It was the first time I’d ever seen my mom holding a glass of beer. We were on a sunny patio in the Distillery back in the summer, as I observed my parents sniff their beers with the same “I can’t believe you made us do this” look on their faces. See, my parents are self-described foodies and wine snobs. They hit all the classy restaurants, drink nothing but wine, and turn their nose up at a humble pint. When I asked if we could get dinner at the Mill Street Brew Pub, the Toronto brewery’s foray into the world of beer cuisine, they were a bit reluctant. To them, pubs, with their flowing taps, high-fat comfort food, and piles of fries were just relics of their student days.

“Just give it a sip, and then eat your food!” I urged. “Trust me, you’ll like it.”

So they both cautiously sipped, my father a light ale, my mother, an apricot wheat, digging into their classic pub fare as I filled my mouth full of shepherd’s pie. I could taste the nutty top-notes of stout in the shepherd’s pie. They may be food snobs, but my parents couldn’t help but smile with satisfaction.

“This isn’t too bad!” my mom declared as she took a bite of my father’s fishand- chips. By the end of the night, my wine-obsessed father actually ordered a second pint.

The humble pub is undergoing a rebirth in this city. Bars around Toronto have suddenly begun to offer more from their taps than your basic Keith’s, Labatt, Molson, and Coors. With a sudden surge in microbreweries and associations like the Ontario Craft Brewers, the art of brewing a complex beer is suddenly in vogue. What’s more is that pub fare no longer has to mean low-quality food. Restaurants around the city are realizing the simple pleasure of a well-made stew with quality ingredients, that a shepherd’s pie isn’t always a poor man’s dish, that ale can be used in recipes to make food tastier, and that beer can be better than wine when it comes to matching with food. The gastropub trend is finally hitting Toronto, and our taste buds are better for it

More than just pub grub

Gastropubs began in London back in the early ’90s, when a number of tavern-keepers, chefs, and bartenders got fed up with the low-class stigma around beer, and decided to prove that good food and a good pint could beat a French bistro any day. The term itself was coined by David Eyre and Mike Belben, founders of a pub in Clerkenwell called The Eagle. Belben and Eyre put their focus on quality, satisfying food, dressing up old pub standards in new and creative ways, with an incredibly wide and diverse selection of quality craft beers. The same beers were used in cooking, combining food and drink at the most basic level. Since then, gastropubs have popped up in New York, Chicago, L.A., and even Paris, inspiring everything from cookbooks to microwavable dinners.

“They’re not formulaic,” says Alison Fryer, the owner of The Cookbook Store, a popular Yorkville haunt for foodies and Toronto’s celebrity chefs. “You’re not going to get the same food as a ‘Duke of Blank’ chain pub. They don’t have beer stains on the carpet, and they’re usually owner-operator operations.”

It may have taken over a decade, but gastropub fare is finally making an appearance. Fryer, a culinary expert with a finger to the pulse of the majority of Toronto’s food scene, is happy that good pub grub is on the rise.

“It’s slowly taking over here” she says, “but in a different way. Pub items are making their way onto the menus at your neighbourhood restaurants. A lot of prominent chefs are butchering their own products now. It’s especially good in the winter—gastropub food is incredibly hearty and warm.”

Fryer has a point—even swanky, hip hangouts like the Drake have been offering classed-up pub fare with a couple of craft beers these days. But is comfortable food and good beer really accepted by Toronto’s chefs? According to Neil Siomra, they are.

Siomra, the owner and head chef of Pallucci, the swanky Italian restaurant on Mt. Pleasant Road, embraces beer cuisine with gusto.

“Everything old is new again,” he says enthusiastically. “The price of wine has gone up through the roof, but you can sit down, have a few beers with your food, not pay through the nose, and still drive home afterward.”

Siomra joined five other prominent Toronto chefs on Global TV’s popular Beer Buddies, a cooking show where Siomra and the others used ale as a principal ingredient. A version aimed at students is currently in development.

“Beer’s a lot of fun. It’s not as snobby as wine. A wine snob won’t take cheap wine or will scoff if you match it with the wrong food, but most beer drinkers realize that you just can’t go wrong with beer. It’s more accessible, more real.”

Could beer be taking over wine’s territory as the drink to have with fancy food?

“I dropped drinking wine myself a month ago,” Siomra reluctantly admits. “Now I only drink beer.” Chic to drink

Located just east of the Financial District,

Beerbistro (18 King St. East) is one of the city’s leaders in beer cuisine. While the restaurant is reluctant to call itself a gastropub, going there is certainly a celebration of itsbeer culture. The walls are peppered with vintage posters and advertisements. Pint glasses and empty bottles are stacked above the bar.

