Hard Labour For Few Parts
Are you a sadist or a masochist? Do you like to yell or prefer to be yelled at? Either way, I have just the place for you. Parts and Labour is a new Parkdale restaurant in a gutted Home Hardware store on Queen West. Where once the local DIY crowd dropped by for a Phillips screwdriver, they now drop in for a Vodka Screwdriver, or two, or three, because Parts and Labour’s decibel count must be at least 85 (dangerous to your health)and thus certain to increase your alcohol consumption – if the latest French study is correct.
Parts and Labour has food too. Long communal tables under bundled fluorescent tubes suggest a canteen for machinists. I look forward to enjoying the crème de la crème of industrial grub – hot dog with petrol-hued pickle, French’s mustard, tomato ketchup,a grilled Kraft cheese sandwich, meatloaf with potato buds. Music? Willie Nelson’s On the Road Again, Dolly Parton’s Here I Come Again…
Dream on. P & L is FauxBo, middleclass slumming, the latest effort by 28-year-old chef Matty Matheson to reconfigure eating-out for his club-crazy cohort.Trained French (La Palette, Le Select) Matheson opened Oddfellows a couple of years ago,with flexible hours, heavy metal grunge and $22 Bison burgers. P & L is a more ambitious effort to put the posh in prole and challenge the flights of burger on auto-pilot. Gotta be showbuzzy. It was Charlie Chaplin who described the choices necessary to make juxtapositions work. It’s only funny if the man who slips on a banana peel is wearing white tie and tails. Thus it’s piquant to sip Cristal from a Dixie Cup on a millionaire’s yacht, spoon Beluga from a Whiskas can, but excellent grilled sea bream $28 dumped unceremoniously on a plastic plate doesn’t cut it. Too earnest.
To begin at the beginning. We had reserved on this busy Friday night, but the reservation hasn’t stuck. Still the hostess fits us in without a murmur. Well she may have murmured but we wouldn’t have heard it. P & L with 140 seats has the football stadium wall of noise, sans vuvuzelas, punctuated by full-throated roars when one side scores.
Huddled together at the end of a communal table, lip-reading assiduously, we only hear the waiter when he loses it after we get a mite critical. “I can’t be harassed!”pierces the fog of noise. We’re harassed too. The cheap plonks are sold out and we grumble about the almost 300% markup on the $45 Campo Viejo Crianza. A haunch of beef arrives for our neighbours who offer us a bite. How great. We’d have loved it. The waiter’s lips move “You should have asked” – we are too hoarse to shout that it wasn’t on the menu.
Listen up. Salads are imaginative, wild roots, roasted pumpkin seeds, goat beemster (mild) croutons with buttermilk honey dressing $8, and fingerling purple potato salad, radish, soft boiled egg and a paillard of bacon $13. Beef tartare $10 is lemony – but for the real thing you have to go to Didier.
We pass up ostentatious trends like fried pig’s face. Puhleeze. Why oh why did a pig appear on the cover of Fergus Henderson’s trendsetting Snout to Tail? As a result the Toronto restocape is littered with fried pig bits. Pigs are only part of Henderson’s primer on restoring the integrity of good British food, notably the unique flavours of animals’ choicer digestive organs, kidneys, liver, sweetbreads. Veal is often favoured because of the calf’s youth. No time to have developed a taste for gin. It will be interesting to sample the liver of those B.C. cows now being fed a flavour-enhancing litre of Okanagan red every day. Now there’s a menu stopper. Drunk Liver.
I order the 10-oz ribeye rare and get sliced enpurpled jelly on a small plastic plate. Scrappy fries mingle well with jus and chive butter. Cornish hen roasted in a cast iron pan, $28, is wonderfully moist but the plate is a deranged mix of chick pea and lardon salad, bitter radicchio.
Desserts are designed for those who missed summer camp – roasted marshmallows, a homemade crunchie bar, lumpy peppermint creams – a sugar hit.
We leave as thoughtful as is possible in a Breughelian rave. This Matty Matheson is talented. Hope he grows out of clubs.
*1 and 1/2 Parts & Labour 1566 Queen W.416-588-7750. No wheelchair access. Dinner for two: food plus tax $100
416 588 7750
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