104 toronto life December 2018said I’d been a waiter and a creative dancer and, of course, that
piqued his interest, which led to, “Well, what kind of creative
dancer?” I had been involved in the Manitoba Theatre School,
performing Jesus Christ Superstar in churches. I imagined myself
doing Isadora Duncan at the St. Lawrence Centre, but he sug-
gested I take a job dancing at a restaurant called The Blackbird,
a kind of low-end Chippendales where the waiters wore next to
nothing and shook their money-makers. I declined. He told me
there was one other job, working uptown as a cook.
The restaurant was called Troy’s and it was on Marlborough
Avenue in Rosedale in a beautiful old home full of French-
Canadian art and antiques, owned by an amazing man named
Cecil Troy. I grew up in the white-bread world of the prairie
suburbs. Chili con carne and deep-fried wieners. I’d never gone
to cooking school. I’d never seen a live fish or a red bell pepper.
But Troy was self-taught and figured I could learn, too. He’d
hand me copies of Gourmet magazine covered in Post-Its and
say, “This is what you’re doing this week.” We did reductions
and demi-glaces, tournedos and spinach pasta. Green noodles.
Who knew? Truite au bleu, where we’d get a live trout, whack it
over the head, slit, gut and marinate it in vinegar, which turned
it blue, then poach and serve. Joanne Kates, the pre-eminent
critic of the day, thought Troy was a genius. As it turned out, I
was kind of a natural, too. I’d always wanted to be an artist of
some sort, and food gave me an outlet for creative expression.
Adrienne Clarkson, a CBC TV personality at the time, the
film critic Rex Reed, the opera and ballet crowd, they all ate at
Troy’s. There were two seatings a night, and it was always
packed. It was my first brush with money, and I was smitten.
Halfway through the evening, Troy would go downstairs and
bring up an apron full of beer and plow through it. I’d have a
beer with Troy once in a while, but booze wasn’t my thing. I had
come from the hippie culture of Winnipeg where we smoked
hash and pot. After we closed for the night, Troy would go down
to Greektown and party until four in the morning, drinking
and smashing plates.
I left after two years because I was making barely more than
a dollar an hour. Plus, there was always some drama between
Troy and his Hungarian boyfriend, and I got tired of it. But Troy
taught me so much. He was a madman in the best way. That was
my internship in the world of food.
I found work at Beggar’s Banquet, a vegetarian restaurant
with communal tables on Queen near John. That’s where I met
Andrew Milne-Allan, a brilliant chef from New Zealand and
probably one of Joanne Kates’s all-time favourite chefs. He went
on to start Trattoria Giancarlo on Clinton Street, and then Zuccaon Yonge. Andrew and I bought the restaurant for $12,000 then
stripped it down, got rid of the communal tables, re -
decorated and reopened under a new name. He loved all things
Italian and wanted to call the place Pappagallo, which means
Parrot. I didn’t think Toronto was ready for a name like that—
it didn’t exactly roll off the tongue—so we called it The Parrot.
He did the menu and I was kind of the sous chef, handling
brunch, soups and sauces.
Toronto had been a culinary desert. Very Presbyterian. Steak
houses and a few traditional French and Italian restaurants.
In the mid-’70s, there was a lot of action around Queen and
Spadina, Kensington Market, the Art Gallery of Ontario. The
punk movement was starting up, and waves of immigrants
were arriving and bringing their cuisines with them. Vietnam-
ese, Jamaican, Thai. I discovered lemongrass, Thai basil, exotic
spices. I came across an Indian restaurant near the Ontario
College of Art (now OCAD) called Babur. Their food was deli-
cious and inspired my most exotic dish, a Salmon Tandoori,
and I started playing with multiculti stuff, cherry-picking
flavours and mixing them together. I hung out with a lot of
Jamaican reggae musicians, like Messenjah, and they inspired
my Jump Up soup and jerk chicken. People were starting to
treat chefs as celebrities, and Jamie Kennedy, Michael Stadtlän-
der and I were at the epicentre of the new scene.
At The Parrot, we’d do Spanish, Moroccan, southern French,
northern Italian, Caribbean. But it was more than a place to eat.
We created our own entertainment. All of my staff were artists,
dancers, musicians. They were fabulous, wearing front- and
back-zipped Fiorucci leathers. We would throw openings for
painters and photographers on Queen West, and in exchange
they would give us a piece of art. Some of our female servers
were in a group called the Clichettes, who lip-synched as both
men and women. They’d do 1950s girl band stuff, with three-
foot–high wigs, and once did heavy-metal drag, including penises
attached with Velcro. When they finished the act, they ripped
the penises off and threw them into the audience. Our patrons
included Divine, Rough Trade, Gerald Franklin, who was our
Jean Paul Gaultier and dressed all the rock stars, photographer
George Whiteside, all the cultural “it” people. We attracted
people from Rosedale and Forest Hill who were daring enough
to leave their rich neighbourhoods and go down to scary Queen
Street and hang around with artists in PVC and leather. Even
George and Helen Gardiner, the fabulously wealthy philanthro-
pists behind the Gardiner Museum, came by.
I remember we hosted an artist who airbrushed homoerotic
paintings of eunuchs playing pool with the Queen’s crown“We were pulling in people who were daring enough
to leave their rich neighbourhoods
and go down to scary Queen Street to hang
with artists in PVC and leather”
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