amaya

Wines from Austria: A Taste of Culture

2009-08-05T14:45:00.001-04:00

Amaya Unveils Stimulus Package

2009-04-12T15:20:00.008-04:00

Dear Valued Guests of Amaya,

Let us start off by saying that there may be tough times ahead, but we don’t think it is quite time to let pessimism get the best of us. Here at Amaya, we believe the only bubble to burst is in your tummy. That is why, henceforth, we will be implementing a fair and honest stimulus package to those bellies in need of a bailout.

We are speaking of a bailout of compromised ingestions and questionable imbibing. We at Amaya don’t believe you, our guests, should have to suffer for the shortcomings and bad habits of the fat-cats in Washington. Why shouldn't you have Wall Street wines for Main Street prices? A proper Amaya curry at a proper price is, in our minds, not something reserved for the privileged few.

We must be socially responsible at this time of great uncertainty. Every man, woman and child deserves to decide for themselves if Amaya is what they fancy. That said, it is our job at Amaya to make these visions a reality.

We are implementing the following amendments to our pricing system. This unprecedented move is as much about filling the void in your stomachs as it is filling the voids in our collective bank statements.

PROPOSED AMENDMENTS:

ONE(I): hereby offer exclusively ‘market’ prices on all Chef’s Tasting Menus (‘market’ being defined as NYSE, TSE, DJIA and all other). Chef’s Tasting Menu for Two at Amaya will, from this day forward, be at a cost of 1% of Dow Jones Industrial Average (at end of day trading). For example; March 26, 2009, Dow closes at 7,924.56; Chefs Menu for Two on the date of March 26, 2009 will be $79.24.

TWO(II): hereby limit tariffs on all wines sold by the bottle. All bottles of wine sold at Amaya shall have a markup no greater than $19.29! For example; if the said cost of a bottle of 2007 Conundrum is $26.95; Amaya’s selling price for said bottle will be $46.24 ($26.95 + $19.29 = $46.24).

To all of our treasured guests, it is with great humility and confidence that we can say…YES, WE CAN… ignite your taste buds and not your wallet. YES, WE CAN… offer great wines at great prices and YES, WE CAN…help strengthen our resolve for a brighter tomorrow by acting on it today!

Faithfully yours,

Hemant and Derek
{The Plumbers}

* click here to print a pdf copy of the package

National Post: Daals & Deals

2009-04-07T23:46:00.009-04:00

Stan Honda, AFP, Getty Images

Amaya has already won the heart of fabulous foodie Padma Lakshmi. And now it's winning over recession watchers.

Indian resto Amaya has moved past prix fixe to a menu that's dependent on the Dow

How the Dow goes here, so goes the daal.

I'm talking about Amaya, that rather fine, non-curry-in-a-hurry restaurant on Bayview, which -- get this -- has taken the ingenious approach of tying its prices to how the markets are doing. Not only has it proven to be a success, but this is one resto, I'll dare say, that's managed to find a silver lining in these dark-as-tamarind times.

"Business at Amaya the Indian Room and Amaya's Bread Bar [across the street] had dropped by about 20%," concedes proprietor Hemant Bhagwani. This, despite the fact that foodies have been in awe of this place since its inception, and that even a woman who'll make a foodie out of pretty much anybody -- Top Chef's Padma Lakshmi -- was in for dinner last year. Others who have stopped by include: Susur Lee, Jamie Kennedy, Bonnie Stern, Lucy Waverman, Christine Cushing, J. P. Challet, Cava's Chris MacDonald and Michael Bonacini.

"We didn't want to reduce prices," Bhagwani goes on. "We wanted to have fun while enticing people to come in." So, this is the deal: There's a three-course tasting menu for two in place that is tied to the Dow Jones. "It is," he explains, "priced at 1% of the trading average of the day."

And since the idea was introduced earlier this week? Well, about 95% of his diners have been opting for the Dow Jones plan. No surprise there, I guess.

Shinan Govani, National Post
Published: Saturday, March 21, 2009

[view this article online]

Best New Restaurants 2009 - The Honourable Mentions

2009-04-07T18:53:00.006-04:00

Toronto saw many great new restaurants open last year. In our April issue, we name the top 10, but some fabulous places didn’t make the cut. Below, the newcomers that soared, but fell short of our list.

12. Bread Bar
A kid sister for Amaya, Bread Bar differentiates itself with some nifty ideas—lobster and prawn naanini, for one, or a $45 tasting menu of seven new-Indian dishes. The casual, colourful ambience and the bold novelty of a communal table have made it Lawrence Park’s favoured destination.

Bread Bar, 3305 Yonge St. (at Glenforest Rd.), 416-487-1100.

By James Chatto, Toronto Life

> read the full article

Toronto Life | Restaurants Guide

2009-01-27T16:27:00.009-05:00

EDITORIAL REVIEW
Lovers of Indian cuisine won’t find fluorescent lighting, curries that all taste the same or token wines here. This is sophisticated Indian food served in a stylish, elegant (albeit very noisy) room. A signature cocktail—gin with cucumber juice and green chili—prepares the palate for the innovative yet authentically Indian fare to follow. The vegetarian hors d’oeuvre eschew greasy pakoras or stodgy samosas for light and flaky kidney bean bhajis, a crisp coconut-asparagus samosa and a smooth, delicate spinach-fig tikki patty. Entrées follow suit, with expertly cooked fish and meats set in pools of heady sauces. Naan is lighter and flakier than other Toronto versions. Desserts continue to dazzle, with garam masala truffles a particular highlight. Excellent wines by the glass match the extravagant flavours. Mains $21–$26.

> read this article online
> view the full Restaurants Guide

Strangers in the Night

2008-12-07T16:07:00.003-05:00

Will the communal table, now a fixture in the city’s hippest restaurants, loosen up fine dining’s couple-centric geometry?

Toronto Life November 2008
by Rachel Heinrichs

Sharing a table with strangers can be riveting—who can resist eavesdropping on the adjacent couple? If you’re simpatico with your co-diners, such close quarters can even lead to shared desserts and phone numbers. But if the dining gods aren’t smiling (or if the hostess seats you next to some schmuck), you’ll have to endure awkward table talk, vile manners or unsavoury lechery. Here’s how the city’s hottest communal tables stack up.

L’UNITÀ
The mood: Part late-night trattoria charm, part effortless East Village cool.
Upside: Cupid-like co-owner David Minicucci often seats diners in chemistry-promoting configurations (say, a group of guys across from a girls’ night out quartet).
Downside: Sitting on a high stool-style chair, with your legs dangling like a toddler’s, it’s hard to take a come-on seriously.

BREAD BAR
The mood: Mod and minimal. It’s chock full of Lawrence Park couples and has the conviviality of a family get-together.
Upside: Bread Bar’s inventive take on Indian street food is served tapas style and tailor-made for sharing.
Downside: Perspiring diners who perhaps shouldn’t have ordered the prawn and crab curry extra-spicy.

BRANT HOUSE
The mood: A cocktail-charged spirit abounds. The converted Victorian warehouse morphs into a sophisticated nightclub on weekends.
Upside: With seven communal tables, the meal offers good sightlines for sussing out after-dinner dance partners.
Downside: Moony-eyed couples eating their pappardelle Lady and the Tramp style.

PICNIC WINE BAR
The mood: A glossy wine bar with the community-oriented goodwill of a farmers’ market.
Upside: For singles perched fetchingly on one of the high backless stools, a DIY charcuterie plate with choices listed on a chalkboard is the perfect conversation starter.
Downside: Leslieville BIA-ers on an anti-Wal-Mart tirade dominate the chit-chat.

{read this article online}

Image credit: Nikki Ormerod

This Year’s Favourite Snacks

2008-12-07T15:34:00.003-05:00

Air Canada enRoute
by Chris Johns

The spicy potato bhaji with shredded potato, spinach, chili peppers and yogurt at Metro in Vancouver.
Edamame with garlic, shallots, chili and lime at Stage in Victoria.
The star anise BBQ-pork-belly bites and Asian slaw at Koko in Montreal.
The spinach and fig tikki fritters at Amaya the Indian Room in Toronto.

