Walk into Assembly Chef's Hall — the hippest of Toronto food courts — and you’ll see a big sign at the end of Resto Boemo that reads: “The Boho Truffle Gnoc — The Gnocchi that Beat Bobby Flay.”
It’s good marketing bait for Food Network devotees. And Ivana Raca, the mischievous and prodigious chef who co-owns the stand, did indeed “slay the Flay,” as she puts it. She made her signature ricotta gnocchi with cream sauce and truffle while Flay made a tomato gnocchi with eggplant and crème fraîche.
“Bobby’s gnocchi was made with ricotta, but it was dense,” Raca says. “Mine was really light. There’s lots of egg yolk in there.”
It wasn’t Raca’s first fight against Flay. She’d earlier been on the show and lost by one point in “Battle Branzino.” The second time, she was invited back for a redemption episode.
She ended up on the show after receiving a phone call out of the blue from the Food Network. “They said ‘We hear you like battles’ and they’d heard I was a very good chef from Toronto.”
Fleeing a war zone
There’s no question Raca is a fighter. The war in her native former Yugoslavia started when she was seven years old and she, her mother and two older sisters soon fled Bosnia for Serbia where they stayed with her father’s family.
“For a month, we couldn’t really get ahold of my dad,” she says. “We weren’t sure he was going to get out. It was hard for my mom. We all thought we were on vacation and we’d be back in a few weeks. We didn’t think war was going to break out or last. It went on and on. It was really bad. I definitely didn’t have that regular upbringing most people do.”
That early experience made her a survivor and a ninja — always prepared for battle. “You come out from something that tragic and your childhood is stripped away from you,” she says. “I was nine when we came to Canada.”
The family had been well off in Yugoslavia. Dad was an engineer and mom was an accountant. They also owned a grocery store, an arcade and were on the verge of opening a bar and pizza place when war broke out.
When they made it to Canada, both parents found jobs right away, but Raca still says it was a “rude awakening” to leave the wealth they had in their homeland. “We had a brand-new house,” she says. “But a grenade and bomb hit the roof. Everything was stripped and it was sold for, like, $35,000. It’s pretty crazy.”
Cooking as a life-saver
Battling for survival in a war-torn country led to battling her way through school in a foreign land with a foreign language. In high school, she became a serious runner, but briefly lost the battle for speed in favour of heavy drugs. Her drug phase was short-lived though, thanks to co-op teacher Margaret Kennedy, who saw her struggling and tracked down Humber College culinary apprenticeship program for her.
“I have to find her number and thank her for saving my life,” Raca says without any hyperbole. “She chased me down the hall one day to tell me about this program that only 20 kids were accepted into. There was a scholarship and everything was paid for. I applied and got in. Cooking kind of saved my life.”
While completing the apprenticeship program, she was also able to complete Grade 13. She excelled in the program and scored a work placement at Mark McEwan’s first restaurant — the recently closed North 44.
“That’s where I started,” she says, noting that she was the first female in that kitchen. “I just grinded.” Soon, she was named saucier — again, the first female — and later sous-chef. On her 23rd birthday, she was the opening sous-chef for McEwan’s new Yorkville restaurant, “One.” By her 24th birthday, she was running the kitchen with 47 cooks in her charge. During that time, she also endured a film crew documenting their every move for the show The Heat with Mark McEwan.
“It was pretty intense,” she says. “That’s probably why I thrive [on TV]. Some people would just freeze, but I don’t.”
Top shows including Top Chef
In real life as on reality TV, she’s confident and clear about her talents. In addition to appearing on Beat Bobby Flay twice, she was a contestant last year on Top Chef Canada (the episodes aired in the spring of 2018) and she competed — and won — Chopped Canada.
Talking about her experience with Top Chef, she’s clearly disappointed to have been sent home in the third episode. Her old mentor, chief judge Mark McEwan, could not be accused of favouring her.
Asked if she’d return to the show if they had a “redemption” season, she says no, though she did return to that series, but failed to win another chance.
