My recent dedication to sourcing and cooking local vegetables has been a great learning experience and has expanded my cooking repertoire, but some days I don’t feel like cooking and don’t want the dish pan hands from cleaning up. So I used my husband’s birthday as the perfect excuse to check out a new (for me) restaurant that supports locally sourced food. I should add the caveat that locally sourced does not mean exclusively local, but rather an emphasis is placed on local.
After reading a number of reviews, I decided to try out Ruby Watchco. on Queen Street East near Broadview. The concept was interesting with just one set menu each evening served family style and a focus on “market inspired comfort food, using only the best local, seasonal ingredients”. Fortunately, we could see the menu on the restaurant’s website in advance in case it was not to our liking. The menu consists of a salad, main, cheese plate and dessert. We also decided to splurge and went with the wine pairing.
Our dinner started with Ruby’s Citrus Salad, a delicious combination of mixed greens including Sleger’s living greens (which I also get in my weekly food bag), radicchio, fennel, frisee and endive mixed with mint and basil and then topped with sesame seed croutons, citrus fruit section and a lemon ginger dressing. The salad was light and refreshing and made my homemade salads seem quite boring by comparison. Must make a mental note to combine different lettuces and herbs at home…
The main event was a slow roasted sirloin with short rib jus with intriguing side dishes of winter root vegetable smash with spicy sour cream, charred broccoli with horseradish black pepper butter, and mushrooms & spinach. 
I think my favourite of the lot was the vegetable smash, which is saying a lot because all of it was superb. What appealed to me was the contrast between the vegetables, cream and spice. It was a great way of taking something relatively ordinary to the next level and I should be able to replicate that at home especially when I get so many root vegetables as part of my weekly food bag.
A cheese plate with Gun Point cheese (I had never heard of it either) by Gunn’s Hills Artisan Cheese came garnished with beets, watercress and rosemary honey. Again, rather than put only cheese on a plate at home, it should be easy to add a couple of extra touches to enhance the flavour. I also liked the colouring of the beets, I think it is called ‘candy cane’.
And what would be a birthday dinner without cake, in this case a maple cheesecake with red wine glazed pears & toasted walnuts. The combination was much lighter than you would expect and I loved the blend of creamy and crunchy with the refreshing pear. Sorry, there is no picture because the one I took just didn’t do the dish justice.
The meal was absolutely delicious and the restaurant atmosphere was casual and friendly. Most importantly for me, hubby enjoyed his birthday dinner and I got a lot of inspiration for future local food meals cooked at home. There are a number of Toronto restaurants focusing on locally sourced food and I hope to try many more out in the near future whether it is a special occasion or not. I found this blog post from 2012 with a list of restaurants: http://www.blogto.com/eat_drink/2012/04/12_locavore_restaurants_in_toronto/. Be sure to call ahead to make sure the restaurants are still open since I noticed that Cowbell appears to have closed and is on the list. If anyone has other suggestions, please let me know.
The Toronto Beet 