The first time I meet Rebecca Meir-Liebman, she's trying to convince me to eat a beef-infused marshmallow. "They’re mooshmallows!" Her enthusiasm is palpable, but none of the journalists surveying the savoury confections dares to make the first move. The pillowy white treats are cradled like the first buds of spring in a naturalistic sculpture by local artist Lauren Blakey. It seems a shame to eat the art.
Meir-Liebman is a charismatic young sommelier, the ‘somm’ in Chef & Somm. The other half of the equation is Chef Eyal Liebman—and no, that’s not a coincidence; they’re married. If you have a finger on the pulse of Toronto’s food events, you might already be familiar with the decadent chocolate tasting dinners they’ve held over the years, back when they operated under the name L is For...
These days, as Chef & Somm, their bread and butter is bespoke dining. (Think private chef service, not caterers—no wilted canapés in sight here.) Before they branched out on their own, both built exemplary resumes with Toronto credits including Didier and Boehmer (his) and Canoe and Luma (hers). The trouble with the high-end restaurant world? There’s no scope for anything quite as innovative as a mooshmallow. As Liebman puts it, “Four walls are the biggest enemy of creativity.”
Four walls are the biggest enemy of creativity.
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“The bottom line is, all he needs to do private chef is an oven and a stove,” Meir-Liebman gestures to Chef Eyal “For him, he can’t even repeat the same dish exactly twice. Not because he can’t do it technically—he did do it technically for years in restaurants—but because he’d get bored to death.”
Between Liebman’s inspired plating and his playful approach to ingredients, these two definitely aren’t putting out any boring plates. What makes the duo even more interesting? The way they approach the synergy between food and wine. Take the mooshmallows: as Meir-Liebman explains it, they’re specifically crafted to play off of a sparkling wine from Back 10 Cellars in Beamsville. It’s no coincidence that the confections have a little fruitiness and a hint of spice to complement the Riesling-based sparkler; that was a studied decision.
Food and wine pairing can be bullshit if you just write it.
“Food and wine pairing can be bullshit if you just write it,” Meir-Liebman says. “Prove it to me, on my palate.”
And that’s exactly what they do at their Beyond Taste seminar at the 2016 Silver Spoons event in Leslieville. In a small meeting room equipped with a toaster oven and two portable electric burners—Chef Eyal really can cook anywhere—Chef and Somm prepare several small dishes and six tasting glasses of wine. The first test is a pair of chardonnays: a fresh, flinty expression hailing from Chablis, and a typically oaky Californian. The wines taste miles apart, but only until we’re asked to pinch our noses. The toasty layers of oak, the hints of vanilla: these are aromatics. If you let go of your nose too soon, the “flavour” returns. (Exhaling is more effective than inhaling to pick up the scent.)
Later, Meir-Liebman pours two wines from Greece. One is a white, the other a rosé. She asks the seminar attendees to record tasting notes on paper. There’s something unusual about the rosé—I’ve never tried one that’s had contact with oak—but apart from that, it seems lovely, almost Provençal. Imagine the group’s collective shame on learning that the wines in front of us were the same, save for a few drops of colourant. The lesson, according to Meir-Liebman? We taste what we expect to taste. “I tasted strawberry,” she says, “and I saw him put in the food colouring.”
You get the sense that this side of things—the storytelling, the element of surprise—is what Chef and Somm love most about their work.
“People really want knowledge when it’s passed to them in a positive and fun way,” says Meir-Liebman. “They ask the chef questions, they ask me questions because they don’t really get that in barely any restaurants in Toronto right now. When they have their own chef, they have their own sommelier, to ask whatever questions they have about food and wine, that’s such a unique thing.”
So unique, in fact, that Chef and Somm remains Toronto’s only bespoke private chef and sommelier service. “Many people do not know what to expect when they invite us,” Meir-Liebman acknowledges. “There is the fear of the sommelier.” Chef Eyal teases her, “’Is she going to stand there and tell me how much brix is in the wine?’ Because that’s what a lot of them do!” (Brix, by the way, is a measure of sugar content in grapes. You can understand why this might not be the most thrilling detail of a wine tasting.) “Basically,” Meir-Liebman continues, “with every dish that we bring, we bring a little story, or information with every wine that we open.” Now Liebman interrupts, “And a piece of my soul!” But Meir-Liebman nods, “And a piece of my soul as well.”
Is she going to stand there and tell me how much brix is in the wine?
They are unabashedly passionate about their work, and about the industry as a whole. Neither chef nor somm is afraid to speak out about the issues they’ve observed in restaurants over the years, both in front and back of house. “This industry is so crooked and so weird at this point, we’re fighting a lot of stigma,” asserts Liebman. By this, he means professionalism in the kitchen (“We got ourselves notorious with Ramsay and yelling and cursing.”); honesty on the business side (“We write keywords that will make you money.”); and putting the customer first (“We forgot that it’s about them, as an industry.”).
This last point in particular is what makes the Chef and Somm model so appealing. “You bring the whole story together, from the first time that you emailed or talked with the customer, until the moment that they actually have the food on the table,” Meir-Liebman explains. “We go together, we choose the products together, we know where it comes from.” Adds Liebman, “And it’s a privilege.” He continues: “Cooking is a privilege. Having people eating in your restaurant is a privilege. And we lost that.”
For their part, Chef and Somm seem distinctly aware of their privilege. This shines through most of all when they speak about their work with Sojourn House, a Toronto-based charity that assists refugees. “It started with the Syrian crisis,” Meir-Liebman recalls. “We saw those pictures, they were all over the news. And the thing is, because we both grew up in Israel, the Holocaust is a huge topic. Automatically it brought that to my memory… When you see something happen, you need to do something about it.”
Liebman adds, “And what I love about Sojourn House is that they don’t respond to the moment. They go based on priority, and when everyone was taking care of Syrian refugees, they were taking in people from Africa who no one was housing, because no one was paying attention.” We chat briefly about the situation of Ethiopian refugees before Liebman goes on. “At the end of the day, I love the cause. I am an immigrant. I had time to prepare, I had language, I had family here, I had so much cushioning.”
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Since syncing up with Sojourn House, Chef and Somm have put on public, ticketed events for the cause, as well as directing some of their earnings to the charity. That’s no small gesture, either: Chef and Somm’s service is priced more reasonably than most, with no mark-up on wines, and menus coming in around what you’d expect to spend at one of the high-end restaurants they used to work at. (Meir-Liebman: “I think that the private chef sector of our industry is ruined by the name that it is only for the rich and the famous. Because if the quote that I’m getting is $350 dollars, who wants to afford that?”) But as Liebman puts it, “they were so in need, we decided to keep that relationship happening.”
Chef and Somm may hate the buzzword, but we’d call that pretty damn ethical cuisine…