{view this story online}

An Irresistible Twist on Indian

2008-09-14T21:07:00.006-04:00

Globe and Mail July 26, 2008
by Chris Nuttall-Smith

BREAD BAR

3305 Yonge St., Toronto. 416-487-1100. Dinner for two with tax, wine and tip, $160

Say what you will about the state of Mexican, regional Italian and even barbecue in Toronto, but Indian cuisine here has rarely suffered from inauthenticity. I have yet to find a single staple ingredient from the subcontinent that can't be purchased for at least part of the year in one of the city's innumerable south Asian grocery stores. Even 150 years ago, a food historian told me recently, Toronto cooks were known to toast and grind fenugreek, cumin, coriander seeds and turmeric to make colonial-style curries.

To my taste at least, the food at many of the city's subcontinental stalwarts - at Moti Mahal, at Rashnaa, at the beloved Banjara - has always been as good or better than what you'll commonly find in Mumbai, or Cochin or Delhi.

This is impressive. Or at least it was until I tried the new Bread Bar.
The Bread Bar, an offshoot of Hemant Bhagwani and Derek Valleau's Amaya The Indian Room, the acclaimed modern Indian restaurant on Bayview Avenue, does Indian with a textural range that extends well beyond the usual slow-cooked mush.

The flavours are fresh and generally light (ghee seems almost to have been banished here), preparation is often à la minute, and the dishes are frequently inventive, touched with decidedly non-Indian ingredients and just enough modern French technique.

So you'll find a vindaloo beef tenderloin, fork-tender and pink in the middle, served with roasted cherry tomatoes and soft, smoky pearl onions. And a watermelon and ginger shooter as an amuse bouche - a sip of summertime sublime that prods the palate and cools it all at once. And prawns rolled in lemon sole and served over a spinach sauce. And chocolate garam masala truffles.

Which is to say that Bread Bar is wildly, unapologetically inauthentic. It's also very nearly the best Indian food I've encountered in Canada, second only to Vij's, in Vancouver.

Only a kitchen with a sandal in both India and North America could have come up with Bread Bar's jalapeno onion rings, for example: a spicy, let's-not-take-ourselves-too-seriously riff on onion bhaji that's served with a deep, tomatoey, nigella-studded chutney in place of ketchup.

Or Bread Bar's "naanini," a glorious grilled sandwich of aloo palak gobi (soft pulled lamb, potatoes, spinach) and house-made naan. The naanini can also be ordered stuffed with lobster and sided with coconut curry and roasted corn.

Jhal muri chaat, by contrast, plays it relatively straight and entirely delicious; here the popular Calcutta street food of puffed rice, vermicelli, peanuts, sprouted beans and mustard oil is studded with chopped mango and cucumber and drizzled with a creamy raita.

The kitchen uses its coal-fired tandoor (most in the city are fueled with gas) to mostly excellent effect. Its Amaya prawns are impeccably fresh, plump and fire-flavoured, and they're set off with a refreshing green mango and mint sauce.

Sweet and sour eggplant is outstanding: soft, sweet flesh tossed in a well-layered sauce of sour tamarind and curry leaves.

The only slip-up here is the naan, which is flat and dense and undercooked, where what you'd expect from a kitchen this good is soft and fragrant, puffed with bubbles and slightly charred in spots. This is jarring, a bit, in a place that's named for its bread.

But the dessert platter fixes things. In addition to the garam masala truffles, which are mellow with spice and enrobed in dark, fruity melt-in-your-fingers chocolate, the platter brings truffles with pink peppercorns, and shortbread made with ginger, and a pane of pistachio, peanut and almond brittle, and a handful of chopped pistachios mixed with fresh, bursting pomegranate seeds - a combination that covers off salty, sweet, nutty and sour so that you want to go on eating it forever.

The restaurant is mostly tapas-style: Dishes are smallish, which works beautifully for people who like trying lots of different tastes and who learned at an early enough age the importance of sharing. Bread Bar also offers a tasting menu that delivers just about as many different dishes as anybody I've ever met can conceivably consume. At $45 a head for nearly a dozen dishes, it's one of the best dining values in town.
Service is smart and friendly. The wine list is short (six whites, six reds, two sparkling) though well chosen and affordable; cocktails, including a kheera-mirchi gimlet and a Bombay bellini made with sparkling wine, fresh ginger juice and candied ginger, are a must.

The décor - well, it's simple. (Couldn't they have done something about the ceiling's acoustic tiles?) But it's bright and clean and comfortable, and with food this good, who cares whether the bar is made of zebrawood?

Authenticity is so overrated.

{view this story on-line}

Raising the (Bread) Bar

2008-08-24T19:10:00.005-04:00

Our taste for Indian food went-up a thousand notches thanks to Amaya. We were sure we couldn’t taste a better bite. And then we opened our mouths at Bread Bar.

The brand new North Yonge resto is the latest venture by Amaya owners Hemant Bhagwani and Derek Valleau. Bread Bar continues their magical, edible journey – only this time they’re serving it up small plates style, with a delectable, naan-inspired- twist.

To say the night’s tasting menu ($45) surpassed our expectations would be an understatement.

After downing the house-special amuse bouche, featuring a liquid shot of watermelon and ginger, our appetite was off to a kicking start. What came next was the perfect medley of textures, flavours, spices and colours. Masala spiced lobster naan featuring chunky white lobster morsels infused in warm, buttery naan led into sweet and sour eggplant swimming in a sauce of tamarind pulp and curry leaves. A tandori platter of apricot chicken, salmon and lamb kabobs, with combinations of lime, curry and hot sauces was absolutely divine; same for the duck roasted with orange and cardomon.

We could go on about the sides of jewelled basmati rice and spiced yoghurt with pomegranate seeds, but we’ll skip to our velvety chocolate truffles, pistachio brittle and ginger cookie desert and leave it at that.

Can Indian-fusion get any better? With cuisine like this, the bar’s definitely been set.

Bread Bar3305 Yonge St.
(416) 487-1100

{click here to view the article at sweetspot}

Dehli With a Difference

2008-06-11T11:37:00.005-04:00

Rasha Mourtada
Globe and Mail Update
June 11, 2008 at 4:45 PM EDT

If you're looking for the secret to creating buzz, don't bother: There isn't one, say Hemant Bhagwani and Derek Valleau.
They should know. The restaurateurs opened upscale Amaya the Indian Room on Toronto's Bayview Avenue last June. Ever since, they've been filling their 46-seat restaurant twice every night of the week. But the partners haven't taken out a single ad the entire time. "We just talked to as many people as we could," says Valleau. The pair reached out to the numerous contacts they'd amassed over 28 years in the restaurant business, and alerted potential diners by posting their menu on the front door of Amaya before it opened. "People are curious," says Valleau, "and they talk to each other." All that talking worked. Within weeks of opening, Toronto's major dailies, along with Toronto Life magazine, had given Amaya glowing reviews, and the restaurant was getting reservations from as far away as Los Angeles.

Amaya may have taken off overnight, but only after years of planning. Bhagwani and Valleau had been talking about opening a place together since 2004. Four years earlier, the two met at the CN Tower's 360 restaurant, where they briefly overlapped as sommeliers. Valleau then went on to run Toronto's Crush Wine Bar, while Bhagwani launched Kamasutra, an Indian spot also on Bayview. After selling Kamasutra for more than three times his original investment, he was itching to start a new restaurant in the area, and Valleau was ready to join him.
Indian was a natural choice for Bhagwani, especially since he feels his native cuisine is poorly represented in Toronto. The way he sees it, a highly complex gastronomy had been dumbed down to a few clichés, the same old curries and masalas, prepared as cheaply as possible. Valleau had a different inspiration: "It was eating at Vij's in Vancouver," he says, referring to Vikram Vij's world-renowned restaurant. "Here's this restaurant that serves upscale Indian food and doesn't take reservations, and it's jammed seven nights a week. I walked away thinking, Why hasn't anyone done this in Toronto?"

