With all of the foaming molecular gastronomy and deconstructed dishes at the best restaurants in Toronto and now even the coolest bars in the city, meeting a chef who loves making good food at reasonable prices feels borderline anarchic. Cheap eats in Toronto are hard to come by. Andrew Carter, the executive chef at The Oxley in Yorkville, admits that fads may come and go, but it’s business as usual for him.
“To this day, I write a menu, and nothing’s changed since I started … The verbiage I use, the kind of ingredients I use and the methods I use have not changed.”
Born into a lineage of butchers in a Lancashire, U.K., town called Tottington — “which you can’t help but say in an English accent” — Carter spent much of his childhood scraping bones and hanging out at the market.
“Today, everybody’s talking about artisan cheese. We had that back then. It’s just been remarketed — and perhaps you’ve got some hipsters making it now, instead of farmers.”
Andrew Carter, the executive chef at The Oxley in Yorkville
Ashley van der Laan
With working parents who were often out of the house, Carter learned how to feed himself at a young age. “School was always a little bit of a struggle for me, and the one thing I could do was cook.”
After his home economics teacher grabbed him by “the scruff of the neck,” Carter got serious and headed to catering college. He graduated from the kitchens of Manchester and got a dream opportunity to work in Switzerland for the summer.
“I remember using the payphone to call home and saying, ‘I’m in too deep.’ I didn’t know any German or French, and that was all the kitchen spoke. But I got through.”
With a foundation in the culinary world secured, Carter successfully interviewed with the legendary Nico Ladenis, the first British chef to earn three Michelin stars. Though working in his restaurants was inspiring (if a little chaotic), Carter yearned for more.
“I thought, ‘I’m spending 12 to 14 hours in a basement cooking. There’s got to be something else.’”
A Ladenis connection led Carter to Toronto, where he hit it off with Jamieson Kerr, a restaurateur and fellow football fan who gave him the chance to open a gastropub — a relaxed pub environment serving great food.
“We opened The Queen and Beaver, and we had James Chatto, one of the big food writers, come through. He said ‘I love what you’re doing, but I don’t think Toronto gets it.’”
The writing appeared to be on the wall for Carter’s classic British pub on Elm Street, and late one night, he and Kerr shared a pivotal moment like a scene from The Godfather.
“The final review had come out, and it was bad. I called up Kerr at four in the morning, and said, ‘Meet me at The Queen and Beaver.’ We sat there with the lights down low, and I put the newspaper down in front of us. I said, ‘You have two choices: You can fire me now, or we can continue.’ He paused for a minute and said, ‘We’ll continue.’ From that point on, The Queen and Beaver became successful. Three years later, we opened up The Oxley.”
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Read moreToday, The Oxley, a charming gastropub inside a red row house in Yorkville, packs seats even on weeknights. The cozy fireplace, eclectic design and menu full of high-quality English classics make it a premium spot for grabbing anything from a swift pint to a full-on Sunday roast — but it has also staked its reputation on the value for money it provides its customers.
Unlike smaller, fancier dining rooms, with a higher cost per head, The Oxley’s 100-seat restaurant — that can reach 500 people a service — offers from-scratch meals that won’t break the bank.
“The only way we can keep our prices down is by doing that volume, which is the harder way of doing things.”
He may have taken a tougher route than some chefs, but Carter has never been overly concerned with what others are doing. Perhaps that’s why The Oxley, a remote island untethered to the fuss of Toronto’s dining scene, feels like such a welcome escape.
“The pressures from the outside are not there,” admits Carter. “If we focus on the forces within the four square walls of what we’re doing, we’ll do well.”
The Oxley in Yorkville's most iconic dishes
Ploughman's Platter
Ashley van der Laan
“The Ploughman’s has been on the menu for many, many years. Traditionally, this is something that the farmer would take into the field ... It’s that nice sharing dish, like a charcuterie. Everything is produced in-house. You have some beautiful aged Canadian cheddar, no younger than three years old. We make our own Branston Pickle, we have a smoked ham hock and green peppercorn terrine — that doubles up for our Eggs Benny. We have piccalilli. There’s our stout-cured lamb shoulder — rack-cured for nine days … then smoked for four hours and roasted. We’ve got a pickled egg on there, a throwback to the pub. The Tewksbury mustard is a very old horseradish-based English mustard. We take two different kinds of mustard
seeds, some fresh horseradish, some chili and other spices.”
