Food & Drink
Stuart's Kitchen
MICK LOWE
Winter 2008 |
But tragedy marred his young life. Both his parents died when he was just 11. After enlisting in South Africa’s Permanent Military Force at the tender age of 16, the future chef opted to oppose his country’s military and racial policy by “voting with his feet.” He deserted the South African military and moved to London, England, the country of his father’s birth. But immigration difficulties dogged him, and another move, this time to Israel, followed.
After several years working—most of the time in the kitchen—and living as a kibbutzim, Raymond was accepted as a student at Israel’s Central Cooking School. Despite an almost total lack of fluency in two of the school’s three languages of instruction—Hebrew and French—the future head chef finished at the top of his class. After graduation, the newly minted Master Kosher Chef quickly found employment in his first commercial kitchen, at the Dan Hotel chain’s Dan Accadia resort in Herzliya, a Mediterranean beach town outside Tel Aviv.
But the azure Mediterranean shore was not for Stuart Raymond. He had first visited Toronto after becoming friends with several Canadians during his stint on the kibbutz.
“I fell in love with what I saw. There was tons of snow; I had never seen that before.”
But it was the era of struggle against apartheid, and Raymond’s resolution to pull up stakes yet again was thwarted by Canadian immigration authorities that looked askance at his South African citizenship. Fortunately his education and experience were about to stand the aspiring young Canadian in good stead: in the early 1980s professional chefs were among the top 10 most needed occupations in Canada.
Raymond realized his dream of trading sand for snow when he finally immigrated to Toronto. Over the next few years, Raymond perfected his craft in some of Toronto’s most legendary kitchens. The transition from hotel to restaurant chef was felicitous: Raymond’s first cooking job in Toronto was at Yorkville’s Le Rendezvous on Prince Arthur Ave., where he learned haute cuisine from a former head chef at Montreal’s Sheraton Hotel.
Next he understudied with Chef Dante Rota, a specialist in Italian cookery, at the Windsor Arms Hotel’s famed Three Small Rooms.
Another mentor was Fernand Pondrette, the former deputy head chef at the Royal York. In quick succession, Raymond worked his way through the kitchens of some of Toronto’s best-known restaurants, including The Carlyle, Remy’s, and The Belair Cafe.
Within a few years Raymond advanced from chef de partie in all stations to sous to head chef. “It only took me a little while, because I was very ambitious,” he recalls.
It wasn’t long before Raymond was helping to pioneer new developments in the Toronto restaurant scene. He returned for a second stint at the Windsor Arms, this time to help at Noodles “the first real classic Italian restaurant in Canada,” learning Italian on the job at the same time. Then he was asked to head the opening of the Daily Planet at Yonge and Eglington, which boasted the largest open kitchen in the annals of Canadian cookery.
It was the mid-1980s, and Raymond was on a roll. “I was the youngest head chef in the city, with the biggest boat to sail. It was very stressful.”
The Daily Planet was a seminal experience for Raymond. The open kitchen would become one of his trademarks, and the Planet’s California cuisine provided another valuable apprenticeship.
The peripatetic ways of a senior chef, and the burgeoning interest in California-style cooking continued when Raymond founded yet another upscale Toronto-area eatery, Darling’s of North York. It wasn’t long before Raymond teamed up with another South African expatriate restaurateur, Peter Oliver, to become a full-blown cuisinier developing his own recipes, and his own style of cooking, at the original Oliver’s Restaurant.
Over the next few years, Raymond would be associated with the Four Seasons chain, and with a succession of Toronto restaurants, including P. J. Melon’s, the Trillium Restaurant, Papa’s Grill, and the Elmwood Spa. But in the early 1990s the hard-driving big city head chef found his life taking an unexpected—and abrupt—detour.
After spending a decade living and working in the Toronto area, Stuart Raymond was typical of most Torontonians: “I’d never been past the 401, right?” But all that changed when he met a Sudbury girl, Colleen Shea, who introduced him to Northern Ontario.
