Toronto Life Magazine, August 1998
MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING
by James Chatto
My wife and I almost moved to Stratford. On a long - anticipated day in May, seven years ago, we waited outside the house we intended to buy - a huge detached Victorian on one of the broad, silent avenues near the Festival Theatre. Tall trees sighed in the breeze; the sun was warm on the shade-dappled sidewalk. While the realtors murmured by their cars, the woman who owned the property stood in her garden, knee-deep in tulips, looking slowly around her, inhaling the morning. "I'm sorry," she said at last, "but I don't want to sell after all." We never saw another house so perfect. So now we experience Stratford like the half-million other tourists who make the annual pilgrimage, driving down a couple of times each summer for a play and dinner.
This year, we went back in springtime, drawn by the precociously beautiful weather, and found the town at its most seductive. The festival season had not yet begun; the sunlit streets were serenly underpopulated. Half the shops and all the major restaurants were still in hibernation. In the past, we would have had little choice but to eat at a pub or to head to Keystone Alley for fish and chips. Not anymore. Stratford's food scene has burgeoned in the past twelve months. A sudden proliferation of cafÎs, bistros, restaurants and cooking schools has turned the town into a foodie mecca, and the responsibility lies largley with the Stratford Chefs School....
Cooking classes are the other side of Stratford's emerging food-consciousness. In the weeks beween the end of the Stratford Chefs School and Rundles' opening at the end of May, Neil Baxter runs his own private cooking classes out of the restaurant. It's that magical time of the year in Stratford, and the dozen or so students who check in for each hands-on weekend are almost all repeats, among them many Toronto Foodies. Bryan Steele offers similar classes at the Old Prune, but the recent press has all been clustered around a charming old B&B on Brunswick Street called Chez Soleil. Its owner, Liz Mountain, is a Stratford native who cooked professionally at the Windsor Arms, the Church and Keystone Alley (among other kitchens). Janet Sinclair is an interior designer who rented a room there when she enrolled at the Stratford Chefs School in 1993. "I'd been living and working in New York," remembers Sinclair. "I woke up my first morning here and heard the clip-clop of horses and the clink of milk bottles being delivered, and thought, I'm home!"
When Sinclair graduated, she and Mountain decided to open their own cooking school. Locals take courses at Chez Soleil Cooking School year - round, while summer weekends are busy with a class of six, who stay at the B&B. The subjects taught are agreed upon in advance, and classes are as enjoyable as they are inspiring. Mountain leads forest tours in search of wild Canadiana: Sinclair, who also teaches restaurant design at SCS, has a knack for dissolving inhibitions. One night, students were told to arrive disguised as their favourite appetizer. The man in black suit and black cape explained he was burnt puff pastry.
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