Culture – Macleans.ca

How Celine Song’s Past Lives became the surprise indie hit of the year

Mariyam Khaja — Thu, 08 Jun 2023 18:22:07 +0000

(Photograph by Getty Images)

Past Lives, a new film from indie hitmaker A24, has been wowing critics with its intercontinental love story, told on an intimate scale. The movie, set mostly in Seoul and NYC, marks the filmmaking debut of Canadian director and playwright Celine Song. “I wanted to tell a story about how the ordinary can be extraordinary,” says Song, whose immigration journey mirrors that of Nora, the film’s protagonist. Both left South Korea for Canada when they were 12 years old, and both wrestled with their sense of identity in the years that followed. Since the premiere of Past Lives at Sundance, Song’s life has changed yet again: her film, which earned a standing ovation and stellar reviews, is now receiving the inevitable Oscar buzz. Here, she chats about how much of Past Lives is pulled from her own experiences and the culturally specific Easter eggs she planted.

Past Lives is largely chronological, except for the opening scene that takes place in a New York bar. Why did you begin there?

When we start the movie we see three characters at a bar in the East Village: Nora, who is the centre of the film, sitting next to Arthur, her white American husband, and Hae Sung, her childhood sweetheart from Korea. Then we hear the voices of other people in the bar who are wondering who these people are to each other. They’re playing a guessing game. Who is the couple? Who is the friend or sibling? It’s an invitation to the audience to come up with their own theories about these questions, which are the mystery of the film. And then we go back to 20 years earlier where Nora and Hae Sung are children in Korea.

Like Nora, you emigrated from South Korea to Canada to New York. You are also married to a white American man. To what extent is the movie autobiographical?

I did once find myself sitting in a bar between my husband and my childhood sweetheart. I was translating between them, and I could see other people in the bar looking at us, trying to figure us out. I thought, Okay, what if I tell a story that does nothing but try to answer that question? The story is adapted from events of my life, but also feelings I have experienced. It’s a personal story, but not a transcription of anything that happened to me.

Nora feels pulled between the life she is living in New York and the life she left in Seoul. Is that something you relate to?

Of course. I made a very big leap in my life, immigrating from South Korea to Toronto to New York. But I also wanted the story to be something universal. People who have left Houston to work in Manhattan will say things like, “Back in my Houston days…” Or if a lawyer becomes a chef, they might say, “Back in my lawyer days…” Even leaving a relationship is a kind of immigration, where you’re leaving a part of yourself to start anew. Nora’s story is the version that I know—physically and culturally and language-wise—but the idea is that we can all connect to this idea of past life.

You also have a past life as a successful playwright. What about Past Lives felt more like a movie?

What drove the decision was the story. The movie spans decades and continents, and it also involves aging. I wanted to do something that was a little more literal, which you can do in film more so than on the stage. And then there were the locations that were part of the characters and the storytelling. I wanted to make sure that the audience really felt these places—Seoul and New York—and understood how they are different.

What did you love about making a movie that is different from directing a play?

I loved it all! The part of me that loves being in control was really tickled by the process of making a movie, and then I just loved being on set and being part of the filmmaking machine. And I loved editing, which is a chance to rewrite the movie in these very small ways. After we shot everything, I was able to put this puzzle together from the images and the dialogue and the audio. I think I became a better writer by making a movie.

This is very much a story about cultural identity. Certain characteristics and customs are described as “so Korean.” How has the reception you’ve received from Korean audiences been different from other audience reactions?

The Korean-speaking audience connected with certain details in the film that are hidden just for them: there are times when I didn’t translate everything the characters were saying or texting. A friend of mine saw the movie and asked, “Are you okay that these really specific things are going to be missed by people who don’t understand Korean culture?” And I thought it was amazing that there are little secrets in the movie that are about cultural specificity. And it’s not just for Korean audiences. There is a scene where Nora is in rehearsal and the play is one that I wrote, so that was a little secret for my theatre friends.

Were there any Canadian easter eggs that I missed?

My costume designer is a Canadian who lives in New York and L.A., so we spent a lot of time talking about the kind of clothing we were wearing when we moved from Canada in the 1990s. Not just Canada, but the suburbs. You see Nora at grad school wearing a Niagara Falls T-shirt, and she wears a necklace with a little bird that we thought felt so Canadian, whatever that means. And of course there is the scene with Pearson International.

That felt so familiar, seeing the airport as it was in the ’80s.

It’s not actually Pearson. It’s in Queens.

I really thought I recognized it!

That means my art team did a great job.

The movie talks about the Korean concept “in-yun.” Can you explain what that is and why you included it?

In-yun is an Eastern philosophical concept: it exists in Korea, but also China, India, Japan. It’s about that ineffable connection that ties us to another person over a series of lives: family members, strangers, the person you end up marrying. I thought it was a good way to describe the relationship between Nora and Hae Sung. They spent time together when they were children, so you can’t call them exes. They’re not partners or lovers. They’re friends, but it’s more than that—it’s in-yun, this connection that endures through time and space.