Actually, someone had. After his success with Kamasutra, Bhagwani opened Mantra in 2005 with a menu similar to Amaya's. He blames its failure on an ill-chosen downtown location. "We were relying too much on hotels, and realized that tourists don't eat Indian on vacation," he says. "For lunch, it was office staff, and they wanted buffet."

So when he and Valleau decided to give high-end Indian a whirl, location was top of mind. Bhagwani was convinced Bayview Avenue would tap the ideal clientele—in nearby Rosedale and Leaside neighbourhoods. "The people here are affluent and well-travelled," says Bhagwani. To get around the lengthy process of securing a new liquor licence, the partners decided to wait until an existing restaurant came up for sale, enabling them simply to transfer the licence. They had their eye on Jov Bistro, a popular neighbourhood spot, because they knew the owners wanted out. They waited a long time—until March, 2007, when Jov finally went on the block.
Within weeks, they had forked over $240,000 for Jov. Aside from expediting the liquor licence, buying an existing restaurant meant they didn't need to make structural changes to the space. But they weren't totally off the hook on renovations: They wanted a fresher, more contemporary look, and that meant putting in new floors, ceilings and lighting. Plus, they had to lay down a whack of cash for new equipment, such as a fryer and a clay oven.

While the 1,800-square-foot space was being recast, Valleau and Bhagwani went to New Delhi to find their cooks. Executive chef Kirti Singh was already in place, but they wanted all their staff to cook from their roots. After 18 interviews, they made three hires from high-end Indian hotels. Sponsoring their new staff to Canada proved surprisingly simple, says Bhagwani. The pair first advertised in Toronto publications, but didn't get a single application—a necessary step that demonstrated suitable talent wasn't available locally. The whole process cost about $2,000 in legal fees for each applicant.

Back on home turf, the partners focused on the menu. Their goal was to offer a little of what people expect (butter chicken), but also bring it up a notch (peppered duck breast). "Lots of Indian restaurants have 60 items on their menus," says Valleau. "Ours is like most high-end restaurants, where you see 10 or 15." Valleau and Bhagwani wanted to pair authentic sauces with non-traditional ingredients, such as short ribs, beef tenderloin and rack of lamb. Heartened by Amaya's quick success, in November they opened Amaya Express, a takeout business, a few doors down. In fact, Amaya Express has been so busy that in the winter Bhagwani and Valleau were driving around Toronto delivering meals themselves as they scrambled to hire more drivers.

A year after opening Amaya's doors, Bhagwani and Valleau are still talking to whoever will listen about their restaurant. Now, there are whispers of a second Amaya, as well as more Express outlets. That is, if they can put down their car keys long enough to make it happen.
Pitfalls: Location is everything. "I failed two years ago with a similar menu on Elm Street in Toronto," says Hemant Bhagwani; the downtown tourist crowd wasn't up for expensive Indian. But Amaya's Leaside community is eating it up.

Why do it: To break new ground. "We kept seeing the same kind of restaurants, especially in Indian cuisine," says Bhagwani. "They all looked the same, and the same food was served everywhere. We wanted to bring Indian food to a new level of respect."

Where the money is: In Amaya's case, the big cash is in the Express delivery business. With far lower overhead costs, the profit margins are better.

Click here for The Globe & Mail article.

Niagara on Summer’s Horizon

2008-06-04T10:55:00.015-04:00

Excellent news for those who live around Yonge and Lawrence. Hemant Bhagwani and Derek Valleau, the owners of Amaya, that delicious modern-Indian restaurant on Bayview, are opening a new restaurant at 3305 Yonge Street. They are calling it Bread Bar (their naan really is the best in the city) and have come up with a new notion to avoid confusion with Amaya or its takeout sister, Amaya Express. Small portions is the revolutionary concept—which is good if you love to graze but not so good if you rely on leaving Amaya with a half-dozen doggy bags full of the food you ordered but could not eat. The Bread Bar will offer such yummy morsels as lobster naan, crab kulcha, sag paneer “pizza,” and lemon sole in a particularly delicious sauce. Sounds like another winner. Now the millionaire denizens of Hogg’s Hollow will have even less far to go when hunger gnaws.

Chatto’s Digest
Posted on June 4, 2008

{Click here to read the full story.}

Re-create Amaya's Signature Chicken

2008-05-19T00:01:00.007-04:00

May 08, 2008 04:30 AM
Smita Chandra, thestar.com

The recently opened Amaya restaurant has generated a lot of buzz. Its innovative menu, creative cocktails, comprehensive wine list, effortless service and chic decor have impressed critics and diners alike. The menu, created by co-owner Hemant Bhagwani and his chefs Dinesh Butola and Kirti Singh, features crispy crab kachoris, chili paneer naan, halibut xacutti and Amaya basmati, a combination of basmati, brown and wild rice. Bhagwani shared the recipe for Chettinad chicken curry, which is perfectly balanced with an assertive bite. He recommends serving an Australian Riesling or Gruner Veltliner wine.

AMAYA'S CHETTINAD CHICKEN
1 ½ lb boneless skinless chicken thighs (about 8)
2 whole cloves
10 black peppercorns
1 inch stick cinnamon
1 tsp fennel seeds
½ inch piece ginger
2 cloves garlic
2 tbsp water
2 tbsp vegetable oil
2 whole dried red chilies
1 medium onion, finely chopped
20 fresh curry leaves
1 tsp red chili powder
¾ tsp ground coriander seeds
¾ tsp turmeric
Salt to taste
¾ cup coconut cream
2 plum tomatoes, finely chopped
1 tbsp dried coconut slices
1 tbsp fresh lemon juice
2 tbsp chopped fresh cilantro leaves

Cut chicken thighs into quarters. In mini blender, powder together cloves, peppercorns, cinnamon and fennel seeds. Add ginger, garlic and water, blend to smooth paste. Transfer to small bowl. Warm oil in heavy-bottomed saucepan over medium-high heat. Add dried red chilies and onions, sauté 5-7 minutes. Add curry leaves and reserved paste. Sauté 2 minutes. Add chili powder, ground coriander and turmeric, sauté 30 seconds. Add chicken and sear until brown, about 5 minutes. Add salt, coconut cream, tomatoes and coconut slices. Mix, cover and reduce heat to low. Cook 30 minutes until chicken is tender, stirring occasionally. Uncover, increase heat to medium and cook 5 minutes to thicken sauce. Mix in lemon juice, garnish with chopped cilantro and serve.

Serves four

Amaya Restaurant, 1701 Bayview Ave., Toronto; 416-322 3270 www.amayarestaurant.com

Got a question about desi cuisine?
Write to Smita Chandra at desilife@thestar.ca

Best New Restaurants | Toronto Life

2008-04-26T11:34:00.004-04:00

7. Amaya

Sometimes a restaurateur just happens to pick the right moment, the right mood and the ideal location. The sitars were perfectly aligned for Amaya’s opening on the Bayview gourmet strip, the comfortable (if noisy) room’s popularity assured from day one. It isn’t the first Toronto restaurant to offer contemporary, high-end, slightly westernized Indian cooking in the style of Vij’s in Vancouver—it just seems to have got everything right. The formula is simple: high-quality ingredients; light, fresh textures; smart, friendly service; good cocktails and compatible wines. Amaya goes further, however, with the best Indian breads in the city, and scrumptious ideas like okra masquerading as frites—julienned, dusted with powdered mango and fried to a crisp. There’s another difference between this kind of restaurant and the traditional curry house: spicing is much more subtle and interesting than any hot-as-hell vindaloo. Not to be missed: fat, juicy prawns perfumed with fenugreek greens and a gently building green chili heat. Since it opened, the owners have added a takeout-delivery store down the street, and other restaurants are in the works. This could be the start of something big.

Click here to read the full story

[James Chatto, April 2008]

Indian with more ‘finesse’

2008-03-01T13:13:00.012-05:00

Rick McGinnis/Metro Toronto {Published February 8, 2008}

Amaya chef Kirti Singh (middle) and restaurant owners Derek Valleau (far right) and Hemant Bhagwani. This Bayview Indian eatery prides itself on seasonal items and a neat wine list.