“It has nothing to do with cooking,” she says. “It focuses more on curve balls and ‘Can you make rainbow kimchi latte in 10 minutes?’ How unrealistic.”
She points to the “quick-fire challenge” in that last episode as an example. Asked to mash up two food trends, each chef drew a trendy ingredient — think matcha, kimchi, seaweed and acai — and a presentation style — think bite-sized, frozen, rainbow, raw, bowl.
Raca drew “seaweed” and “bowl.” That challenge didn’t send her home. What did, later in the same episode, was a dessert — not her strength, she admits, but she’d made a poorly received dessert in the previous episode and wanted to redeem herself. The judges found her flavours muddled and said the ingredients didn’t work together.
Raca admits she may not have been ready for a show that intense at that time. “I don’t think I should have done the show,” she says.
The opening of her Resto Boemo in Assembly Chef's Hall originally conflicted, but at the last minute they changed the opening date, allowing her to do the show.
“I found out Monday and two days later, we were taping,” she says. “You’re away for a month, you can’t be contacted by anybody. They take away your phone. Mentally, I wasn’t ready for it.”
Chopped Canada, meanwhile, is a rosier story. Indeed, it is responsible for what she’s doing now. After she won Chopped, former Canadian football wide receiver and TV host Brad Smith asked how they could work together. He liked her spunk and saw she was talented.
Because he didn’t know Raca, Smith called McEwan to find out more about her before the show was recorded. “Mark told Brad I was a pitbull and I get what I want, so he’d put his money on me.”
Smith and Raca co-own Resto Boemo and they’ll soon open another space in Assembly Hall. Chef’s Table by Resto Boemo will feature high-end grab-and-go food. “Keto, paleo, organic, freerange,” Raca lists off, as she flips through messages on her phone — time running short as the new place’s opening date rushes at her. “We’re doing gourmet high-end salads and proteins, glutenfree mac 'n' cheese, CBD water, organic juices.”
Giving back
Raca comes by her entrepreneurship honestly — her parents ran businesses in the former Yugoslavia — but she didn’t anticipate owning her own business.
“I’m all about teaching my craft and sharing,” she says, adding that she’s one of the original members of Open Kitchen. Called OKTO, it hosts a dining series that raises money for a scholarship at George Brown College, for which it provides financial support to two recipients who demonstrate “excellence, passion and dedication to the culinary industry.” “
We saw guy chefs out and about and we said ‘Why can’t women do this?’ It’s about supporting and getting to know each other,” she says.
Life before Resto Boemo
There were other ventures before Resto Boemo. After working for McEwan for 10 years, Raca quit and booked a one-way ticket to Australia. She travelled and worked at Palazzo Versace on the Gold Coast, under Paul Froggatt, a three-Michelin-star chef. When she returned to Toronto, she opened Raca Café & Bar at the age of 29. NOW magazine named it the No. 1 restaurant in Toronto in 2016, the same year it was named 88th of Canada’s 100 Best. She ran Raca for a while before selling it because it was small, with just 28 seats and she wanted bigger projects. She then went to work for Ufficio Restaurant. She’s now executive chef. She works at Resto Boemo every day, but looks after the menus at Ufficio and entrusts the kitchen to chef-de-cuisine Kyle Watson.
“They wanted someone who would treat it like it’s their own,” Raca says. “Someone who would take it seriously.”
Sitting outside Assembly Chef's Hall, Raca seems content with her current lot. She looks forward to opening her new food stand in this space, has her fine dining boxes checked by her input at Ufficio and has the ability to travel because Brad Smith takes over the Assembly Hall spots when her feet get itchy. She travels every August, for example, to Montenegro, where her parents own a house perched on the Mediterranean.
“I always ask myself why I don’t go for longer.” To the observer, the answer seems clear: Too many balls in the air.
Resto Boemo (Chef's Table) at Assembly Chef's Hall
111 Richmond St., W., Toronto, Ont.
assemblychefshall.com | 647.557.5993 | @restoboemo
Ufficio
1214 Dundas St., W., Toronto, Ont.
ufficiorestaurant.com | 416.535.8888 | @ufficiotoronto
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