting style of curry house. You know the places I mean. They sprang up all over the world in the late 20th century, opened by immigrants with no restaurant experience as a way of creating work for the whole family. They borrowed the generic menu that had first evolved in England 50 years ago—unrelated curries from all over the subcontinent with a bunch of northern Indian street food as appetizers. Ingredients were the cheapest available; spicing was as crude as the taste of the lager louts who called out for satanically hot vindaloo.
Elsewhere in the world, this paradigm has evolved into something more interesting. Amaya in London, England (no connection to the Bayview restaurant), has earned a Michelin star for its imaginative cuisine and swish service; so have three other Indian restaurants there—Benares, Rasoi Vineet Bhatia and Tamarind. Cinnamon Club is just as smart and almost as expensive. Danny Meyer’s Tabla in New York applies the Indian spice palette to North American cooking. In Vancouver, Vikram Vij has carved out an enviable reputation as Canada’s best-known pioneer of modern Indian.
Toronto would have lagged hopelessly behind if not for Amar Patel and her 38-year-old gem on Dupont Street, Indian Rice Factory. It has always been ahead of the curve—the first Indian place in the city to provide authentic regional cooking, or to bother with a wine list, the first to attempt fusion dishes (largely created by eager young Canadian chefs doing stages in Amar’s kitchen), or to offer an Indian brunch (back in 1983). I wondered how the Factory would compare after my fine meal at Amaya. I needn’t have worried. Here, too, business is booming. Amar’s son, Aman, has been travelling, taking his nine-year-old son to renowned restaurants in Hong Kong, Singapore and all over India, returning with ideas. From Mumbai’s trendiest seafood restaurant, Trishna, comes a marvellous lobster dish, the tender tail broiled with onion seed, dressed with coriander chutney and a squeeze of fresh lime that lifts the coriander flavour sky-high. His mother’s own girlhood memories of duck hunting with her father have inspired a spice-marinated duck breast grilled and served with a sweet sauce of dried apricots, dates and onion.
Beer is not the default beverage at Indian Rice Factory, though beer expert Stephen Beaumont has been hired to choose a dozen well-suited brews. The spotlight is much more on wines and sakes, matched to specific dishes by master sommelier John Szabo and sake aficionado Michael Pataran. Norman Hardie’s 2005 Prince Edward County Pinot Noir, for example, is stunning with the duck, while an unfiltered nigori sake is the ideal soothing foil for finely textured Goan-style chorizo served with a gentle vindaloo dipping sauce. Some dishes take Western rather than South Asian ingredients but treat them with an entirely Indian rationale: moist roasted black cod topped with an unction of scalding spiced oil; a side dish of pumpkin enhanced with fenugreek greens.
“We’re always thinking,” confides Aman Patel. “We want to start serving things in small portions so people can try more items. And we’re bringing back brunch—traditional dishes like kedgeree or rumble- tumble, which is scrambled eggs with shredded chicken, spiced with onion, ginger, coriander and green chilies.”
That sounds a lot like one of the brunch egg dishes they used to do at Xacutti, on College Street, and indeed Xacutti’s erstwhile owner and chef, Brad Moore, spent a couple of months in Amar’s kitchen back in 2001, watching the way she used spices. Xacutti opened a year later. During Moore’s five-year tenure, the restaurant defied categorization; he sometimes called the cuisine “new Indian,” but there was always more to it than that. Indo-Thai prawns, for example, were more Thai than Indo, the gorgeously juicy tiger shrimp impaled on skewers and served over a sharp, floral yellow curry sauce that tasted of lime, mint and coconut. His sweet and subtly spiced onion bhajis were Toronto’s best, served with a most untraditional chili and nigella mayo for dipping. Moore walked away from an untenable situation with the other shareholders late last November. His new place, Eleven, will open any day now at Front and Jarvis with an even more eclectic menu.
“Xacutti was a great concept, but it was more fusion than Indian. Like tandoori ravioli,” says Alka Dhir, one of the owners (with her sister Poonam) of Indus Junction, Queen West’s contender for most interesting new Indian restaurant. Ten years ago, Alka started a gourmet samosa business out of her home while embarking on a career in advertising and marketing. She and Poonam had often discussed the idea of a restaurant, and last year the moment seemed right. “I had just had my two kids,” she explains, “and I wasn’t sure if I’d resume my career. Poonam, who is nine years younger than me, had just finished university and had the time to manage the place.”
