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Tartare star Thornton's Luke Wood brought Northern flair to Toronto competition Galit Rodan Northern News Services Published Monday, April 9, 2012
Luke Wood of Thornton's was a last-minute entrant and the sole non-Torontonian amongst a group of elite chefs that included Order of Canada recipient Jamie Kennedy. "It was a little competitive but it was more fun," said Wood. Tartare is an adjective that typically describes finely chopped or ground seasoned raw meat or fish. Ten professional chefs gathered in the Imperial Room of the Fairmont Royal York Hotel last Thursday for RAW! The Great Toronto Tartare-Off a gala fundraiser for Grapes of Humanity, a philanthropic group currently raising money to build a high school in Basico, Guatemala. One-hundred-and-fifty tickets were sold at $125 per ticket and 95 cents of every dollar raised will be put toward the school. Wood travelled on his own dime and didn't even expense his ingredients. While other chefs and their sous-chefs did their prep work at their own restaurants before the event, Wood and his daughter Amelie spent hours chopping meat, peeling shallots and picking cilantro and parsley in the Royal York's kitchen. The menu at Thornton's features a tenderloin-based tartare but Wood picked up frozen Muskox meat an hour before heading to the Yellowknife airport "to try to bring some kind of Northern flair" to his offering. By the time they were done, the Woods had prepared 200 portions of a muskox-beef tenderloin tartare blend, flavoured with ground up Colorado chillies, smoked paprika, wasabi powder, shallots, capers and fresh cilantro and Italian parsley. At just eight years old, Amelie was the youngest, tiniest sous-chef and was quite a hit at the event, said her father. "I'm really proud of her," Wood said. "She's only eight years old and her contemporaries were hotshot sous-chefs Š She was handling her own with the elites of Toronto." Another highlight for Wood was getting to meet Rush frontman Geddy Lee, who was one of six judges at the gala. The winning tartare came from Chef Lorenzo Loseto of Toronto restaurant George, who was pronounced the King of Tartare. Loseto took first place with a tartare made of cobia a sweet, oily, white-fleshed fish topped with a stack of tiny chips made from fingerling potatoes. But Wood's personal favourite was the creation of Chef Patrick McMurray of restaurant Starfish, who chopped up chunks of inside round steak, and threw chunks of oysters in with the meat, allowing the salt from the oysters to marinate the steak. "It was fabulous," said Wood. "It's like you're chewing on really meaty oysters." As for the muskox-tenderloin tartare Wood served up, "For a lot of people we were their favourite so we did good," he said. But it was the overall experience Wood appreciated the most, sweetened by the fact that he got to share it with Amelie. "The whole thing really was fun and the whole thing we took away, I guess, was just meeting really nice people," he said. "Everybody kind of went out of their way because they heard we were coming from Yellowknife."
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