Amaya The Indian Room
1701 Bayview Avenue
416.322.3270
http://www.amayarestaurant.com/
Hours: Mon – Sun: 5pm – 10pm
Capacity: 46
Dinner for 2 w/tax & tip: $80
**** 1/2

Derek Valleau and Hemant Bhagwani met seven years ago when they were respectively the outgoing and incoming sommeliers at 360, the CN Tower’s restaurant high over the city. Six years later, they managed to reach another high point of sorts when Amaya, their brand new Indian restaurant on Bayview Avenue, managed to pull off a hat trick, with thumbs-up reviews from the restaurant critics at all three of the city’s major dailies, and a glowing feature by Toronto Life magazine’s James Chatto on top of that.

Since then, business at Amaya has been booming, as one particular Tuesday night proves, with the room jammed at 8pm, right down to the seats at the bar. The two men had been talking about doing something like this since 2004, but it was a visit to Vij’s in Vancouver – an equally well-reviewed outpost of what’s been called “haute Indian” – that finally convinced Bhagwani that a shorter menu with seasonal items was the way to go.

“We're not reinventing anything,” says Valleau, “we're just repackaging it, giving it a bit more finesse. We've upped the presentation, upped the service, upped the wine program - we're both sommeliers, so we've put some thought into the products that we're offering with the food. We've made it a little friendlier to the general public. That said, we've both been amazed by the education of our customers. It's amazing how many of them a) have been to India, and b) ask if the food is from the north, the south, the east, the west. And we're going, uh, it's just great Indian food. We've underestimated how much people know about food."
For anyone used to the vast catalogues of dishes in most Indian eateries, Amaya’s concise list of entrees – and equally neat wine list – will be a refreshing surprise, and not just because of hit dishes like the Amaya prawns or the meltingly tender Parsi ribs. Bhagwani admits that they’re still experimenting, especially with the wines, their biggest challenge so far.

“It's tough,” he says. “We have 21 spices in there - which one do you match with the wine? You can match all the spices with the wine; we've done it, but it's hard. That's why we wanted to go with 10 wines right now, instead of going with 20 or 30 wines. We wanted to play around and see - we're building a wine cellar for our guests, but it's a slow process. The common wisdom is that only beer goes with Indian food - yes it does, or maybe only chai goes with Indian food.”

“It's a very subjective thing,” agrees Valleau, underlining the sort of relaxed, bistro-like attitude that’s gone a long way to making Amaya a hit. “The whole idea of red or white wine with certain foods is changing, and people drink what they like to drink with the food they like to eat. I think it's the same thing here - it's amazing how much Shiraz we sell here, which is a big, full-bodied, juicy, high in alcohol wine, and those rules are all against spicy foods. You're supposed to drink something low in alcohol, with residual sugar, and it's supposed to balance off the heat. Some people do - we sell a lot of Riesling and gewürztraminer, but you drink what you want to drink.”

Rick McGinnis/Metro Toronto

Masala Make-over

2008-01-29T09:04:00.003-05:00

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.

Restauarant of the Year 2007

2008-01-05T19:25:00.001-05:00

Hemant Bhagwani, left, chef Dinesh Singh Butola, middle, and Derek Valleau at Amaya.

Bite-Size Critiques
Gina Mallet, National Post Published: Saturday, January 05, 2008

Time to chew over all things gastronomic from last year.

RESTAURANT OF THE YEAR
Amaya, chef Dinesh Singh Butola; owner Derek Valleau

DISH OF THE YEAR
Shane Waite's brilliant fusion at Cru, sardines in tempura matched with lobster boudin blanc -- "an intricate fugue of flavours"

CLASSIC TORONTO
Suzanne Baby at Gallery Grill is "decorously terrific." Reliable big bang restos The Fifth (J.P. Challet), the French narrative; Splendido (David Lee), eclectic Mediterranean

GOT LEGS, WILL TRAVEL
Lorenzo Loseto (George), fashionista with depths; Michael Steh (Reds), don't eat meat without him

EAT YOUR FRESH VEGGIES
TatiBistro

KEEP AN EYE ON
Ted Pegg of Noon makes superlative baveuse omelettes. Andrea Nicholson, 35 Elm, with clever spins such as olive oil poached celeriac. Kreg Graham, Tundra sous-chef who won Calphalon's Rising Chef Challenge this year with simple unctuous flavours

BEST NEW PATIO
The sidewalk cafe at One

REGRETTABLE TREND
Increasing number of restaurants owned/run by corporations like Sir, or chefs (Mark McEwan, Jamie Kennedy, Oliver Bonacini) turned corporation. If a meal is a narrative, the chef drives it and I want to hear that voice (not a corporate marketing plan) loud and clear.

THREE OWNER-CHEFS OF THREE-STAR OWNER-CHEF RESTOS
Scot Woods/ Simon Bower's Lucien; the Bermanns' Boba; Danielle Schrage/ Alireza Fashrashrafi's Pomegranate; Patrick McMurray's Starfish; Jean-Jacques Texier's Batifole; Veronique Perez's Crepes a Go Go; Anton Potvin's Niagara Street Cafe

BLACK-TIE BROWN BAG
Petit Fours is the ooh la la underground brown bagger with crunchy focaccia and little verrines.

HOLES IN THE FOODSCAPE
In 1988, Susur Lee opened Lotus and introduced the fried taro root to a delighted Toronto. Lee would go on to become internationally acclaimed as a Pacific Rim chef. Today, the Rubino brothers' Rain, more East-West fusion, is a significant influence on young chefs.

Otherwise, the promises of the multicultural food explosion, fuelled by immigrants from all over the world, have not been fulfilled. At first the new flavours were confined to small cheap restaurants and mostly they still are. There's been little movement with such exceptions as three high-end Japanese places -- Kaiseki-Sakura, Sushi Kaji, Hashimoto (none of which I've reviewed yet) -- and Amaya where the cooking is quite different from the cliches of the neighbourhood buffet. Why did it take so long? It's not as if Toronto isn't full of curry maniacs like me.

And on the subject of me, it is now a human right to have one's own "culturally appropriate" food, so where's my steak and kidney and oyster pie? I'm happy to see a trad Sunday roast beef and Yorkshire pudding dinner at Prime, the steak house in the Windsor Arms Hotel.

Surely the excitement of a multicultural city is that everyone has a chance to have a go at someone else's food, not just fiddle around with fusion. We don't have anything like Montreal's Raza, a Canadian take on South American food, Rick Bayless's addictive everyday Mexican at Chicago's Frontera Grill nor his classical Topolobampo, nor do we have a Thai restaurant comparable to David Thompson's Nahm in London, which doesn't taste sugary at all. We do have serious Italian takes from Andrew Milne-Allan at Zucca and Alida Solomon at Tutti Matti. I'd like someone to take on Spanish cuisine; we don't have a true Ferran Adria acolyte, and where's the successor to the shuttered Barmalay? Barmalay was hokey with its melancholy balalaikas and so was New York's faux imperial Russian Tea Room -- but they were both fun. Fun is too often missing since the celeb's yoohoo cafe, the Courtyard Cafe, was closed more than a decade ago. Significantly, the extreme makeover of the CC looks like a Valley of the Kings tomb.

MOST FUN
Gordon Mackie's roasted pig nights at Far Niente; Harbour Sixty's OTT steak amid Texas Gothic decor

THE FRAGGY CLUSTERF--K
Noise is the overwhelming complaint of the eating classes. Drop 200 on a dinner and you don't get a chance to bore your friends 'cos they can't hear you.
One of the '60s dire legacies is eardrum smashing music 7/24. Now a generation gap is widening between the young and deaf and the old and going deaf.
When I went to Alain Ducasse's three-star restaurant in the Plaza Athenee in Paris, the only sound was slowly moving jaws. The room was carpeted, heavily draped tables set well apart, stuffed chairs. But designers rule here. Today's fashion is industrial, bare floors, stripped walls, curtainless windows, coverless table tops, noisy bars too near diners.