“She took me to the family camp on Manitoulin, and I just fell in love with the north. You know why I love Sudbury? The rocks, the water. I love the outdoors.”
A quick check with an executive headhunter for head chefs revealed that a Sudbury restaurant, Bryston’s, was seeking a new head chef. Raymond hired on, and helped Copper Cliff-based Bryston’s expand into a second location in the old Cedar Hut, on Barrydowne Rd. He introduced Sudbury’s first wood-burning grill, another Raymond signature, into the Cedar Hut location, before Bryston’s, in that incarnation, at least, went dark in 1997.
But Raymond, in the meantime, had become a born-again Sudburian, not to mention the father of an infant son whom both he and Colleen wanted to raise in the north.
“When all the rain and dust had settled,” Raymond recalls, “I decided the only way to remain in Sudbury was to open my own restaurant.” And so one of Sudbury’s most enduring dining experiences, Simon’s Café and Deli, was born. The restaurant is named after his son, who is now 14.
Right from its inception Simon’s was unique, not only for Sudbury, but in all of Canada. For starters, it may be the only restaurant in the country with virtually no signage, interior or exterior, to announce its presence. Raymond’s success is based exclusively on word-of-mouth. And on the cuisine, of course.
Then there is its location in the Travelway Inn on the southwest corner of Paris St. and Ramsey Lake Rd. With its floor-to-ceiling plate glass windows overlooking Lilly Creek and Science North and the rocky granite ribs of Northern Ontario visible, even in winter, just inches from the tables, Simon’s affords a view few restaurants anywhere can match. It is Sudbury in the raw.
In a business where two years in one location and under a single flag and head chef is a lifetime, Simon’s, now entering its 11th year, has long since outlived almost all of its competition. The café’s original 50-seat capacity was soon expanded to 60 places, and then to the 80 settings available today. The restaurant employs a staff of 24, most of whom appear to be in constant motion.
“I have the same energy as a 20-storey hotel in this little kitchen,” Raymond says proudly.
Simon’s is the legacy of a lifetime spent cooking on three continents, with the quirks, foibles and preferences picked up along the way. From his lopsided grin to the shock of unruly hair jammed under a baseball cap to the lean, kinetic energy he seems to embody, Raymond’s café is living proof of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s famous dictum that “an institution is but the lengthened shadow of one man.”
Simon’s open kitchen, where patrons can hear, and often see, their food being prepared is a Stuart Raymond trademark. So, too, the wood-flavoured grill that is, arguably, Raymond’s favourite culinary tool. (At one time Simon’s imported 3,000 pounds of mesquite wood chips each month from Hollis, Oklahoma; Raymond has since found a Canadian supplier.)
And mesquite is just one of the details Raymond has sourced in his relentless pursuit of culinary perfection.
“I only cook with the best,” he says bluntly. “No mediocre ingredients. I have buyers all over the world—New Zealand, Australia, New York, Vancouver.”
Another Simon’s trademark is the huge loaf of braided Italian bread arrayed in front of the kitchen. A fresh loaf is trucked up from Molisanna’s Bakery in Toronto every other day.
Besides providing diners with a unique conversation piece, not to mention their daily bread, any unused portions of the loaf have a myriad of other uses: as bruschetta, croutons, and coatings.
A new menu was introduced this fall. Dinner entrees include goat curry, a vegetarian curry, and fresh filet of Atlantic salmon along with menu all-stars such as certified Angus beef rib steak, pork back ribs, pork tenderloin with black tiger shrimp, and veal scaloppini.
“Look, if you don’t change, adapt, and grow, boredom sets in, with your guests and your staff, and then you have a problem,” says Raymond.
What does the future hold for one of Greater Sudbury’s most enduring eateries? This fall Raymond will introduce a live cooking program on Saturday afternoons that can be viewed from Simon’s website. People will also be able to download and watch previous programs at their leisure.
And in the new year, “Watch for Simon’s By Night in our new home,” says Raymond.