They felt that the suburbs, where they grew up, were not yet ready for the kind of place they envisaged, but Queen West might be—an avant-garde neighbourhood without many Indian restaurants. Not that their food is alarmingly modernist. “We call it ‘authentic Indian,’ ” says Alka. “Pukka Indian food cooked the way people do at home, presented in a modern way.” They found their chef, Sanjiv Malhotra, by putting an ad in the paper, then inviting him to their parents’ home to audition. A thorough professional who trained at the Oberoi hotel in Mumbai, then cooked in Australia and for 10 years in Lagos, he passed with flying colours. He and Alka immediately started working on a menu.
The results are often delicious. Instead of slow-braising proteins and vegetables in a heavily spiced sauce, Malhotra borrows a page from Western gastronomy and adds the sauce to the plate at the last minute. So a tangy onion-based vindaloo sauce with only a hint of chili heat can be spooned over juicy grilled shrimp or, later in the meal, a grilled sirloin steak. Lamb chops emerge from the scorching tandoor to be cooled by a mild apple chutney. I preferred some of the more traditional dishes: dhal makhani was unabashedly rich, the lentils tasting as if they had been toasted then smothered in cream and coriander leaves. Soft vegetable dumplings and bittersweet kale shared another thick sauce of tomato, cashews and cream. Some customers have found the spicing at Indus Junction too timid, though Malhotra is always happy to turn up the heat if bidden. No one has yet complained about the prices, with main courses all coming in under $15.
But if the food isn’t particularly ground-breaking, what qualifies the place as “modern”? With chai-coloured walls, a pressed copper ceiling and some very contemporary art and light fittings, Indus Junction is an evolutionary leap forward from the Indian restaurant template, with their crimson flocked wallpaper and framed prints of the Taj Mahal.
And so is Jaaadu, another new Indian restaurant on Yonge Street, just south of St. Clair. The owners have taken a former Swiss Chalet franchise and transformed it into what looks like the lobby of a very smart boutique hotel. Dark leather chairs and linen-clad tables are dotted about the grey-on-grey acreage. In other breaks with tradition, the service is far more solicitous and formally attentive than anything Toronto is used to, and the prices are considerably higher. As for the food, Jaaadu has decided to partially westernize the presentation by bringing a plate already laden with rice and a free basket of naan; meanwhile, two or three principal dishes are all spooned (undeniably decorously) onto a single white china platter. And though the menu is deeply conventional in its offerings, spicing is disappointingly tentative, not just in terms of heat but also of flavour.
You can’t win them all. What’s important is that so many restaurateurs are willing to try something new. Our city has a habit of sparking a culinary trend and then failing to follow it through, letting the hopes of restaurant-goers wither and twist in the wind. There was that moment a few years ago when we all thought “nuevo Latino” was going to break through. And then there was the stillborn “high-end Korean” revolution. This time could be different. As we all get used to a much greater variety of Indian restaurants, we push open the door for further innovation. It happened in the ’80s with Italian restaurants, when the clichéd red-and-white-tableclothed spaghetti houses suddenly bloomed into an extravagant plenitude of types, authentically regional beside Cal-Ital fusion, expensive beside cheap. The moment has come for India’s far more exotic and distinctive cuisines to burgeon. This year there will be more than half a million South Asians in the GTA; most of our immigrants are now coming from India, not China. And there are other signs. George Brown College has recently invested in a tandoor so that culinary students can learn authentic Punjabi cooking. It has also entered into a partnership with the international hotel school in Mumbai that will lead to exchange trips for faculty and students, and ultimately the opportunity for our young cooks to receive a post-graduate diploma in Indian cuisine.
If I were a rune caster or a reader of entrails, I could back this all up more convincingly, but I’m pretty sure we’re on the verge of the next big thing. Our new Amaya is just the first namesake of a chic British modern-Indian favourite. Hemant Bhagwani is quite certain we’ll also have our own Cinnamon Club in the next couple of years. And why not a Benares and a Tamarind? Imagine the irony, after all this city has eaten over the years, if our first Michelin-starred establishment was a place best known for its curry.