Beerbistro is divided into two parts: a bar welcomes you as you walk in, with a half-separated, candle-lit dining room on the other side. The bar has taps-a-plenty, friendly staff, and, of course, a big-screen TV showing a hockey game. With its diverse crowd—Bay Street traders, beer afficianados, couples, IT folks, and even blue-collar Joes, Beerbistro seems to be a balanced combination of haute cuisine and neighbourhood pub. From your table, you can see the exposed kitchen, where chefs dash from station to station to put together their dishes. Yet the top of the tables are lined with dozens of humble French-fry baskets. The scent of stout wafts out into the whole restaurant.

“It’s obvious to me,” says Brian Morin, head chef of Beerbistro. “Beer is loaded with amazing flavour. It’s a wonderful ingredient—it’s complex and diverse, but it’s also easy.”

To Morin, who’s spent over 25 years working his way up through the culinary ranks, beer and food are one and the same. With the proliferation of craft beers in recent years, Beerbistro seemed like an obvious move.

“A brewmaster is just like a chef. He comes up with a recipe and uses grains as his ingredients.”

Like the traditional tavernkeeper Morin prepares as much as possible from scratch. Besides doing their butchering on-site, the chefs make most of their own sauces—including ketchup—on the premises.

Our first appetizer is a fusion of two of my favourite things: bacon and shrimp. This tribute to excess uses Morin’s own home-made pork belly bacon—cured in pickle and Berkshire beer brine, and then smoked in an Applewood smoker—wrapped around bite-size pieces of shrimp. Neither flavour overpowers the other— the bacon is soft enough to be used as a wrapper, with just enough fat to be flavourful without going overboard. It came with a fruity barbecue sauce, undercutting the shrimp’s salty flavour. Each item on the menu comes with a recommendation for a certain kind of beer, so I chose a Scotch Irish Porter, which complimented the crispness of the bacon, while my friend had a pint of St. Ambroise Oatmeal Stout.

With over 19 craft beers on tap and dozens more in bottles, you can match your food to nearly any variety. Combining beer and food isn’t quite as restrictive as with wine. Some basic rules apply—otherwise you’re free to do just about anything.

“Just because I like a certain combination doesn’t mean that you will,” admitted Morin. Regardless, his recommendations served us well. Our waiter, Matt, made sure to bring us samples of beer with our main courses. My friend decided to have the grilled salmon with white beer sauce paired with Denison’s Weissbier, a wheat beer with a light, satisfying fl avour reminiscent of, in all seriousness, banana. Who knew that banana beer would be so tasty?

The salmon had a distinctly beer-and-butter-infused feel, creamy and refreshing. The salmon itself was perfectly cooked— a rarity at many restaurants—but a little over-salted. It was served with under-done vegetables, with creative use of the oft-neglected parsnip.

I decided to go for a pub staple, and ordered the Maudite Steak Stew. The stew, made with La Maudite, the classic Quebec spicy ale, was warm, refreshing, and comfort food at its best. I’ve always hated it when writers use the old adage “melt-in-your-mouth” to describe meat, but that’s exactly what happened—it was that tender and delicious. The Maudite beer shined through, contrasting nicely with the sweetness of the caramelized pearl onions.

The stew was served with that old pub staple, potatoes. While Morin bragged about his well-aged, double-blanched French fries, they were a bit soft for my taste. Still, they tasted great—an excellent way to eat as much of the stew’s sauce without licking the bowl. The complimenting homemade ketchup and mayo that came with the fries, however, were unique. I’m reluctant to use the words “mayo” and “good” in the same sentence, but I think I have to. This mayo was good.

Certainly the top dish we had at Beerbistro was dessert: beer scream. Beerbistro has brought every drunken frat boy’s fantasy to life, combining beer and ice cream in a way that doesn’t make you want to throw up. The Dragon Stout and Skor Bar ice cream had all of the positive attributes of stout—the fl avour most stouthaters can’t taste—without the overwhelming bitterness, all combined with crunchy Skor bits. The Berry Berry Beer Sorbet uses a Belgian berry ale to make a unique dessert that wasn’t too sweet, a curse suffered by most. The Maker’s Mark Bourbon Caramel Ripple, while not made with beer, was simply an orgasm in ice cream form, with a sweet caramel taste and a delightful afterglow of bourbon spice.