Hand-Chopped Burger
Ashley van der Laan
“The burger has been on the menu since The Queen and Beaver days, and it’s been going solid. It’s a hand-chopped culotte (or tri-tip) cut of beef: We chop marrow and pop that into it, add some shallots and seasoning, mix it all up and bind it with egg. They cook like a hockey puck, and that’s topped with our house-smoked bacon. We cure [raw belly] for about seven or eight days … It’s this beautiful double-smoked bacon with a beautiful smoky smell and taste. We top the burger with that and some three-year-old cheddar or stilton. Our sesame buns are made by our baker — the texture of the patty is more like a steak, so the bun has to stand up to that. Our fries are punched, soaked overnight, blanched and fried to order. The house ketchup, people sometimes say it’s got a curry taste to it. One of those spices in there is fenugreek — so it’s a bit like currywurst.”
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Read moreBreast of Dry-Aged Muscovy Duck
Ashley van der Laan
“We buy whole muscovy ducks — historically used for confit — and break them down ... We dry-age those in the fridge for about two weeks, so the flavour gets more intense. … We take some of our smoked bacon in lardons, put it into the fat and render that down. We serve that with dumplings — they’re basically gnocchi, but it’s not Italian. We add those to the fat with the duck and the bacon and we add a celeriac and watercress velouté. We take the breast, slice it skin-side up on top and then we finish it up with some leaves of watercress around it.”
Mushroom and Potato Pithivier
Ashley van der Laan
“This dish is 16 years old. Pithivier is a French dessert, a cooked pastry with a jam inside. But because we’re an English gastropub, I thought we could do a large pithivier and portion it as a slice of pie. I make beautiful, rich dauphinoise potatoes and put a little bit of garlic, thyme and bay leaf into that. We cook that and let it cool, cut out a nice big circle, put that on pastry, and then we make a mushroom mix with creamy butter mushrooms, oyster mushrooms and sweat down garlic with some shallots. We add madeira into that … Then we add cream, so you have this very rich mushroomy ragu. We finish the tart and bake it off so you have this beautiful, golden brown pastry. We portion it into a wedge, serve it with some young leeks on the side and finish with a bit of truffle oil.”
Fish and Lobster Pie
Ashley van der Laan
“I grew up eating fish pie on a Friday — usually a white fish in a béchamel sauce … that I proceeded to put Heinz ketchup on. To elevate it, I decided to make a lobster bisque. We take the lobsters, blanche them, remove the meat and make a bisque with the shells. We reduce that bisque right down, we reduce some 35 per cent cream and put the two together to give you the base sauce of the lobster pie. Then we produce a fish mix — we put some haddock in there, bay scallops … salmon and lobster. We top it with some beautiful mashed potatoes and pop it in the oven until it gets nice and brown on top. We put some butter peas on the side, and that’s it. It has a beautiful flavour; it’s luxurious.”
Fish & Chips
Ashley van der Laan
“We always use fresh Canadian haddock. People say, ‘Why don’t you use halibut?’ I’ve always found haddock is the best fish … It has more fat content, which allows it to fry better. We marinate it with some lemon zest, and lemon thyme is sprinkled on there. We dredge them in flour and our beer batter, fry them, and that’s served up with our house ketchup. Our tartar sauce is like no other. We make crème fraîche — it’s a five-day process. We dice cornichons and shallots, plus there is some thyme and capers in there.”
Sticky Toffee Pudding
Ashley van der Laan
“The sticky toffee pudding sells itself. I’ve only changed the recipe once over the years. A classic sticky toffee would have dates. I use half dates and half prunes — the prunes bring a richness to the dish that the dates don’t offer, plus prunes have more flavour … We bake it, make a toffee sauce and then put a rich house-churned ice cream on top. I have a full-time baker in-house: Stephen Bullock does all the bread, pastries and desserts. We’re going through the process of developing takeout — the pudding will be a frozen product so you can take it home and use it whenever.”
