Insider’s Tips - Jan.9
Happy New Year and best wishes for 2025 from all of us at GEORGE!
Based on the success we had last year re-opening GEORGE for lunch, we will continue serving lunch from Wednesdays to Fridays. The lunch menu provides a GEORGE culinary experience that is simplified and quicker. It consists of three- or four-course tasting menus or an à la carte menu with the Chef’s signature pasta dishes, which are not available at dinner.
For lunch, we recommend you try the white lasagna pasta, which is magnificent, light and delicious.
Executive Chef Lorenzo Loseto visited the Ontario Food Terminal yesterday and found it very cold, very dark and sparsely attended. He bought root vegetables but did not see much high-quality Ontario produce from hothouses. Ontario pears were missing. However, he did find golden beets, parsnips and turnips, which he liked a lot.
On the import side of the Terminal, there were quite a few shortages he had to cope with. He did, however, find plenty of citrus and remarked that good mandarins had finally arrived. Chef selected the best ones: California mandarins from Gailee Citrus, which he highly recommends. He also came across his favourite variety, Satsumas. Chef thinks that the clementines currently on sale everywhere are a terrible buy.
GEORGE continues to receive whole harpooned swordfish from Nova Scotia, which normally is out of season at this time of year. New shipments of Nunavut turbot are also arriving.
Additionally, Chef continues to receive the buffalo cheeks, which were very popular on the New Year’s Eve menu.
For dessert, Chef presents chocolate Basque cake and an apple almond sponge.
Throughout January, GEORGE offers a seven-course dinner special composed of Chef’s most popular dishes from 2024. It is priced at $125 pp, with no HST on food or wine.
Of interest to note -
We had a preview of an interesting article in this week’s New Yorker titled “Why is the American Diet so Deadly?” The author, Dhruv Khullar, states that “no one really knows what caused the {current} obesity epidemic in America.” He notes, “If anything, Americans began consuming slightly fewer calories after the turn of the twenty-first century, yet rates of obesity continued to climb.”
An American scientist named Kevin Hall concluded in 2009 that the increase in consumption of ultra processed foods was responsible. But in a later study by Hall in 2019, he effectively refuted this theory. While ultra-processed food might have some effect, Hall concluded, “weight gain is not a necessary component of an ultra processed diet”.
Back to square one. And maybe back to the 2008 book by Michael Pollan: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”
The article itself is somewhat difficult to digest. Look for it in the Annals of Medicine column in a future issue of New Yorker.