A couple of weeks ago the front page of the Style section of the Globe and Mail featured a large photo of Canadian chefs David Hawksworth of West Restaurant in Vancouver, and Susur Lee, of Susur’s, in Toronto. Standing back to back, each with a kitchen utensil in hand, they looked as if they were ready to slice and dice each other into submission. The headline read, ‘Food Fight: East meets West when two top chefs take off the gloves.” Your reporter was Alexandra Gill, and the rest of the headline promised a report gathered as ‘they battle it out’.
This was NOT a battle, and the promised article turned out to be mostly a comparison of Vancouver and Toronto restaurants, with only passing mentions of the menu the two chefs delivered to their fans. I wish I could have been witness to the denouement, but while the chefs were ‘duking’ it out, I was teaching my freelance travel writing course at UBC.
The day before the dinner, though, I was granted access to the kitchens at West as Hawksworth and Lee prepped for the 6-course plus amuse plus dessert meal. It turns out this meeting was a year in the making. Hawksworth had heard good things about Lee, and thought it would be fun to have him come out. The two had never met before, and Hawksworth’s wife Annabel, who also does publicity for West, admitted she was a little nervous about how the two might hit it off. Her fears were dispelled, however, from moment one, especially when the two toured Chinatown and were like the proverbial ‘kids in the candy store’.
The two have quite different personalities. In his kitchens, Hawksworth is quiet, calm and assured, the epitome of professionalism. Lee is the opposite. Irreverent, cursing and a joke-cracker, he went about his work with the air of someone who knows how to have a good time. Both the prep kitchen and the main service kitchen at West were jammed with sous-chefs dancing their way through preparations for dinner that night, as well as the extravaganza to come the following night.
I asked each of them about chefs in each other’s kitchens, but it didn’t seem to faze them. Hawksworth says you want to be careful about whom you invite, but Susur’s reputation left no worries about that, and Susur says while it’s great to be invited, working in a strange kitchen is always an issue for a chef to work around, although bringing his top sous-chef with him helped avoid any problems. While I was there he was quickly mixing together what seemed like a large amount of wasabi for a mousse, which he then piped into tiny, perfect mountains on a tray to set for use the next day. Meanwhile, Hawksworth watched a couple of his chefs struggle with one of his dishes, a squab paired with foie gras, wrapped in a leaf of savoy cabbage. They were figuring out how to properly wrap the meat in the cabbage, which would then be wrapped in plastic and steamed in a contraption that would cook everything at the same rate. Apparently this dish was the hit of the evening. Hawksworth told me it was one he had come up with years ago…one that he keeps in his head, along with everything else he’s learned about cooking over the years.
My big regret was not being able to attend the dinner to see how it all worked out. But for a few pics of the prep for ‘East meets West’, click here. To taste the food of David Hawksworth, I guess you’ll have to get to West, and for Susur, add the cost of a plane ticket to Toronto. Susur, 601 King St. West 416-603-2205.
If any of you out there was at the dinner, I’d love to read your comments, which you can post at the bottom of this page.
