26-04-2025
Freed: A restaurant is only as good as its recipe book
I went to my favourite Chinese restaurant recently, a simple place we've loved for 30 years.
We ordered our usual favourites, but in moments we realized nothing was the same. It was all bland and tasteless.
I asked a waiter if it was the chef's night off, but it turns out the chef was off for good, retired after decades. But he hadn't passed on or written down any of his recipes.
I don't know the story behind that, but others in Chinatown have told me that top Chinese chefs have become expensive because they can get good pay in Toronto and Vancouver.
Apparently, my place's recent new owner wasn't willing to pay for another first-class chef.
So I'm looking for a new Chinese spot, along with other longtime patrons I know. All because 30 years of great cooking was never recorded.
It turns out my restaurant's excellent food existed only in the mind of the chef, like an explorer who discovers an exotic land but neglects to leave any maps behind.
I thought of this again two weeks later when I stumbled into a late-night restaurant on Sherbrooke St. W.: a burger and kebab place called Crusty's.
The place is lavishly decorated in nostalgic technology: battered calculators, old cameras, dial phones, sewing machines and half an antique Ambassador car jutting from a wall.
Another wall had a striking massive painting of a New York night scene, maybe 25 feet long.
Curious, I asked the owner about it. His name is Fadi Dehni, and he'd come here from Lebanon five years earlier.
To my surprise, he wasn't crazy about the painting: he had once studied art and thought 'the perspective is off' on some figures. But he was crazy about cooking.
Fadi gave a monologue about his passion for recipes: how he adjusted and readjusted them, constantly seeking 'perfection.'
'Most importantly, every tiny recipe change I do or refine is handwritten down meticulously in the book, so anyone can duplicate it. I measure each gram, each grain of spice.
'This way every dish is always exactly the same,' he said emotionally. 'So no matter who makes it or when, it will taste precisely the same.'
'If something happens to me, my kids or someone else can still make it. It's all written down in the book, so it can live forever.'
Much of Fadi's precision comes from being trained in engineering in the U.S. He immigrated to Montreal in 2020 with plans to open a printing business as he had done in Lebanon, but his dreams were shattered by COVID.
Like many immigrants, he was forced to earn a living doing menial restaurant jobs, but he quickly rose to become manager, then later ran a large restaurant in the Laurentians.
Finally, he bought Crusty's, his Sherbrooke St. restaurant, and applied his scientific training to his cooking methods.
Yet even with all this written data, Fadi is forever refining his food formulas based on customer feedback, then recording each minute change.
'Do you notice there are no garbage cans in the entire restaurant,' he asked.
It's true, there isn't a trash can to be seen. Why?
He pointed to a pile of small, used plastic food baskets with leftover clients' crumbs in them.
'I look at them to see if people finish their meal and if not I may ask them why not — was there something wrong?'
For instance, not long ago, he noticed a basket where someone had left most of his marinated chicken dish, and Fadi rushed after him.
'What's wrong?' he said.
'Too salty,' he was told.
'I tasted the leftovers in his basket and, yes, someone in the kitchen had added salt to the premixed marinade, which already had the precise and perfect amount of salt. This cannot be!
'So I went into the kitchen and made the day's marinade all over again.'
As we talked, Fadi kept breaking away to talk to customers at other tables to see how they liked their meal.
He brought several additional mushrooms to a woman who felt there weren't quite enough in her burger — perhaps a change he will add to the next day's mushroom-burger recipe, then record in the 'book.'
'When people eat here,' he explained, 'I want them know they can always have the exact same experience.'
Talking to Fadi, it was hard not to think of my Chinese restaurant where the knowledge of decades has been lost in time, like some foodstuffs of my youth.
I used to love the black pumpernickel and rye bread at the St. Lawrence bakery, but since it closed years ago it's impossible to find their equivalent.
I fear the same fate for my favourite Hungarian csabai sausage shop, whose owner will probably be retiring soon, with no one prepared to replace him. I suspect the shop's unique recipe will disappear with him.
Unfortunately for me, Fadi doesn't make Chinese food (or Hungarian sausage), so I'll have to keep looking for a new Chinatown favourite.
If you have one, let me know. Then let's all make sure the chef is writing down his recipes.