A Canadian Twist on Beer Cuisine

After the international fl are of Beerbistro, I decided to check out the Rebel House in Rosedale (1068 Yonge St.) on Alison Fryer’s recommendation. This pub is well known in the neighbourhood. Not too far from U of T, the Rebel House features dozens of (mainly Ontario) beers on tap, a fancier gastropub-inspired menu, as well as a menu of cheaper, traditional pub fare for students.

With a name referring to the 1837 Upper Canada Rebellion, Rebel House features walls lined with all kinds of Canadiana, including a wooden Mountie, deer antlers (to mark the bathroom, of course), and an antique rifl e, purportedly used in the rebellion itself. The bar has a dark, wooden, rustic charm, and a wide assortment of patrons, including gruffl y friendly regulars, Yorkville business-types, and students. It’s not too big, so see if you can get a reservation, or else avoid prime hours.

This time, I’ve decided to bring along my friend Ian. Ian adamantly believes that Keith’s is the best beer out there and there’s nothing wrong with a four-dollar beef stew from a chain-pub. While waiting for a table, my friend and I both decided to chat up the regulars about why they keep coming back. The general consensus was a simple one: they go for the beer, they keep coming back for the food. The Rebel House is a winner not just for the variety of quality beers offered, it’s also one of the few pubs in the city to offer Great Lakes Winter Ale, one of the greatest beers to come out of this province in years. As Ian put it, it tastes like sitting next to a fi replace on a cold February night.

Chef Karen Vaz has put together an impressive smattering of Canadian fare with local ingredients. What’s truly worthwhile is the wild game sausage plate, which features a different kind of sausage depending on the day, homemade mustard, and balsamic onions. Our sausage was stuffed with venison, just gamey, juicy, tasty, and satisfying enough to make me drool, especially with the spicy mustard. Vaz’s sausage plate single-handedly made Ian like venison, so avoid the other appetizers—this is the one to go for.

For my main course, I had an apple butter chicken supreme, a valiant attempt at doing something different, but the name is tastier than the dish. The sauce was overdone and had a burnt taste, but a bit of apple fl avour shined through. Luckily, my Neustadt 10w30 Brown Ale, a malty, smooth Canadian concoction, easily washed down the chicken. My meal came with kettle fries, which were thin, fl avourful, and kicked Beerbistro’s butt.

My friend Ian ordered the Ontario Lamb and Ale Stew, which fared well with Beerbistro’s. It was a complex blend of vegetables, incredibly tender lamb, and a distinct sweetness, contrasting well against the Wellington Arkell Best Bitter, a refreshing light beer. Overall, the stew was soft, warming, and altogether satisfying, like spending a weekend at your grandparents’ farm. That does sound kind of lame, but this is comfort food we’re talking about. It’s lame as hell, but we all love it.

What’s next?

As gastropubs spring up more and more, there’s a lot that can go wrong. As I learned with Rebel House’s chicken, venturing outside of the realm of invigorating classic pub fare can leave upsetting results and a strange burning sensation in one’s mouth. That’s not to say that chefs shouldn’t think outside the box, but they should make sure to do new things well. There’s also the issue of price. While good craft-beer isn’t very expensive, it’s just not offered everywhere. Pubs like Rebel House, with their cheaper menu, offer fi ne food with quality ingredients and reasonable prices. Another problem is that “gastropub” can be a misnomer. Prohibition Gastropub and Oyster Bar out on Queen East have been widely panned by foodies for having a weak menu and shoddy service. Worst, all they have on tap is Molson, which is pretty much blasphemy to beer buffs, mostly because Molson makes terrible beer.

Back at the Cookbook Store, Alison Fryer is hopeful. “There’s a lot of good beer and a lot of nuances in the microbreweries,” she says. “But we’ve been slow to catch on. A lot of restaurants need to carry more microbreweries.” Right now, it’s a matter of getting more variation to our beleaguered taps. Toronto’s own Mill Street is a success story, but Molson, Coors, Keith’s, and Labatt still dominate the pubs.

A few days later and a few blocks away, I’m sitting at a local bar with my friend Ian again. He stares down at his beer—a Molson—and the pot pie we’re sharing.

“Matt?” he says with a frown.

“Yeah?”

“This isn’t very good,” he sighs, as he slumps down onto the bar.

Just as I’m about to lose hope, I notice the bartender writing something in chalk on the beer list: Great Lakes Winter Ale.

Hey, maybe the trappings of a gastropub are spreading after all.