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Check out this article by acclaimed journalist and freelance writer Noah Richler from The Toronto Star. Noah visited us after meeting Kathy at GoMedia in Toronto, and wrote this lovely article over the Taste! weekend. We hope that one day you’ll be able to call yourself ‘County’ too, Noah.
The high dunes of Sandbanks Provincial Park are spectacular even at a time of year when swimming isn’t top of mind.
jim byers photo/for the toronto star
WELLINGTON, ONT. — At East & Main, a charming bistro in the village of Wellington, Prince Edward County, at the small table next to ours, an attractive, well-dressed septuagenarian woman was dining with her husband. When the dignified pair rose to leave, I complimented the woman on her colourful shoes and evidently she was pleased — as was her husband, wearing the crested blazer of some sailing club or other, who turned to me and said: “County?”
“No,” I had to say, and then, my home in Toronto, after all, “Township.”
The 401 Highway can cleft the province like the deepest ravine and 10 minutes south of it, across the Murray Canal and into Prince Edward County, you can feel yourself in a whole different world. There are virtues to having been off to the side for so long. Until recently, the cultivation of hops for beer, but also contraband to and from the United States, the breadth of a river away, accounted for a good portion of the local economy.
Today, Prince Edward County is an altogether more salubrious place. It has possibly the most prolific tourism acumen of any region in the province and, what with the boon of the Sandbanks Provincial Park, the “Arts Trail” and September’s “Taste!” Festival—an annual showcase for its thriving wineries, restaurants and organic farms—has become to Ontario, as the regions of Charlevoix or Kamouraska are to Québec, an exquisite terroir of slow food and haute cuisine. The export of hops and contraband has given way to fields of asparagus, corn, beets, tomatoes, plums and other fruits, as well as the cultivation of local poultry (tender lamb, especially) and wine—as well as a sort of Canadian Californian migration of hopeful folk from away wanting to be able to make it here and call themselves, “County.”
Jamie Kennedy, the pioneer of “farm to table” eating in Toronto, lives here and remains the inspirational light for many, but the truth of the County’s new version of itself is that success in its gastronomical world can also come by chance. When Andrew MacKenzie and Andrew Hunter opened their Buddha Dog diner next to the Bean Counter coffee shop on Picton’s Main St. back in 2005, they’d done it as an experiment they expected to last four months. Now, its student manager Brooke told me (providing labour to students is part of the two Andrews’ mission, along with “bring[ing] together the County’s best butcher, baker, farmers and cheese-makers”), customers are “pounding at the door” come closing time at five o’clock. The business is in operation all year, selling an idiosyncratic variety of high-end hot dogs—I had a “Lamb Dog” with tzatziki, most recently—and offering a walk-in budget alternative to the region’s abundance of excellent eating.
Wellington, Bloomfield, Picton and “The Carrying Place” (a village name that I assume to be the equivalent of the French Portage), as well as smaller hamlets such as Milford, are settlements on the County’s “Taste” and “Arts” trails. On the length of the County’s idyllic country roads—we rented bikes from the Ideal Bike shop in Picton, its young owners doing everything they could for our convenience (including picking up the bikes later, free of charge, at our hotel in neighbouring Wellington)—old wooden gates mark the entry to fields bordered by high trees, and artists’ studios announce themselves in galleries, cafés and restaurants, but also people’s homes and in hotels and inns. It would take a good week to tour all of the studios, so the game of visiting is left to chance and the chase something of a pleasure in itself. At the Waring Inn, a sprawling hospitality complex outside Picton and near some of the region’s best farms, with its own cookery school and as many out-buildings as a small army base, I discovered the wonderful folk art of Robert Danielis, a wood sculptor given to punning work—such as his two-foot statue of a very Gallilean-looking fella holding a tray of cheeses called, cheekily, “Cheeses of Nazareth.”
And at both the East & Main Bistro in Wellington, and Picton’s Merrill Inn, my wife and I ate superbly well in restaurants with distinct and pleasing atmospheres. East & Main is the most recent brainchild of Kimberley Humby, an alumna of Langdon Hall, in Cambridge, and On the Fifth, in downtown Toronto. The bistro, pleasingly quiet even when the place is full, occupies the ground floor of an old store at Wellington’s single traffic light junction, sells a few choice foodstuffs in the front, and has been refurbished so that its marvelously uneven wood floors are polished, the hard work in the kitchen is visible in the back, and its bar and common table (made of salvaged barn wood set at stool height) provides the dining room’s warm heart.
I would book a B&B to be able to eat at East & Main again in a flash. The village of Wellington is immediately on the water, Lake Ontario somehow always managing to stun even those who live right by it with its vast dimension, and the Sandbanks Provincial Park with its high dunes and gentle waters are nearby, and East & Main is one of those restaurants where the evening is congenial in all its aspects. (No wonder that on my first night I was complimenting a woman on her shoes as if I lived there.) My wife had a salad of local greens and a generous portion of delicately roasted chicken to follow. I had the panko-crusted Harrison perch to start, and a tender and savoury Waupoos cider-brined pork chop for a main—and neither of us was able to pass up the opportunity of local beets and frites on the side.
The Merrill Inn, another handsome converted home beyond the Books & Company end of Main St., is the premier place to stay in Picton. Its dining room is at semi-basement level, with a small terrace at the back, in a small room that most hoteliers would relegate to being merely a pub. In this, the dining room is quite English. Diners waiting for the second sitting wait in the lounge upstairs, and those who linger and talk too long, easy to do as the ambience is so appealing, are gently ushered along when their own sitting is over—and being “County” earns no favours: I was dining with James Lahti and Victoria Rose, the proprietors of the excellent Long Dog Winery and, however charmingly, we still were booted out.
The Merrill has the atmosphere of a small ship; it’s a comfy hideaway where the food is first rate—and much in demand. (You’ll need a reservation here, and be pleased you made it.) And in that way one quickly learns is the nature of the County, all good things are found to be related. Michael Sullivan, the chef at the Merrill Inn, is married to Lili Sullivan, once a punk rock aficionado and now the chef at East & Main. And the night my wife and I ate at the Merrill Inn—wonderful lamb (succulent local lamb chops and the Inn’s own merguez) but also hen, crab-cakes and a seafood sausage—there were several vintners in the room, sitting at each others’ tables, swapping the latest gossip and comparing their fortunes convivially.
A three-day weekend was enough to have an idea of the bounty of Prince Edward County—to experience the countryside (the Sandbanks are pleasing even in the off-season, possibly more so because the crowds are less) and the cornucopia of tastes and artsy accomplishments that have come out of it—and I could feel myself dreaming of a retreat from the city and some ingenious country start-up of my own—another winery, a bakery or the county’s first bona fide publishing house?
And to be able to answer, one, day, “Yes. County.”
Noah Richler is a Toronto-based freelance writer.
