UPDATE: The longer print version is not online. So here it is, along with some photos of the making of Grand Electric: THE BEST NEW RESTAURANT IN TORONTO.
Imagine a place with great food that plays hip-hop. And real hip-hop, Rick Ross and Ghostface, not the El Michael's jazz covers of Wu-Tang that some FOH manager has allowed the cooks to play in the dining room. Finally, there are now TWO restaurants in Toronto that I want to eat at on a regular basis.
My story about the Grand Electric opening, the version online now, is a truncated, newsy edit of a longer piece that'll be in print on Monday. (It's now been printed but it's not online). Here it is in its entirety, focusing more on the owners, Ian McGrenaghan and Colin Tooke, and how they don't like to wear pants at home.
Night 2: co-owner McGrenaghan slings drinks behind the bar.
Grand Electric Opens
Or
Colin Tooke and Ian McGrenaghan’s Thai-Mexican Fusian Resto-Lounge Pop-Up Bistro-Izakaya Supper Club Jaz Bar Rub’n Tug: Grande Electric
By Dr.-Prof. Corey Mintz
Business partners Colin Tooke and Ian McGrenaghan agree that living together was probably a great idea that should end as soon as possible.
“You wake up, have an idea, sit down in your underwear to hash it out,” explains McGrenaghan, co-owner of Grand Electric, the just-opened Parkdale restaurant with as much emphasis on Mexican food as bourbon. “A lot of our really good ones came in the wee hours of the morning, at 3 a.m., sitting in our underwear and drinking bourbon.”
The insistence that pants are some obstacle to the creative process is a distraction from the restaurateurs’ pedigrees. The two met at The Black Hoof, where Tooke was the chef de cuisine and McGrenaghan the front of house manager.
There is a magnifying glass on the careers of Hoof cooking alumni: Guy Rawlings earned critical praise at Brockton General; Guillermo Russo is the executive chef of Gordon Ramsay’s Montreal restaurant; Geoff Hopgood is working on opening his own restaurant; Grant van Gameren is now the executive chef of Enoteca Sociale.
But Tooke and McGrenaghan are the first graduates to open their own place.
This is what it looked like a month ago.
A year ago, Tooke was about to move Portland, Oregon, and become a beer maker. He’d already sublet his condo. But a staff shake-up put him in charge of the Hoof’s kitchen.
“And then we stupidly decided to move in with each other,” says McGrenaghan. “I actually highly recommend it, for the period of planning a restaurant. I mean, we’ve already discussed that once the restaurant’s up and running …”
“We’re getting married,” chimes in Tooke.
McGreneghan corrects him. “We’ve got to move out.”
The pair finishes many of each other’s sentences. They are less an old couple, or brothers, and more like college dorm mates who never seemed to have gone to bed last night.
McGrenaghan has the brazenness of Han Solo, while Tooke, like Chewbacca, towers above him, speaking a barely audible language that only his partner understands.
Their communication suggests a restaurant with front and back of house that might draw strength from the other, rather than bickering over status and money. It’s early days still, but they’d like to borrow the idea of London, England’s St. John, in having cooks spend a shift or two, per week, serving customers.
These ideas have been slowly coalescing over the past year.
And two months ago.
Except for a few bits, they did it all themselves.
Least fun reno job: removing cheese stickers from ceiling of kitchen.
One drunken night, the two began discussing what they liked or didn’t like about restaurants. One of their favourite Toronto spots is Guu, not so much for the food, but the infectious energy.
“It started off with the idea of opening a spot that we would want to go to,” explains McGrenaghan. “So a restaurant, kind of bar vibe, open late, cool brown liquor and reasonably priced food,” adding, “not like $20 pasta ‘reasonably priced’”.
Once he was in charge of the Hoof’s menu, Tooke introduced a couple of his Mexican dishes, pig’s head tacos and pig’s tail pozole.
“Ever since I’ve been cooking I’ve wanted to do food that people crave,” says the chef. “Not like ‘breaking the boundaries’ or ‘that’s something I’ve never seen before’. I wanted to do something that’s like crack. And at a price point that you can eat it again.”
He’d cooked many styles before starting to play with Mexican ingredients. “The techniques they use are so much different than traditional French: the way that they treat chilies; that they fry all their sauces in lard.”
Committed to the idea, Tooke left for Chicago, where he worked as a stagiare at Big Star, a raucous Mexican Joint. Back home, he spent his nights experimenting in the kitchen, waiting until after last call, for his partner to get home to taste his work.
If he fell asleep in front of his Tiger Woods golf video game, McGrenaghan would wake him, and they’d taste the day’s results of his “crack-lab”: tacos filled with braised beef cheek, almost candied by brown sugar and a beer-tinged demi-glace; a deep-fried puck of braised pig’s head and shoulder, mashed with tortillas and bitter orange juice; a salad latticed with buttermilk dressing and Mexican Coca-Cola gastrique (you read that right); pozole rojo served with a muerte salsa of pequin peppers.
“If you eat them straight,” Tooke warns to stir in only a small amount, “you’re going to ____ your pants.”
He couldn’t always wait up. “One night, I ate probably ten pounds of churros.”
15 bourbons to start. Crazy-excited to sample some of the NON-LCBO bourbons that McGrenaghan is importing.
Oh, they've got a sick, already built-out patio with a bbq, where they'll be grilling up corn in the summer.
The menu is peppered with small tweaks to well-known Mexican dishes.
“We’re not trying to stay super authentic,” says Tooke. “You’ll find similarities between Mexican and Southeast Asian cuisines: chili, cilantro, lime, sugar, garlic. I don’t want this to be this Thai-Mexican fusion restaurant. But, to throw some fish sauce in something, I have no problem with that.”
Keeping the kitchen open until midnight and having an extensive bourbon list (15 on the shelf, and more non-LCBO bottles — Georgia Moon, Old Fitzgerald, Van Winkle — on the way) are what they’d like to focus on. They’re hoping not be pigeonholed as a taqueria, the new scenester “it-spot” or a Black Hoof satellite.
“I find that so many people have this misguided assumption that restaurants are online fan-clubs or community centres,” says McGrenaghan. “We are restaurant workers. We’re serving you food and getting you drunk.”
Key lime in a cup.
Before.
After.
I'll see you all there. Obvs.
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