By James Chatto
So you want to eat at Amaya but lacked the foresight to make a reservation two weeks ago? There is a solution. Show up before six and try for a seat at the bar. Those six precious stools are first-come, first-served, and perhaps luck will smile upon you, as she recently smiled upon me. It was already dark and the rush-hour traffic was thick along Bayview Avenue’s gourmet strip as I pushed open the door of the smart little restaurant. The empty room seemed poised for imminent action, polished and primed, with spirit lamps twinkling on the linen-covered tables and a faint scent of spice in the air. And before I had finished my first curry martini (vodka and lime juice, muddled curry leaves, raw ginger and a dusting of garam masala), the place was stuffed with people—Leaside and Rosedale loud and jovial at the tables, an Indian family from Burlington beside me at the bar (“We’ve eaten everywhere, and this is the best naan we’ve found”), and two more couples perched on the windowsill, wishing we’d all eat more quickly. That night, the 40-seat restaurant served 115. Toronto has embraced Amaya’s “modern Indian” ethos with rare passion.
And it’s not just Amaya. All around town, it seems, our local version of the Indian restaurant, once trapped inside the tired old curry house template, is suddenly bursting free of cliché. Some places have ramped up service and ambience; others are pulling the cuisine in new and exciting directions. The one thing they all have in common is a wish to attract a well-heeled clientele from outside the South Asian community. Amaya does that in spades, with fresh, textured, contemporary cooking. Which is funny, considering that two years ago at Mantra (same owner, same chefs, pretty much the same menu), you couldn’t give it away. Located downtown, on Elm Street, the restaurant died after 18 months of customer-free evenings.
“It wasn’t about timing so much as location,” explains Hemant Bhagwani, Amaya’s co-owner. “The tourists didn’t come, and the lunchtime office crowd wanted a buffet. We failed miserably.” Bhagwani wasn’t used to failure. He left India in his teens for hotel school in Switzerland, then business school in Australia, and opened his first restaurant in Sydney when he was just 22 years old. In Dubai, he created international restaurants for glamorous hotels until he grew bored of working for others. He came to Canada in 2000, working as the sommelier at 360, then starting up a Hakka Chinese restaurant called Chor Bazaar in Brampton. He successfully opened Kama Sutra on Bayview in 2004, then sold it when someone offered a price he couldn’t turn down. “I knew I wanted to come back to Bayview one day.” His business partner and co-host, Derek Valleau, was ready for a place of his own after five years as general manager and sommelier at Crush.
Neither Bhagwani nor Valleau is in the house tonight. They’re both frantically driving around the neighbourhood, delivering tubs of food from Amaya Express, the takeout and home delivery business they opened down the street soon after Amaya’s debut last June. Offering similar fare, it too is an unexpected runaway success.
I’d never heard of an Indian restaurant owned by two sommeliers, but it explains why the wines on Amaya’s list match the cooking so beautifully. Oremus furmint, for example, a dry Hungarian white, is perfect with a bowl of julienned okra fried as crisply as frites and dusted with powdered mango. It’s equally good with murgh satrangi, moist chunks of chicken breast smothered in a vegetable brunoise with a slow-building green chili heat. And my neighbours at the bar are right: the breads are indeed exceptional, thanks to Brij Lal, a talented tandoor cook Bhagwani met in India and brought to Toronto. (They are even better at Amaya Express, where the kitchen has a charcoal-fired tandoor instead of the gas-fired version they have here.) Fresh textures, easy on the cream and ghee, quality ingredients, more items cooked à la minute than slowly braised—this isn’t a new cuisine, it’s how Indian families cook at home. We just aren’t used to it in our restaurants.
For decades, Toronto has been stuck in the rut of an old-fashioned, cheap and not particularly cheerful Indian restaurant scene. We have some good regional places in the western suburbs, but those of us who live in the city are restricted to a less interesting style of curry house. You know the places I mean. They sprang up all over the world in the late 20th century, opened by immigrants with no restaurant experience as a way of creating work for the whole family. They borrowed the generic menu that had first evolved in England 50 years ago—unrelated curries from all over the subcontinent with a bunch of northern Indian street food as appetizers. Ingredients were the cheapest available; spicing was as crude as the taste of the lager louts who called out for satanically hot vindaloo.
