We Live for Brunch

Getting brunch advice in Toronto is easy — everyone seems to have a favourite hole-in-the-wall or hotspot they’re willing to queue hours for on Saturday morning. But perhaps, it’s best to take counsel from an expert. “I even have a pair of official brunch socks,” says Matt Basile, author of Brunch Life and co-owner of Fidel Gastro food truck and Lisa Marie restaurant.

“Brunch isn’t just a meal — it’s a way of life,” he writes in his second cookbook, Brunch Life, wholeheartedly devoted to the midday feast. The book, co-authored, styled and photographed by his partner in business and in life, Kyla Zanardi, is a veritable spread for the eyes, chock-full of recipes, including classics — eggs benedict and buttermilk pancakes — and more exotic fare, such as tandoori fried chicken with chickpea waffles and a brunch version of oysters Rockefeller. Lighter options include eggs cilbir and tuna poke bowls.

For Basile, breakfast is a meal, something you have to do in the morning when you wake up, but “not much thought goes into breakfast.” It’s about getting something in your body that’s quick, healthy and nutritious.

“Brunch is more culture-based and it’s not dependent on a time of day,” he says, "some people start their feasting at 10 a.m., others at 2 p.m. The formalities of dining are removed when it comes to brunch,” he adds. Case in point: “You want to crush a bacon doughnut and two mimosas and wear track pants? Sure, why not,” he writes.

But brunch hasn’t been a lifelong love affair for Basile, who grew up in an Italian family where brunch wasn’t really a thing and brunch culture was more akin to banquet-hall buffets and platters stocked high with smoked salmon and stale bagels.

It was during his mid-20s that Basile noticed a shift in late-morning dining. “The first place that spoke to me was The Stockyards,” a local spot on St. Clair near Christie Street. “I would sit at the bar and get fried chicken and waffles,” he recalls. It never mattered how long he waited or how long it took to finish, he adds — it was the best part of his day.

While attending McMaster University, Basile needed to find a full-time job. He picked up a position at a local restaurant and worked the breakfast shifts.

“It was the easiest thing in the world to do — as long as you could wake up in the morning,” he laughs. “Years later, I’m doing the brunch thing now, so maybe it was like a sign, we’ve come full-circle.”

Basile gained notoriety at Fidel Gastro, a pop-up sandwich shop known for its over-the-top decadent “extremo” sandwiches. But he took the culinary route only after a stint working in advertising, which he studied at Humber College. A self-taught chef who learned from his grandparents, Basile is now a brand — something his advertising background surely had something to do with. His food truck (lovingly nicknamed Priscilla) and flagship restaurant (Lisa Marie) have a cult-like following and Basile is in high demand for special events.

He recently helped launch June’s Eatery, a pop-up restaurant where the chefs were all HIV-positive to raise awareness about HIV/AIDS and the stigma that still exists around living with the disease. And if that wasn’t enough, he’s also the star of Rebel Without a Kitchen, a show about street food around North America.

Basile admits, he rarely has weekends off and with everything on his plate, it’s hard to believe he found time to write a cookbook, let alone two. “I get super bored of things super quickly if I don’t have a lot of things on the go,” he explains. But he gives a lot of credit to his “amazing team.”

“It does take a village, and it’s definitely not the case of doing it alone,” Basile says. “The first [book] was really tough, we didn’t think we were going to do another one.”

That book, Street Food Diaries, was a collection of street food recipes verging on the extreme: peanut butter cookie fish and chips sandwiches, pad thai fries and tempura-fried coney island dawg are just some of the dishes featured.

The process of creating Brunch Life, which truly is a labour of love, took two years. Starting in 2016, the team developed, wrote and shot recipes. The publisher released it in late 2018. “We had a far more structured game plan,” Basile says about the process the second time around. With the help of Zanardi and Houston Mousner, Basile set a clear schedule to develop, test and write the recipes.

“As I was developing the recipes, I would say everything out loud that I was doing… then I would go back, re-read it, try to re-create it again and then make any edits that I needed,” he says.

“Then the third time going through it, I would interject with personality.” And for anyone who has read his books or met the man in person — you quickly learn that personality is a big part of Basile’s charm.

Fidel Gastro | Lisa Marie
638 Queen St. W., Toronto, Ont.
fidelgastros.com| 647.748.6822