SOLUTIONS
Use multiple tablecloths, padded table legs and padded walls, heavy drapes, and heavy carpets, stuffed chairs --and shoot the DJ.

HOUSEKEEPING
The star system is thus revised. Three stars is Don't Miss; two stars, I'll Go Back Again; one star, OK.
I shall call the first course hors d'oeuvre, the second, entree, followed by cheese and dessert courses.

TREND FOR '08

Eating Out. It's taken awhile for house-happy Torontonians to embrace resto culture Now the city's filling up with 500-square-foot condos. Great. The reason Tokyo has so many good restos is that people live in such small spaces that they have to eat out.

(Click here to read the article online.)

Amaya on Joanne Kates' Top Ten List of Best Restaurants in 2007

2007-12-29T13:30:00.002-05:00

ON THE MENU: DINING 2007
It was the best of meals, it was the worst ...
JOANNE KATES
jkates@globeandmail.com
December 29, 2007

This was a big year for small plates ... as in tapas. Even Mark McEwan jumped on the bandwagon. One, his glamorous new Yorkville hot spot, is all tapas. Gastronomically, '07 was also a paradox of local and organic on the one hand versus steak on the other. More and more chefs are using healthy local and organic ingredients, while steak houses serving the fattest meat on the planet - kobe/wagyu beef, the foie gras of cow - are springing up like mushrooms after rain.

Restaurant prices continued upward. In '06, serious restaurants broke the $150-for-two barrier. This year, they broke the $200 barrier, thanks partly to the tapas trend. Ordering several small dishes costs the kitchen more trouble and the diner more money. Sides aren't always included these days, so watch your bill ratchet up.

The good news is that Toronto keeps getting yummier. The depth, breadth and diversity of our restaurants are second only to New York's. Herewith the 10 best and 10 worst restaurants of 2007 in no particular order.

The Best

Cru
(www.crurestaurant.ca)
In a gorgeous renovated 1930's art deco Woolworth's store, Cru dishes up gnocchi so light and sweet they mimic clouds, with tarragon-scented light lobster cream and chunks of barely cooked lobster. Berkshire pork belly is crispy on the outside, juicy on the inside. The pleasure principle lives on in the west end.

Colborne Lane
(www.colbornelane.com)
When wunderkind Claudio Aprile opened Colborne last winter, we slavered over his rich, complex, modern cooking. Who wouldn't swoon over the likes of licorice and burnt honey sauce on uber-tender Peking duck, and sweet/hot squid, both tender and crisp? But instant popularity overwhelmed the wunderkind; both food and service flagged badly. Prognosis: in recovery.

Golden Turtle
(416-531-1601)
An Ossington dive serving the best pho in town. Classic rare beef pho has thin slices of beef atop rice noodles in rich broth with sweet spices. Seafood pho is sweet chicken stock with al dente egg vermicelli, barely wilted leaf lettuce, and mixed seafood including big shrimp and fish balls.

Imperia
(416-921-1471)
Franco Agostino has owned Banfi and Il Posto, so Imperia's great tastes are not surprising. From impeccable thin-crusted pizza and fab house-made pasta to sophisticates such as lobster risotto, his food is incredible Italiana.

Kaiseki-Sakura
(416-923-1010)
Serving elaborate Japanese tasting menus, Kaiseki is the best Japanese restaurant in town today. Our eight-course dinner began with deboned quail topped with "sea foie gras" (a.k.a. monkfish liver), soy and miso-soaked mushrooms and tofu, with a side of tiny water chestnut chips. One course! Top that.

Spice Room
(416-935-0000)
Greg Couillard the spicemeister is back, and at the top of his game. Sauces are vintage Couillard - sweet, hot, a hint of sour, deep, complex and spicy. Perfectly cooked meat and fish are dazzling. Welcome back the jolly jump-up sprite of the kitchen.

Amaya
(www.amayarestaurant.com)
Toronto's first superb Indian restaurant is to most curries what Pavarotti was to the Spice Girls. For example, Amaya prawns, their sauce a tamarind-scented green-mango curry with green chili and fenugreek, sweet and hot and perfectly balanced on the big, barely cooked shrimps. They do tandoori duck breast: ruby red slices in orange-inflected sauce with shredded apple. Move over, duck à l'orange.

Oro
(www.ororestaurant.com)
Tarek Aboushakka left North 44 after 20 years and bought Oro. He hired chef Sam Girgis, who produced great food at Lure. Sam is a modernist who makes seafood minestrone. He dollops goat cheese gelato on a fragile tart of caramelized onion and leek in gossamer custard. His osso bucco is fork-tender. He shaves fresh artichokes into nicely textured risotto. Add Tarek's silken service and Oro shines.

Seven Numbers
(www.sevennumbers.com)
Eglinton Avenue missed Mamma Rosa's pasta in particular and the Marinuzzi family's brio in general. Standing in line at Seven Numbers and schmoozing with Rosa while she cooks is part of the crazy-quilt culture of the little restaurant with prices to match - and terrific southern Italian food.

Lucien
(www.lucienrestaurant.com)
After closing YYZ, Simon Bower teamed up with chef Scot Woods (ex Habitat) to open the warm, intimate and delectable Lucien. A classic Woods plate is deconstructed southern fried chicken: He removes the skin, cooks the meat sous vide for moisture, fries the skin crispy and "glues" it back onto breast meat with buttermilk. Hot, enriched buttermilk spurts from a small round croquette. On the side are lightly creamed collards, smooth onion gravy and buttermilk foam!

The Worst

Sado Sushi
(www.sado-sushi.com)
My sushi does not include heavy sauces, weird combos (blue cheese, spicy mayo and raw tuna?) or servers who forget my order. But it's working for some people. Le tout Forest Hill flocks to Sado Sushi. Is it all about location?

Seoul City
(seoulcityrestaurant.com)
Upscale Korean sounds yummy. But beauty is skin deep here because of flavour-free bulgogi, greasy bland dumplings and horribly dried-out rice.

E-Pan
(416-260-9988)
A failed Asian crossover - gentrified but gastronomically blah, featuring hot and sour soup that is neither, bland Singapore noodles, tough salt and pepper squid and thickly battered General Tao's chicken: Chicken nuggets meet General Tao, the general loses.

Mother's Dumplings
(www.mothersdumplings.com)
In a tiny space below stairs, four cooks labour mightily, fast fingers flying, to make hundreds of fresh Chinese dumplings every day. The dumplings are clad in superbly fresh, tender dough and perfectly cooked. We want to love them, but neither dumplings nor soups have flavour. Bring your own sesame and soy, or stay home.

Coca
(416-703-0783)
The darling of Queen Street West is gorgeous but not delicious. Fried things are greasy, flavours are either underpowered or oversalted, and other than the lovely flatbreads (Catalan answer to pizza), Coca's kitchen does not live up to the cool quotient of its dining rooms.

Sassafraz
(416-964-2222)
Rebuilt after a 2006 fire, Sassafraz still has appalling service and the food is a pathetic parade of overcooked meats, clumsy flavour pairings, heavy sides and banal flavours. What a pity such a gorgeous room is mired in mediocrity.

Harbour Sixty
(www.harboursixty.com)
Looks like a bordello, charges like a three-star ($57.95 for New York strip steak, $35.95 for lobster martini) and schmecks like a lot less. The aforementioned lobster has no flavour, frites taste like frozen, creamed spinach is gummy and crab cakes recall cereal.

Peter's Chung King
(416-928-2936)
The dirty sign out front should have been enough info. This is the food of Toronto's unfortunate gastronomic yesteryear - too hot but not tasty hot and sour soup, indelicate fried dumplings, soggy Szechuan green beans, overcooked, too sugary Szechuan beef, and dry Singapore noodles. Complete with dirty bathrooms.

Reds
(www.redsbistro.com)
Hiring a serious chef didn't make Reds a good restaurant. You still stand in line to check your coat, you still feel mass-produced, you are still served by wait staff who would do well at the Keg. But you pay for serious food.