Elsewhere in the world, this paradigm has evolved into something more interesting. Amaya in London, England (no connection to the Bayview restaurant), has earned a Michelin star for its imaginative cuisine and swish service; so have three other Indian restaurants there—Benares, Rasoi Vineet Bhatia and Tamarind. Cinnamon Club is just as smart and almost as expensive. Danny Meyer’s Tabla in New York applies the Indian spice palette to North American cooking. In Vancouver, Vikram Vij has carved out an enviable reputation as Canada’s best-known pioneer of modern Indian.
Toronto would have lagged hopelessly behind if not for Amar Patel and her 38-year-old gem on Dupont Street, Indian Rice Factory. It has always been ahead of the curve—the first Indian place in the city to provide authentic regional cooking, or to bother with a wine list, the first to attempt fusion dishes (largely created by eager young Canadian chefs doing stages in Amar’s kitchen), or to offer an Indian brunch (back in 1983). I wondered how the Factory would compare after my fine meal at Amaya. I needn’t have worried. Here, too, business is booming. Amar’s son, Aman, has been travelling, taking his nine-year-old son to renowned restaurants in Hong Kong, Singapore and all over India, returning with ideas. From Mumbai’s trendiest seafood restaurant, Trishna, comes a marvellous lobster dish, the tender tail broiled with onion seed, dressed with coriander chutney and a squeeze of fresh lime that lifts the coriander flavour sky-high. His mother’s own girlhood memories of duck hunting with her father have inspired a spice-marinated duck breast grilled and served with a sweet sauce of dried apricots, dates and onion.
Beer is not the default beverage at Indian Rice Factory, though beer expert Stephen Beaumont has been hired to choose a dozen well-suited brews. The spotlight is much more on wines and sakes, matched to specific dishes by master sommelier John Szabo and sake aficionado Michael Pataran. Norman Hardie’s 2005 Prince Edward County Pinot Noir, for example, is stunning with the duck, while an unfiltered nigori sake is the ideal soothing foil for finely textured Goan-style chorizo served with a gentle vindaloo dipping sauce. Some dishes take Western rather than South Asian ingredients but treat them with an entirely Indian rationale: moist roasted black cod topped with an unction of scalding spiced oil; a side dish of pumpkin enhanced with fenugreek greens.
“We’re always thinking,” confides Aman Patel. “We want to start serving things in small portions so people can try more items. And we’re bringing back brunch—traditional dishes like kedgeree or rumble- tumble, which is scrambled eggs with shredded chicken, spiced with onion, ginger, coriander and green chilies.”
That sounds a lot like one of the brunch egg dishes they used to do at Xacutti, on College Street, and indeed Xacutti’s erstwhile owner and chef, Brad Moore, spent a couple of months in Amar’s kitchen back in 2001, watching the way she used spices. Xacutti opened a year later. During Moore’s five-year tenure, the restaurant defied categorization; he sometimes called the cuisine “new Indian,” but there was always more to it than that. Indo-Thai prawns, for example, were more Thai than Indo, the gorgeously juicy tiger shrimp impaled on skewers and served over a sharp, floral yellow curry sauce that tasted of lime, mint and coconut. His sweet and subtly spiced onion bhajis were Toronto’s best, served with a most untraditional chili and nigella mayo for dipping. Moore walked away from an untenable situation with the other shareholders late last November. His new place, Eleven, will open any day now at Front and Jarvis with an even more eclectic menu.
“Xacutti was a great concept, but it was more fusion than Indian. Like tandoori ravioli,” says Alka Dhir, one of the owners (with her sister Poonam) of Indus Junction, Queen West’s contender for most interesting new Indian restaurant. Ten years ago, Alka started a gourmet samosa business out of her home while embarking on a career in advertising and marketing. She and Poonam had often discussed the idea of a restaurant, and last year the moment seemed right. “I had just had my two kids,” she explains, “and I wasn’t sure if I’d resume my career. Poonam, who is nine years younger than me, had just finished university and had the time to manage the place.”
