My friend Geoff is turning 40 next week.
(It only looks like I’m obsessing about age, but I’m not, I’m just thinking about the occasion).
When Geoff and I were students, I made Geoff an involuntary friend. The details are convoluted and odyssean, but it’s the truth. I was in a moment of crisis I don’t think I’d ever encountered before, busy constructing a plan of rebuttal and attack but really kind of clueless about what I’d have to negotiate, and Geoff was a sudden, familiar face. He happened to be around at just that moment, the first I recognized when I scanned the great room in the Steadman Lecture Halls. He seemed poised, serene, and relaxed behind a paper cup of Tim Horton’s, smoking a cigarette by his books and surrounded, as usual, by a group of really beautiful girls. Maybe he was waiting for a lecture to begin. I don’t know if that’s the case, all these years later, because in my state of complete dumbfoundedness I never thought to ask. I just remember reaching my hand out to him and pulling him along with me, as if he’d just been waiting for me to extract him from his group. Good thing I didn’t ask, now that I think back: I have a feeling we’d have passed the rest of our education in separate spheres of study and influence. Then I’d never have acquired the many gifts which came from Geoff, directly.
Here are some:
1. A tape made while Geoff was away, working in the mountains of Lake Louise at a teahouse so high in the Rockies trips to the nearest town happened only once a week. They involved lugging all of the restaurant’s garbage down to the town’s landfill, since vehicles could never make the climb. The tape included the Two Nice Girls’ “Spent My Last $10 on Birth Control and Beer” (an anthem like no other); Dick Siegel’s “Jesus, John, and Elvis” (still relevant, Mr. Obama and Ms. Clinton); and Louden Wainright’s “Don’t Leave Your Records in the Sun”, my introduction to Blue Grass music. He named the collection “Songs Like (my) Driving”, as he’d spend every trip in my car with his eyes fixed on a point under the dash whenever we went anywhere, as if they were held open with fear and those tiny braces on Malcolm McDowell’s eyelids in Clockwork Orange. “Any time you change lanes,” he’d say, “you’re asking for trouble”.
2. Divine, John Waters, and the magical, incantatory force of Cha Cha Heels they created.
(I bet Geoff and Nicky were the first to put John Waters on a syllabus in an institution of higher learning).
3. When Geoff came back from living in Prague for over a year, he showed up on our doorstep in Parkdale. Our landlord couple, who lived on the bottom floor, were not getting along well with us because I’d recently insisted on having the rooms painted and they were resisting. Geoff was early, many hours early. When we finally got home, Geoff’s luggage was outside their front door, which slid open as we came in. Geoff stood in our landlord couple’s entrance holding a glass of wine, surrounded by our suddenly besotted and very friendly landlord couple, who absolutely loved meeting Geoff and concluded that we couldn’t be so bad if we had such a friend. The landlords were amazing after that, talking with us for hours and inviting us out for coffee and dessert. When the house was successfully sold and we all packed on moving day, they ended up giving us a goodbye card stuffed with $50 dollar bills plus the interest on our rent deposit, and they cried as they wished us well. They were really great! And we’d never have known if it weren’t for Geoff.
4. Food. Geoff was always a fantastic cook, able to take almost nothing and transform it into something great. His mom tells me he’s been cooking since he was 7, when he took his first cooking class.
So it’s no surprise then that we’ll be having a birthday meal for him at Colborne Lane, an eclectic modern restaurant in the St. Lawrence Market district in Toronto, where the cuisine is influenced by Ferran Adria’s molecular gastronomy. The Chef’s done his time at El Bulli with Adria, but he’s clearly going for a kind of asian fusion molecular menu, something much more personally relevant. So it should be interesting (though I have to say, supplying these people with the chemical ingredients they use was always a little frightening, back when I was “doing my own time” at a compounding pharmacy in the city–you’d always wonder what the hell they were using some of these lab compounds for when they made those “foams”, “jellies”, “freeze-dried powders’”, and exactly how what they were doing differed from General Mills, or Monsanto). Hidden among the usual menu items (salmon, tuna, duck, chicken) in their alien incarnations, I notice this offering:
Beef tenderloin + slow & soft poached
egg + chorizo+fondant potato + smoked salt +
steak sauce jelly + Yukon gold potato puree
And realized that that’s the part that’s all Toronto: the Meat and Potatoes, adorned mostly with adjectives and few chemical reactions. Toronto’s a fantastic city for food and restaurants, and it’s big enough to keep a place like Colborne going for years, even though it’s got competition in the cuisine on the western end of the city; but you know it couldn’t be much of a repeat draw without conceding to that enduring protestant desire for steak and mashed taters.
(I’ll be sure to avoid that selection on the menu).
I haven’t a clue what wines you’d pair with such super-accentuated flavours, in their unexpected textural transformations, but I’m looking forward to finding out.
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