Six Steps
(www.sixstepsrestaurant.com)
A confused resto. Is it a bar or a dining room? Wait staff seem to make it up as they go along, and the kitchen's reach way exceeds its grasp. The menu is too complex, with painfully spotty execution (decent lamb with soggy rosti, horribly overcooked roast chicken and scalloped potatoes, so-called caramelized apple tart with shoe-leather dough and no caramel).

An Evening with Padma Lakshmi

2007-11-27T11:43:00.003-05:00

Left to right: Harsh Chawla, Derek Valleau (back, standing), Padma Lakshmi, Hemant Bhagwani

On the evening of Monday, November 26, 2007, Amaya the Indian Room was closed for a private function, An Evening with Padma Lakshmi, that included an incredible dinner, wine, and of course, readings by Lakshmi from her latest book, Tangy, Tart, Hot & Sweet.

Padma Lakshmi is known as India's first supermodel and the host of Top Chef, the highest rated food show on cable television. Before Top Chef, Lakshmi starred in her own show, The Melting Pot, on The Food Network, and hosted the documentary series, Planet Food, on Discovery. She then went to add author to her résumé, with Easy Exotic, a low-fat ethnic cookbook, currently in its third printing and also winner of the International Versailles Prize for Best First Cookbook.

Tangy, Tart, Hot & Sweet, a follow-up, will feature recipes along with her memoirs. Lakshmi, who is fluent in five languages, has contributed to Vogue, Gourmet and Harper's Bazaar, and is a syndicated New York Times columnist.

The menu.

Tangy Tart Hot & Sweet

the Indian food Toronto has been waiting for - Globe & Mail, October 6, 2007

2007-10-06T11:12:00.006-04:00

JOANNE KATES
October 6, 2007

Amaya

1701 Bayview Ave. Toronto. 416-322-3270. Dinner for two with wine, tax and tip, $110.

Toronto gourmands can be easily forgiven for not believing in Indian food. An aversion to greasy acrid curries and dried-out biryani is easy to develop, if one's sole experience of Indian food were the product of Little India (Gerrard Street East between Greenwood and Coxwell).

Don't get me wrong. I adore Little India, for it represents everything I hold dear about my hometown: I'm proud to be a citizen of a city that celebrates its various cultures instead of asking them to melt into one big homogeneous pot.

Strolling through Little India (like Koreatown or one of our several Chinatowns) is the next best thing to travelling abroad - rich with the sights and sounds of exotic places. But that doesn't necessarily mean I want to have dinner there. Aficionados of cheap eats will pillory me for this, but not all noodle houses or curry shops are created equal. Some cuisines lend themselves more readily to being produced on the cheap.

Pho, for example, is the ultimate cheap dinner. Its genesis as the meal-in-a-bowl sold on the streets of Hanoi explains why pho's destiny is to be cheap. It started that way, as street food. Same for dim sum and other inexpensive Chinese food. It was, historically, quick food made with inexpensive ingredients. Hence, it translates well to cheap restaurants.

Indian food, on the other hand, has its roots in the great houses of the upper class. My Indian friend who taught me the mysteries of curries also made it clear that people of her moneyed class would never go to restaurants, which served food disdained by the well-off, who prided themselves on keeping excellent cooks. These skilled artisans hounded market sellers for the freshest spices and the best vegetables, baked their naans and their chapatis fresh for every meal, and would not have been caught dead immersing different foods in a generic "curry sauce."

Which unfortunately is what a lot of our local curry parlours do. Not their fault: If customers won't pay good money for carefully braised fish, meat and vegetables, each in its individually made sauce, then a pot that simmers all day, into which you dump whatever the customer orders.

Vancouverites have been standing in interminable lineups for Vikram Vij's high-end Indian delights. Here, we have had only Cuisine of India to fill that void, and it has three problems: One, it's way north on Yonge Street. Two, the room is blah. Three, the service is not stellar.

All of which explains why Amaya, which opened recently in the (renovated) premises of the former Jov, is heaven-sent. The combination of silken service and excellent ingredients freshly cooked, with sensitive spicing, is seductive in the way that only the food of the subcontinent can be - rich, assertive, complex, exotic. Amaya prawns are very spicy but restrained, their sauce a tamarind-scented green mango curry with green chili and fenugreek, sweet and hot and perfectly balanced on the big barely cooked shrimp. Even samosas, the most common of Indian appetizers, are crisper than usual, nary a hint of grease, and served with a splendour of chutneys - pale green coriander with mint, red sweet/sour plum, and a translucent mango purée zinged with mint.

But my favourite Amaya app is its one nod to street food: Chaat is a savoury pyramid composed of tiny wheat crisps, equally crispy puffed rice and sprouted beans flavoured to a dazzling sweet/sour pitch with tamarind, coriander, mint and pomegranate seeds, all gentled with slender ribbons of spiced yogurt.

Ordinary Indian restaurants throw some red-marinated chicken in the oven and call it tandoori. Amaya does tandoori duck breast, ruby slices in orange-inflected sauce with shredded apple. Move over, duck à l'orange. Lamb shank xacutti is uber-tender lamb in a complex sauce with cardamom, coriander seed, coconut, cloves and a hint of sweetness. Coconut lobster curry is what happened when the maharani met Marie Antoinette: a sauce so creamy it meets and matches the soft flesh of barely cooked lobster, but unlike a French cream sauce, this one is jazzed with ginger, garlic and cardamom pods.

Their sole error is overcooked halibut wrapped in banana leaf with mint coriander paste, of which there is not enough to make an impression. The too-thick coconut sauce on the outside is of no service, either.

Indian cooks honour the vegetable kingdom and keep it holy: Amaya's veg biryani, served in a tall pounded copper vessel, is moist saffron-scented rice with big chunks of al dente veg. Their palak paneer is puréed spinach that has not been cooked to death, with cubes of very fresh cheese and an embarras de richesses of garlic. They do great work with various lentils, adding spice, ginger and garlic to make very beautiful dals. Ditto the thrill of Amaya's breads, their garlic naan being a triumph of flaky delicate bread with toasted garlic and butter to make it dangerously delightful.

This theme continues for dessert.

How not to succumb to the thrill of dark dense chocolate terrine? Or cute little shortbreads with pulverized almonds, flavoured with chai? Dark chocolate truffles delicately spiced with garam masala? Spiced nut brittle?
This is the Indian food we've been waiting for. Say goodbye to acrid curries and boring biryanis. Amaya is to downmarket curry houses what the Taj Mahal is to a hovel.

Amaya the Indian Room - August 17, 2007

2007-08-21T23:03:00.001-04:00

Amaya just sounds beautiful.

The latest resto to open on Bayview Avenue has a soft-sounding name. As owner and sommelier Hemant Bhagwani explains, it means “no delusions” in Sanskrit.

Bhagwani is hip, well-traveled and an experienced hand in this business, having opened and operated several restaurants, from Mantra to Kama Sutra. His business partner is Derek Valleau, formerly of Crush.

We arrive with high expectations, expecting beguiling aromas to seduce us into the doors like the bright colours and aromas of a market but the small front entrance is quite discreet.

A small entrance way leads into the front bar area. The intense, hot colours of saris and bowls of spice are transferred over to the dangling jewel-toned lights and the row of candles at the edge of the bar. The dining room has a modern, yet imperious post-colonial Indo-British feel. The light wood and the practical office style chairs are reminiscent of another era. Dark, framed photographic art with various scenes from India is the modern touch, along with the massive trio of black string globes. Formal linen and table settings have the added touch of coloured madras-style napkins. The black-shirted waiters are calm and collected.

Manager Lynn Stimpson shows me to my corner table and leaves me to the drinks list and menu. Pepper-laced poppadums and a pot of mango mint chutney arrive while I read. The first thing that catches my eye is a rosewater infused martini. I must try Lynne's 'Lychee Rose' ($10). The rose aroma wafting up from the drink restores the dashed equilibrium of the day.

