Bear Restaurant wins Best New Restaurant in Best of Food 2009

[Editor’s note: This story is one of a package of three of Andy Murdoch’s articles selected for Honourable Mention in the Food Writing category of the Association of Alternative Newsweekies’ 2010 awards. See all three here.]

3:30pm An hour and a half before Halifax’s Best New
Restaurant opens, server Sarah Guthman walks in. She and server Paul
Driscoll are eating strawberries from a Tim Hortons cup and checking
bookings. Tonight looks slow, with just 24 reservations.

The kitchen is bright and brash. Lupe Fiasco’s cool beats pound out
loudly from the kitchen. Shiny new steel gleams under the lights. The
KitchenAid whirrs, the stove is crammed with roiling pots and dishes
pile up in the pit.

Chef Ray Bear is out, but he’s got his young guns digging into their
work.

On point at the sushi station is Zaque Johnsen. Johnsen trained at
the only sushi bar on the island of Saint John in the US Virgin
Islands. He’s laid-back, with high-end influences, like Morimoto and
Nobu. Johnsen began his day making rice. Now, he’s pulling meat from a
tray of king crab.

Next to him on the cold-food station is the new kid, Aaron Allen, a
fresh-faced 19-year-old on loan from the Nova Scotia Culinary College.
He’s cutting up beets for salads, then he’ll move onto slicing scallops
for ceviche and keeping the Malpeque oysters on fresh ice.

Adam Todd, an apprentice under Bear, picks through a tray of lamb
short ribs that will go into ravioli for tonight. “I do the vegetable
and the starch area. So I work on the main-course stuff.”

Todd works to the right of chef Bear. He’s kind of a “Sarge” type
figure, with a pretty good kitchen radar despite being just ripe. Todd
finished culinary school at NSCC last year and started at Bear in
January. He will become a full-fledged chef in a year and a half: Only
3,000 more hours to go.

4:00pm Pastry chef Julia Mahoney stirs a French butter cream
at the stove. She’s only been out of school for a year. She worked as a
dishwasher at Gio under Ray Bear. She takes the hot mixture off the
stove, pours it into the KitchenAid mixer in the corner, then adds
butter. You don’t want to know how much butter. She’s got bread rolls
proofing and tea biscuits in the oven.

“We don’t have a [bread] mixer. They are all made here, by hand, by
me,” she says, proudly. “It’s my 13th straight shift without a day
off,” she adds, moving a blob of melted chocolate around on a slab of
marble to cool it off.

Allen and Todd do dishes. Johnsen makes hollandaise sauce. Servers
Driscoll and Guthman have swept, set tables and check the bar. They
head to the change room as chef Ray Bear walks in.

5:00pm Ray Bear’s Saturday went like this: Shopping at the
Farmers’ Market; back to the kitchen to start stocks; out to Pete’s
Frootique in Bedford to set up a cook to demo his line of barbeque
sauces—recently picked up by the White House, as in Barack Obama’s
new home—then back to brine meat; out to shop; back to prep; out to
Bedford to reel his cook in; open the kitchen and out to shop
again.

5:15pm The lights in the kitchen go down. Lupe Fiasco stops
playing and the house music starts. The restaurant opens, but no
customers have arrived. Bear moves to his station and looks at what’s
on the stove. Todd gives him a report: lamb stock, more lamb stock,
beef stock.

Everyone calls him Chef. Wait staff don’t talk to cooks, they talk
to Chef. Everything goes through Chef. Bear tastes some short rib,
tells Todd to salt it. Mahoney removes chocolate shells from a mould,
banging them on the counter. Bear tells her to keep it down.

5:30pm A trick Bear learned from a Jamaican cook at Canoe in
Toronto: He ties string to the brass rail of the oven. Then, he takes
the lamb racks he’s cut French-style, exposing the rib bones. He ties
the other end of the string to the base of the exposed rib and pulls it
as if he were starting a lawn mower. The bone is clean and ready to
serve.

6:00pm The first customers arrive. A table of two. Allen
finishes his pork dumplings. Johnsen rolls out long sheets of pasta for
ravioli.

6:10pm The amuse bouche is decided on the spot. “We’re going
to do the octopus ham,” Bear says. This is one of many tiny confections
he keeps on hand for his tasting menus. “We take an octopus,” Bear
says, “brine it, smoke it and simmer it in canola oil for four hours
and it comes out tasting like ham.”

