Dandelion butter and sweet fern ice cream are dishes served at Montgomery’s that inspire deep thoughts. The restaurant, known for its steadfast commitment to local ingredients, offers you the very basics from, sourdough and cured Berkshire ham as starters, to aged duck with cayenne yogurt and trout with spent wine vinegar and fermented leeks as your main course. But what all the dishes have in common is a focus on ultra-local ingredients. It raises the question: Have we placed too much value on specialized products from far-flung places? Perhaps, the most extraordinary food might be right under our noses, in our backyard or on the side of the road.
Kim Montgomery and Guy Rawlings are the owners of Montgomery’s Restaurant on Queen Street West in Toronto. These restaurateurs have strong ideals that push the boundaries of what food says about our choices as consumers. A meal at Montgomery’s easily pleases the senses, but there’s an underlying statement in the ingredients that Rawlings selects as the chef.
Montgomery’s arrived on the scene in 2016 with a full-steamahead approach that championed local ingredients. In previous chef gigs, such as at the now-closed Brockton General, Rawlings had a principled approach to respecting his ingredients; he ordered from small producers and did much of his own butchering. From the very beginning, Montgomery’s only used Canadian sources for its meat, seafood and produce.
But in 2018, the couple's commitment to local and seasonal eating took another step. The restaurant stopped using all imported ingredients, except coffee. You won’t find a drop of olive oil in the place, but you will discover house-fermented vinegars, smoked mustard, aged duck, oyster leaves, cold water shrimp and black walnut financiers. The list of exotic-sounding ingredients goes on and on, but not one is foreign to Canada.
At home, the Rawlings-Montgomery family isn’t as strict about eating local (you might find bananas in their fruit bowl and olive oil in the pantry), but they are acutely aware of how the choices they make in their kitchen impact the world and the future of their three children.
Stepping back and taking stock of what they eat is second nature to Montgomery and Rawlings, a principle they hope to pass down to their children aged six, four and four-months-old.
When it comes to kids, talking about sustainable eating is all about the basics.
“We talk about the seasons, and when foods grow and when they are ready for harvest… We talk about asparagus season, and peas being a springtime vegetable, and how they are a treat for that one time a year,” Montgomery explains.
“We load up on Ontario-grown peaches or berries when they are in season and eat them until we burst. We talk to them about how watermelons are ready to harvest only at a specific time of year, so that’s when we should buy them,” she goes on.
“The kids have gotten used to hearing us say ‘that’s not grown in Canada, let’s look for an apple that grew in Ontario!’”
Rawlings is also troubled by food waste. “Wants and needs are really out of balance in our society. When you live in a big city, you become detached from the reality of these food systems,” he says.
Food waste is reaching an astonishing degree in Canada. Second Harvest, the country’s largest food-rescue charity estimates that as much as 58 per cent of food grown or raised ends up in the compost pile, or worse, the garbage. Reasons range from over-buying habits by consumers, producers who dispose of food because of cancelled orders and grocers who discard items nearing their best-before date.
“We talk about food waste,” Montgomery says about the conversations she and Rawlings has with their children. “But instead of preaching or lecturing to them… we just try to get them involved in our decision-making.”
And in homelife, that decision-making means one thing for Rawlings: “Cook at home.”
“Cook from scratch and find a way to use everything. And don’t be picky; it’s OK if something has a blemish or a bug ate a hole in the leaf and not everything is tender. You may have to use your teeth and chew! Don’t just throw it in the bin because it’s not the 'best' part. Those parts make the 'best' part even better,” he says.
Another vital decision-making tool takes shape in the couple’s garden. They not only have one, but two plots to tend — one at home and one at the restaurant.
At Montgomery’s, diners will often dine on food grown right above their heads, originating in the restaurant’s rooftop garden.
“We grow things that are uncommon, hard to get a reliable source for or things to dry and stock our pantry of flavours,” Rawlings explains. “We always grow sorrel, there aren’t many regular or reasonable sources of it, which is silly. Since we don’t buy spices that aren’t from here, we will grow a couple favourites, like fennel seed that we use in a salami,” he says.
They also grow edible flowers and are always trying different crops. This year, those include celtuce (also called stem lettuce), a new variety of cucumber called itachi and shungiku (an edible chrysanthemum), which has become a restaurant favourite.
“It’s been bred into us,” Montgomery says about the couple’s planting bug. “Our parents on both sides and our grandparents have been avid growers,” she goes on, adding that it’s something they hope to pass on to their kids.
“We really believe in the importance of growing your own food, showing and involving our children in the act of growing edible plants,” she says. Plus, kids always have more fun with some “mucking about in the dirt.”
Growing food themselves helps curb waste, but there’s an emotional part to the process, adds Rawlings. “If you grow the plant, you respect it more. You can conceptualize and experience the effort it takes to produce food,” he says. “Being re-attached to that process will create empathy.”
It goes without saying that running a restaurant is a lot of work — and a huge time investment. As the chef and sommelier, Rawlings is at the restaurant often long past closing time. Montgomery does a lot of the day-to-day running around to keep the restaurant running smoothly. But one thing remains at the top of their todo list: Making a genuine effort to sit down together and enjoy a homemade family meal as often as possible.
The juggle between family life and restaurateur life is just that — an unpredictable juggling act, which the couple admits can be tough.
“There are times that definitely make our minds explode, but I can say it’s been a blessing for me to have the kids while juggling the stress of running the restaurant, because no matter what issue is happening at Montgomery’s, I know I’ll have to push them aside completely, and be there, and focus on my kiddos,” Montgomery says. “To me, the restaurant isn’t forever, but my kids are.”
“We lovingly reinforce to the kids that nothing beats having a well-balanced, nutritious home-cooked meal, made with extra TLC,” Montgomery says. “And even if the kids don’t totally understand or believe how important it is to us now, we know that one day they too will cherish these home-cooked family meals as much as we do.”
Montgomery’s Restaurant
996 Queen St. West, Toronto, Ont.
montgomerysrestaurant.com | 647.748.4416 | @montgomerys.restaurant
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