Stimpson ask the chef to make me a small platter of different starters. A rectangular plate arrives with Amaya prawns (14), curried squid ($8), harra kebab ($6) and tandoori paneer ($12). The prawns are bathed in a slightly smoky yet seductive sauce, evidence of the roasted seeds and spices used for the massala. The squid, with a tumeric curry leaf dusting, is excellent, as are the kebabs -- little spinach stuffed discs of cheese, dipped in curry and quickly sauteed. Paneer is mild cheese, a chameleon depending on what is used to dress it up. The intense tandoori seasoning and colour lifts it out of its obscurity, giving it a life of its own. I decide that with such a mix, a Kingfisher Lager from India is the right cooling touch for the cuisine.

There's a big selection of main dishes, from vegetarian, seafood, poultry and meat dishes not to mention the accompaniments of different breads like naan, roti and paratha and basmati rice dishes and various chutneys. I'm a completely willing victim to vindaloo, that intensely spicy cuisine with Goan roots. Yet, I love duck, so the chef creates a special dish -- splitting a Kerala Pepper Duck ($19) with an order of Lamb Vindaloo ($17). The tandoori-spiced duck is great to begin and I finish with the lamb. I'm in a fiery heaven of sorts by now, quenched with the addition of a dry Alsatian gewürztraminer.

Amaya has laid-back class. And, there aren’t any delusions about the quality of food, service and personable attention to detail at this chic new addition to Leaside.

Recommended Dishes: Harra kebab, Curried Squid, Amaya Prawns, Lamb Vindaloo
Dinner for two: $80+
Reservations: Recommended
Wheelchair Access: No

by Patricia Noonan, photos by Mona Kiriakopoulos

The Star - Saturday, July 28, 2007

2007-07-28T12:56:00.003-04:00

Derek Valleau believes Indian will be the new Thai.

He's not the first to speculate on which far-flung cuisine will replace cold salad rolls in our affections. There have been convincing cases made – but ultimately lost – for the potential ubiquity of Portuguese, Moroccan and Vietnamese foods.

But Valleau is on to something with Amaya, his new Leaside restaurant that blends purity of flavour with sophisticated service. Amaya is the next step in Indian dining. Open just five weeks, the chic room is already packed with well-heeled locals drawn by complex masalas as far from cut-rate buffet fare as a maharajah is from a mahoot.

What makes Amaya (Sanskrit for "without boundaries") so revolutionary? The owners, for one. Valleau, 41, was a partner in Crush Wine Bar and was inspired by an upscale Indian meal at Vij's in Vancouver. He partnered with Hemant Bhagwani, formerly of Kama Sutra down the street, to lap the competition with gorgeous presentation, Western desserts and thoughtful wines. They hired Crush front-of-house veteran Lynne Stimpson to smoothly manage the dining room.

As sommeliers, Valleau and Bhagwani relish the challenge of marrying highly spiced food to wines. Amaya offers 15 offbeat but successful pairings, like a fruit-driven Oremus Tokaji Dry Furmint and a lightly wooded Mt. Rosa New Zealand Pinot Noir. Their cocktails are both traditional (punch was invented in India, after all; Amaya's knock-you-flat rum version is $8) and modern.

Not for them are kitschy sitar music and embroidered wall hangings. The room was until recently JOV Bistro and still looks like a bistro, albeit one hung with photographs of India by cookbook authors Naomi Duguid and Jeffrey Alford. Otherwise, the subcontinent is merely hinted at in pressed cotton napkins and handsome copper dishes.

In the kitchen, visible through a large window, flames leap from a tandoor oven and black-jacketed cooks coax maximum taste out of high-quality ingredients – when was the last time you saw organic chicken and AAA Canadian beef on a $6.99 buffet? – with minimum greasiness.

Executive chef Dinesh Singh Butola oversees a concise menu of largely northern Indian dishes, with side excursions to Goa, Bombay and Chettinad. There's no fusion, just polished classics plus a few new ones, like a $25 whole tandoori lobster.

The Uttaranchal native trained in hotels and was hired from Mantra Indian Restaurant & Wine Bar in Burlington (another Bhagwani project). He grabs our attention straightaway with piquant rolled pappadums and tart mango sauce.

Let us pause to consider the enormity of Butola's task. He is trying to win over fans from a population where "curry" is synonymous with "pain."

Butola signals his good intentions with patrani machchi ($19), halibut baked in a banana leaf. Did I mention the halibut is first brushed with coconut-mint paste, then layered with red peppers and carrots? After it's cooked, the fish is drizzled with a sauce made from 21 spices.

Let Jamie Kennedy have his frites. Butola's gorgeous cassava fries ($6) are a revelation, the thick wedges wondrously crisp yet starchy. Marathi-style short ribs ($19) are perfumed with star anise and sesame seeds, while the coconut sauce coating fork-tender lamb shank xacutti ($18) is rich and subtle.

Butola purees baby spinach with garlic in palak paneer ($10). His blistered naan ($3) is a paragon, fluffy and crusty. Plain basmati won't seem the same now that I've had it combined with brown and wild rices in a nutty pilaf ($5) garnished with crisp fried onions.

Not everything is down with the revolution. Samosas ($5) are heavy. The wafers in chaat ($6) taste like bagel chips with yogurt dip. Seafood can be overcooked. And the effort that goes into shredding and deep-frying okra ($6) is admirable, but not the oily result.

Helen Valleau, Derek's wife, makes the Western desserts garnished with tropical ice cream from Greg's. Grilled pineapple ($7) is sadly more carbonized than caramelized. The best ending to a rich meal is the tiny, perfect chocolate truffle ($2) perfumed with garam masala. It should, and will, be sold at Amaya Express, the planned takeout and delivery operation.

Is Amaya good because it's different, or is it different because it's good? Both, in this tandoori chicken-or-egg debate. With more restaurants like it, pad thai could be on the way out.

Amy Pataki, The Star, Saturday, July 28, 2007

Four Entrances and an Exit

2007-07-23T20:59:00.001-04:00

Chatto's Digest - July 23, 2007

I went to Amaya on Thursday and enjoyed myself no end. Call the cooking there New Indian or Contemporary Subcontinental—or better yet, don’t. It’s more like the way very good, rather sophisticated Indian friends cook in their homes with fresh textures and subtle spicing. But the facts, the facts…! Amaya is on Bayview Avenue, where JOV Bistro used to be. Derek Valleau (ex Crush) and Hemant Bhagwani (who owns Mantra in Burlington) are the proprietors, working the room as good owners should, and they have brought the brilliant and charming Lynn Stimpson in as manager from Cava (and a great many other places—she’s a career front-of-house star with a CV as long as the Nile). The chef, Dinesh Butola, also comes from Mantra and he knows his stuff. We finally have someone to contend with Vancouver’s Vikram Vij and with the team at Amaya in London, England (no relation—and no comparison, either, since our Amaya is content to woo Leaside while the London version aims to be the sexiest, haughtiest venue ever).

The room looks very JOV-like but with framed pics of India on the walls. It gets noisy when the room is packed with well-heeled locals in full cry, but it was ever thus in the little room. Butola’s textures impressed me most. Most of our Indian restaurants start from the premise that their clientele have no teeth so vegetables have to be braised to mush and protein must be served drowned and smothered in some kind of dark brown reductive tar. Amaya’s dishes take a different route. It’s great to catch the fleeting flavours of cardamom, rosewater and saffron in the biryani, to hear the juicy snap of a rare prawn perfumed with fenugreek leaves, green mango and a slow-building aftertaste of green chili. If you want the macho thrill of a vindaloo hot enough to strip the skin from your tongue, I dare say the kitchen can oblige, but reluctantly, I imagine. If I have one complaint, it’s that the array of smoothly puréed chutneys are too sweet and not tart enough. Frying, however, is a forte and, naan lovers, this is your nirvana.