They felt that the suburbs, where they grew up, were not yet ready for the kind of place they envisaged, but Queen West might be—an avant-garde neighbourhood without many Indian restaurants. Not that their food is alarmingly modernist. “We call it ‘authentic Indian,’ ” says Alka. “Pukka Indian food cooked the way people do at home, presented in a modern way.” They found their chef, Sanjiv Malhotra, by putting an ad in the paper, then inviting him to their parents’ home to audition. A thorough professional who trained at the Oberoi hotel in Mumbai, then cooked in Australia and for 10 years in Lagos, he passed with flying colours. He and Alka immediately started working on a menu.
The results are often delicious. Instead of slow-braising proteins and vegetables in a heavily spiced sauce, Malhotra borrows a page from Western gastronomy and adds the sauce to the plate at the last minute. So a tangy onion-based vindaloo sauce with only a hint of chili heat can be spooned over juicy grilled shrimp or, later in the meal, a grilled sirloin steak. Lamb chops emerge from the scorching tandoor to be cooled by a mild apple chutney. I preferred some of the more traditional dishes: dhal makhani was unabashedly rich, the lentils tasting as if they had been toasted then smothered in cream and coriander leaves. Soft vegetable dumplings and bittersweet kale shared another thick sauce of tomato, cashews and cream. Some customers have found the spicing at Indus Junction too timid, though Malhotra is always happy to turn up the heat if bidden. No one has yet complained about the prices, with main courses all coming in under $15.
But if the food isn’t particularly ground-breaking, what qualifies the place as “modern”? With chai-coloured walls, a pressed copper ceiling and some very contemporary art and light fittings, Indus Junction is an evolutionary leap forward from the Indian restaurant template, with their crimson flocked wallpaper and framed prints of the Taj Mahal.
And so is Jaaadu, another new Indian restaurant on Yonge Street, just south of St. Clair. The owners have taken a former Swiss Chalet franchise and transformed it into what looks like the lobby of a very smart boutique hotel. Dark leather chairs and linen-clad tables are dotted about the grey-on-grey acreage. In other breaks with tradition, the service is far more solicitous and formally attentive than anything Toronto is used to, and the prices are considerably higher. As for the food, Jaaadu has decided to partially westernize the presentation by bringing a plate already laden with rice and a free basket of naan; meanwhile, two or three principal dishes are all spooned (undeniably decorously) onto a single white china platter. And though the menu is deeply conventional in its offerings, spicing is disappointingly tentative, not just in terms of heat but also of flavour.
You can’t win them all. What’s important is that so many restaurateurs are willing to try something new. Our city has a habit of sparking a culinary trend and then failing to follow it through, letting the hopes of restaurant-goers wither and twist in the wind. There was that moment a few years ago when we all thought “nuevo Latino” was going to break through. And then there was the stillborn “high-end Korean” revolution. This time could be different. As we all get used to a much greater variety of Indian restaurants, we push open the door for further innovation. It happened in the ’80s with Italian restaurants, when the clichéd red-and-white-tableclothed spaghetti houses suddenly bloomed into an extravagant plenitude of types, authentically regional beside Cal-Ital fusion, expensive beside cheap. The moment has come for India’s far more exotic and distinctive cuisines to burgeon. This year there will be more than half a million South Asians in the GTA; most of our immigrants are now coming from India, not China. And there are other signs. George Brown College has recently invested in a tandoor so that culinary students can learn authentic Punjabi cooking. It has also entered into a partnership with the international hotel school in Mumbai that will lead to exchange trips for faculty and students, and ultimately the opportunity for our young cooks to receive a post-graduate diploma in Indian cuisine.
If I were a rune caster or a reader of entrails, I could back this all up more convincingly, but I’m pretty sure we’re on the verge of the next big thing. Our new Amaya is just the first namesake of a chic British modern-Indian favourite. Hemant Bhagwani is quite certain we’ll also have our own Cinnamon Club in the next couple of years. And why not a Benares and a Tamarind? Imagine the irony, after all this city has eaten over the years, if our first Michelin-starred establishment was a place best known for its curry.