The octopus is paired with papaya salsa, made of pickled red onion,
cucumber and papaya. Bear chops it up quickly as Allen watches. “Do two
rounds of the pepper mill,” Bear says to Allen and walks off to trim
the striploin steaks for the night.

6:20pm The first order comes in: calamari for two, striploin,
confit duck. As Bear cleans the beef he says, despite his reputation
for creating skilled molecular dishes, “People don’t want to come in
here and eat a fucked up steak. It needs to get left alone. Salt and
pepper and on the grill.”

That said, Bear has admitted to frequent urges to go over the top.
He has a mad professor-style plan to serve a whole steak in tempura
batter. Many ideas like this are in their developmental phase: scallops
stitched into tenderloins; blueberry coconuts, octopus hams. Beside
him, Todd pours a bottle of Dr. Pepper into a pan to reduce. One bottle
gives a quarter cup of syrupy reduction, infused with smoke, for the
duck.

6:30pm The first appetizer is plated. Todd pulls a large lamp
a few inches above the plate, sitting like a patient on an operating
table. Red pepper sauce is applied to the plate. Calamari goes on.
Lemon is squeezed. Micro greens top it off. Every action is formal,
timed, aspiring to science, but at this time of day, a kitchen is less
a laboratory than it is a playing field. The plate leaves; a play is
executed.

Cooking straddles science and art the way sport does. It’s training
and practice and teamwork. The restaurant runs on a skeleton rookie
crew. It’s a big gamble for Bear because it means ultimately, at crunch
time, he has one person to rely on: himself. All Bear has are his
skills, some young minds and collective sweat equity. All night long,
Bear plays coach and quarterback, keeping a close eye on his
rookies.

“Dragon roll is two, ravioli is one, envy is three and the barbeque
is four,” Bear tells his waiters.

Each number is a diner. As soon as they leave, Bear turns to Todd,
“Two fishes, strip and a lamb.” Work starts on the entrees.

When it gets busy there’s a flow to the kitchen. The amuse bouches
are started. Then the appetizers by Johnsen or Allen up front. Then the
mains, assembled by Bear and Todd in back. Finally, it moves over to
Mahoney against the wall.

“There’s a method to each dish,” Todd says. “You have to be
anticipating what will have to be done.”

Bear paces 15 minutes to eat appetizers; half an hour for mains.
Desserts only take 10 minutes. You could eat here in an hour, Bear
says, but a meal should take two hours, ideally.

Allen dresses the amuses. Johnsen gently places a tempura shrimp in
the fryer, flicking batter on the oil’s surface with his fingers. Todd
blanches edamame, assembles lobster risotto with butter and cheese,
puts vegetables into six-inch saucepans. A breaded, deep-fried sweet
potato pavé is put into an oven.

Bear takes a steak’s temp with a long pin. He sticks it in, feels
the top of the steak, the sides. Then he takes the pin out and puts it
to his wrist. “That’s gonna feel a little different once it’s rested,”
he says.

7:40pm One can feel the evening peaking now. The dining room
is half full, but from within the open kitchen, the relationship
between diner and cook feels like one of audience and performer. You
vaguely hear them, you can see them, too, but they are more sensation
than reality. The pace ratchets up. Heat lamps sway, casting a
shipboard light. More orders come in.

“Two amuses, followed by an envy, calamari, lamb and a duck.” Each
station repeats aloud their part of the order as Bear calls it. “Two
amuses, barbeque split, duck and a halibut. Gonna sell a lot of duck
tonight.”

“Duck, duck. You got more legs kickin’?” Todd asks.

The stove is full of pans. As piles of sushi and calamari go out to
tables, Bear announces, “We’re gonna start our pick up on table three
in about four minutes.”

The halibut is flipped. Three pieces of duck, four pieces of lamb
and one striploin are taken out of the oven or from a spitting frying
pan, ready to plate.

8:15pm One minute from plating, Bear calls.