The wine list is minimal but savvy. We drank Oremus Mandolas Tokaji Furmint from Hungary—dry, aromatic, but not as soapy as a dry muscat, and it worked beautifully with the gentle spicing. Stimpson has also devised a cocktail list that includes a Curry Martini—vodka quickened by fresh lime juice over muddled curry leaves, with fresh ginger and sweet curry spices and a final dusting of garam masala—like a well-seasoned Punjabi Caesar without the Clamato.

There are other new places taking advantage of the summer lull to open their doors. Mark Cutrara, who wowed me at Globe Bistro on the Danforth but left soon after it opened to study the art of butchery at The Healthy Butcher, has opened his new venue: Cowbell is a 30-seat fine dining establishment at 1564 Queen Street West. I’m looking forward to eating there. And The Citizen is up and running on Queen Street East, a sister for Rosebud and sharing its Orson Welles frame of reference. I haven’t been there yet either but a friend with a trusted palate was delighted with owner-chef Rod Bowers’s schnitzel—and when was the last time anyone in Toronto delighted us with schnitzel?

Last, but by no means least, Mark McEwan’s new restaurant, One, will burst upon us on August 15. The trades are still in there, brushing down the cognac suede walls and polishing the dark green marble that runs from one room to the next. There will be glamorous tables on the Yorkville sidewalk patio, a private room for 20 that I’m sure will be the ultimate hang for superstars during the Film Festival, and a menu that consciously favours unpretentious but delicious dishes, with vegetables served in platters in the middle of the table for everyone to share. It’s the sort of place you hope to find in New York when you’re feeling flush and cocky and eager to be where the action is. Dress sharp and enjoy.

I seem to be finding myself at Starfish quite a lot these days, eating oysters in a month without an r and finding them plump and sweet. But sad news: Starfish’s chef since the beginning, Martha Wright, is moving on, most amicably. It was her kitchen dishes that set Starfish above every other oyster house in the city (I wonder how many tonnes of her frites I have eaten over the last six years?) and I look forward to hearing that she is cooking somewhere else soon.

National Post, Saturday, July 14, 2007

2007-07-19T14:00:00.001-04:00

Imagine going off to sit six-hour exams fortified by brain food such as badaam-ki-golis, small almond balls made by soaking the nuts overnight, grinding them with sugar and cardamom and finally covering them with varak, real silver tissue. A whole culture wrapped in silver paper -- more trouble must have gone into making the delectable morsels described in A Taste of India, by Delhi-born Madhur Jaffrey, than the exams themselves. This was my wake-up call to the sumptuous, complex, seductive flavours of regional Indian cooking and to the breadth and depth of the cooking. Other than France, I can't think of a country where food is so intimately connected with every facet of life, where food is a resource, a philosophy, a medicine and always a delight.

Not that I could find such food in Toronto back in 1985. Greasy-spoon Indian--hot, medium, mild curries -- still prevailed, and I loved it. You see, I'm a curry maniac. (I know speaking of curry is no longer politically correct but it's the fastest way to describe the astonishing blend of spices that defines all Indian food.) With the first mouthful of cardamom, cumin, cinnamon and more spices than I can identify off the top of my head, I'm addicted--I lose all control and continue eating, even after my appestat is flashing signs saying "full up, full up."

While nouvelle Indian, a free-ranging fusion of Indian regions and Western influences, was getting raves in Europe and New York--and Vancouver, where Vikram Vij opened his eponymous restaurant --Toronto lagged. No more.

Amaya, open just a few weeks, is revelatory, with a menu of eye-popping palate pleasers, as well as takes on familiar dishes that change some of my perceptions of Indian food. Item: Mango chutney isn't a sweet, chunky condiment but a little pot of sweet and sour juice. Item: Lamb vindaloo isn't a furnace blast of chili nor is it exactly Indian. It probably tastes closer to the original sweet-and-sour meat dish the Portuguese made with vinegar. When the Portuguese colonists couldn't find vinegar in Goa, they used instead black pepper, tamarind and chilis. Now chef Dinesh Singh Butola uses vinegar and chilis and the result is not so much a subdued vindaloo but a subtler peppery bite to the rich purplish stew.

Butola, who comes from Garwhal in northeast India, has rubbished the notion, which I once mistakenly clung to, that Indian food might lose its soul if it became influenced by Western mainstream taste -- those bad memories of pallid curry sauces linger. Not here. Instead, a talented chef is creating new and unusual flavours to savour.

Tonight I'm with a couple of fellow curry maniacs and the moment we step inside the simple whitewashed room with blond panelling half way up the walls we bond to the modern aesthetic. No reference to the Raj or Taj Mahal. Instead, white tablecloths, candles and a short but intriguing menu. And a light touch: Don't forget the curry martini.

How difficult it is to pick among the first courses -- but our first order is a knockout: rajasthani bindi, an airy pile of deep-fried and mango-crusted skinny strips of okra with the liquid mango chutney. I also love the harra kebab, round spinach fritters with a creamy cheese stuffing, and a plate of pakoras with such familiar favourites as paneer, deep-fried cubes of soft cheese, mushroom and spicy onion.

We simply can't make our minds up about the second courses. A tandoori-roasted duck breast tempts -- the smoky taste of tandoori-roasted food, like our butter naan tonight, is an enduring favourite in the West. We plump for patrani machchi, halibut-wrapped in a banana leaf and lapped with an irresistible pinkish sauce that contains a blend of 21 spices and mint and ginger. "What else is in this?" we ask our excellent waiter, Korum, and he says coconut milk. The seamless blend of ingredients makes it hard to identify them properly.

Chettinad chicken is a very hot South Indian curry with curry leaves, tomato and grated coconut. To sop up the juices, we order a spin on rice -- brown, wild blended with basmati, the rice that astonished foreigners because the Indians cooked it so each grain was separate from the others.

We're now surrounded by half-empty plates. Oh dear, Indian food has done it again. We've ordered too much! This is the danger of curry mania, which, if unchecked, may lead to orgy, even guilt. Even so, we feel we must test cardamom grilled pineapple with ginger ice cream -- but it isn't gingery enough -- and enjoy a garam masala truffle -- one of the marvellous ways they're using healthy dark chocolate nowadays.

Only downer: no Indian wine (which, since I inquired about it, is now on the list at Tabla wine bar) but almost everything else, fun cocktails to single malts. My fellow diners prefer red wine and Lynn Stimpson, the helpful manager, advises a lively Languedoc, but for myself, I like effervescent Kingfisher beer with the food.

Amaya has about 40 seats and they were full tonight. I wonder whether co-owners Derek Valleau and Hemant Bhagwani haven't underestimated the number of curry maniacs in Toronto. Although I'd love to come back and order lamb shank xacutti, I wonder whether I'll be able to get in.

-Food for two plus tax, $85.

Gina Mallet, National Post

National Post, Wednesday, July 4, 2007

2007-07-18T11:00:00.001-04:00

Since Amaya the Indian Room opened quietly two weeks ago, word has been spreading: This is no ordinary Indian restaurant. Not surprising, considering its founders: Lynn Stimpson (Cava) and Derek Valleau (Crush). According to my server, Amaya focuses on North Indian fare, which tends to be milder than elsewhere in India. If I prefer more heat, however, I can always ask the chef to add an extra "kick."

A plate of complimentary poppadums is presented, accompanied by a small dish of mango sauce; the sweetness of the mango complements the peppery kick of the crunchy poppadums. My starter is the Rajasthani Bhindi ($6): crispy powder crust and mango chutney on the side.

I'm impressed by the artful presentation but still nervous; I chose the dish on a whim because of its intriguing name. I take a tentative bite . . . dear Lord. My taste buds do cartwheels of ecstasy as each crispy morsel melts in my mouth. With great effort, I resist the urge to lick the plate.

And here comes the main course: Murgh Satrangi ($17) with organic chicken, green chili, assorted vegetables and lemon, with steamed long grain Himalayan basmati ($3). Dessert: a single, luscious garam masala truffle. As I linger over a cup of smoky Assam-Lapsang Souchong tea, I know I will be dreaming of Rajasthani Bhindi tonight.

--Debbie Ridpath Ohi, blogto.com

Click here to view the scanned article.