The Man Who Ate Toronto

As a young man in England, James Chatto had worked as a waiter, dishwasher, and occasional cook. As a boy, he had learned about restaurants from his godfather, the actor Robert Morley, who was also a food critic for Punch and Playboy. When he came to Canada in the early 1980s he decided to parlay his appetite and experience into a career and began writing about restaurants for Toronto Life Magazine. Since then he has spent most of his nights, and not a few of his days, in Toronto’s culinary demi-monde, chronicling an extraordinary transformation.

Over a period of twenty years, Torontonians, newly affluent and increasingly well traveled, discovered the world of food and wine. Eating out became a form of recreation. Hundreds of new restaurants opened their doors, and some of the people who created them became celebrities. In certain circles it began to matter whether you had been to Franco’s new place, had tasted Sasur’s latest invention, or could spell radicchio.

This is a book about how the restaurant business became show business, and about the tycoons, artists, dilettantes, journeymen cooks, gifted gastronomical junkies, and ambitious entrepreneurs who made it happen. It is about fortunes made and lost, reputations built and squandered, written by a man who observed these events from the best seat in the house.

James Chatto brings to his a cosmopolitan objectivity and an Englishman’s irreverence. The result is a perceptive, sometimes funny, often poignant memoir in which the reader joins the writer as he makes his rounds, eating, hanging out with chefs and maître d’s, and eavesdropping on the late-night gossip of waiters.

The Man Who Ate Toronto - like a fine wine or an unforgettable meal is meant to be savoured and shared.


From the Hardcover edition.