Somehow their hands manage to work around one other at great speeds
without getting tangled. Todd plates the risotto, dashes fennel puree
across the side, Bear crumbles on a dry bacon vinaigrette reduction,
Todd shakes on edamame. Two halibut come out of a pan onto the plate.
Done. Next plate. Rack of lamb is distanced from the sous vide leg. Sweet potato pavé slides out of the oven, plated by
Todd. Done. Todd applies parsnip puree then Bear pushes a rake across
it. Bear pours veal jus into the parsnip furrows as Todd leans grilled
green scallions on roasted shallots. A line of Dr. Pepper squirts on
the side. Duck legs balance on duck spring rolls and Bear puts a
lean-to of sizzling foie gras as the last piece in a Jenga stack of
duck. Done.

Slam! Heat lamps are flipped off and fly back up to the ceiling.
Play moves to Guthman and Driscoll out the door.

8:30pm Bear leaves the kitchen to do a walkabout. Allen’s
wife sits in front of him at the bar. She’s all dressed up. It’s a
sweet picture, so the crew teases them. The kitchen takes a few
breaths. There is no dishwasher. No one minds doing them. Mahoney did
them earlier and Johnsen does them now with a bored efficiency.

“The best cooks come from Sackville,” Bear jokes. Yes, he’s from
Sackville.

The greatest underlying principle in the autocratic society of the
kitchen is that it is a meritocracy. More than any other profession,
even the lowest caste members can work their way to the top.

Chefs are Napoleon and Horatio Alger wrapped up in one. Todd worked
at Boston Pizza. Mahoney was at the Superstore bakery. Allen works at a
hospital. And Bear once worked at Red Lobster.

During the lulls of the evening, Bear tells me his story. He moved
to Toronto when he was 15, using his sister’s social insurance number
to work in a Red Lobster. “I was fighting all the time. My parents had
enough of me. Basically, I knew exactly what I wanted to do and I
wasn’t doing anything in school so I just got up and went.”

After a couple years drifting, he came back east. “I remember my
interview with Unni at Scanway. She looked at me and she said, ‘Have
you ever been in trouble with the law?’ and I put my head down and I
told her a lie and I said, ‘Nah.’ She knew what the truth was, but she
hired me and took me on and kept me out of trouble. Very strict. Long,
long hours. Ninety-hour weeks back to back, but right on the other side
of that table was Unni. I never questioned it.”

It was his first real professional job. He worked for $4.50 an hour,
living in a Fairview roach motel dreaming of $8.50 an hour. Bear spent
the next 10 years travelling, networking his way into jobs at big name
kitchens: August in New Orleans; Radius in Boston; Alinea in Chicago;
Nobu in Miami.

Then there was Gio. “One year, we made 20 percent profit at the
Prince George. That is almost unheard of,” Bear told me. He took a 50
percent pay cut to start this restaurant. He claims a line cook at the
Westin makes more than him now.

Bear is full of hungry cooks. Foremost among them is chef Ray Bear.
His staff at Gio were paid well. Not here. He can’t afford to. That’s
why he’s hires young guns. It’s a mutually beneficial enterprise: He
gives them chops, they give him time.

“They know, if they stay a year with me, the amount of knowledge
they’re going to learn, anyone in this city will hire them after year
with me. It’s worth it.”

9:00pm Chef looks over Mahoney’s shoulder as she prepares
desserts. The guys have to prepare four boxes of calamari for a
buttermilk marinade. They take the long, needle-like pen—basically
the spine—out with the guts and chop. The cleanup begins and prep for
next week is underway. On a night like this, they’ll be all ready to go
home when the kitchen closes at 11pm.

10:00pm Driscoll was given a ticket to a concert as a tip.
“Guess I did my job right tonight,” he says smiling. He bugs out as
fast as he can.

Ray Bear, winner of Best New Restaurant, shows all the stress,
bravado and defiance involved in trying to nurture a high-end kitchen
through its first year during a recession.

That’s a challenge in a city where high-end is a niche market. “I
was in New York talking to this guy from Vancouver and he was laughing
at Halifax. I said, ‘Bullshit, you wait and see. I am going to do it in
Halifax.'”

“It” refers to a world-class restaurant. He admits he’s not there
yet. His staff aren’t there yet. Hell, maybe the city isn’t there yet,
but he’s unfazed.

10:15pm A late table arrives. Bear calls out their order and
slaps some meat on the grill. The big kitchen seems empty, but Ray
Bear’s invested in the future. What else can new kids on the block do,
but hope?

Andy Murdoch is food editor at the coast. He once
made his own haggis, with surprisingly edible results.

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This article appears in May 21-27, 2009.