At one point Nora is flirting with her future husband and she says that in-yun is “just something Koreans say to seduce someone.” Would your own husband recognize that scene from real life?

Ha! No, I haven’t used it like that, but it felt like something Nora would say in that moment.

Do you consider Past Lives to be a love-triangle movie?

I guess it is in structure, but it also subverts the idea. It’s less about the choice between two guys and more the choices she makes for herself and her life.

The movie premiered at Sundance, where it earned stellar reviews. Rolling Stone called it the first great movie of the year. How did the reception compare with your expectations going in?

My expectation was not to have any expectations. I felt like it could go either way. When the film was so well-received, I was so happy. I felt like it wasn’t just me who thinks this is a story worth telling. I wanted to make a movie about ordinary people doing an extraordinary thing, which is loving and caring for each other, and the fact that audiences connected to that is so great.

I’ve heard Oscar buzz. Does the prospect of walking the red carpet during awards season appeal to you?

I think what appeals to me more than anything is getting to make another movie.

The post How Celine Song’s Past Lives became the surprise indie hit of the year appeared first on Macleans.ca.

Never Have I Ever star Maitreyi Ramakrishnan doesn’t know what’s next. She likes it that way.

Mariyam Khaja — Mon, 05 Jun 2023 16:00:33 +0000

“I’m damn good at my job and I want audiences to watch me do it in 100 different ways.” (Photography by Wade Hudson, makeup by Julia Vuong, hair by Priya Kumari Bilkhu.)

If you believe the early hype, Maitreyi Ramakrishnan rolled off her parents’ couch in Mississauga, Ontario, and into a star-making lead role in Netflix’s hit high school rom-dram Never Have I Ever. It was 2019, and a friend sent the tweet announcing Mindy Kaling’s casting call. Ramakrishnan, then 17 and tired from a long day at real-life Meadowvale Secondary School, went, so it goes: Eh, why not?

In truth, Ramakrishnan, now 21, has always had big plans. Okay, maybe “preferred manifestations.” She hadn’t banked on besting 15,000 other young girls to play the now-iconic teenage try-hard Devi Vishwakumar. Acting wasn’t her first dream; she wanted to be an animator. Later, she was cast as Priya Mangal, an (animated) South Asian tween, in Pixar’s Turning Red. Things have a funny way of working out—just rarely in the way she imagines.

The final season of Never Have I Ever, set in Devi’s senior year, streams this month. Another freshly adult actor who’s had less success with serendipity might dread an open schedule, but Ramakrishnan is mostly relaxed. What’s the next big thing for the erstwhile “next big thing”? A university degree? A stint as a Disney princess? She’ll figure it out—or the universe will.

Devi’s finally graduating. In a way, you’re graduating, too. Congrats! Where’s your head at as the series winds down? Reflective? Sad? On to the next?

A mix—sad, excited for the unknown. It ended when it needed to. I hate when shows drag out. That’s a pet peeve of mine.

The good thing about the high school conceit is that it can really only last four years—unless you “fail.”

Right? In real life, I started high school in 2015. Then the show went from 2019 to 2023. I’ve been in high school for eight years. I failed every year, basically. Oh my god.

Was it surreal to attend fake high school right after attending one for real?

It was. In season one, I was so excited to see what a real set was like because I’d never worked on one. I looked at everything like, “This isn’t a real door! It’s all fake!” But, very quickly, it became my stomping ground, that little hallway that we re-dressed in a million different ways. You’d never know!

Speaking of transformations, you had one of the more dramatic pandemic glow-ups. Never Have I Ever debuted a month after we went into lockdown, and you came out of it an it girl. So, you know, how was that?

I don’t know about an it girl. I definitely came out wiser than I went in. For most of lockdown, I was filming. During months off, I played video games with my family and finally learned how to do transitions on TikTok. I had that phase of “Maybe I can start working out!” then slowly realizing, “No, I can’t start working out.”

So you were living with your parents?

I mean, I still live with my parents.

I’m well aware that Mississauga and Hollywood are two very different worlds…

What?! The Meadowvale Town Centre isn’t the Walk of Fame?

…but what do you do when you’re home?

I still do press, take meetings and audition. (After the pandemic, everything is self-tapes.) I also do fun, spontaneous things like visit Toronto Comicon and fan expos. I dragged my best friend to paint pottery the other day. I picked a plate—easy, because it’s flat—and painted “I feel lucky” with charms around it. I think it’s gonna look good, but it might look like garbage, to be honest.

Your parents immigrated here from Sri Lanka before you were born. What do they think of all the Hollywood fuss? How do you even begin to broach something like that?

They’re supportive and protective in all the right ways. They understand the Hannah Montana switch I do because they’re right beside me. They also keep me humble. I’m very much like, “I can walk into Square One, no problem!” And they’re like, “Just stay low-key. Don’t be an idiot.” It’s a really hard thing to wrap your head around, living a regular suburban life and having people say, “You’re famous!” I’m kind of a turd, actually.

I apologize for using the term it girl earlier. I know it’s a bit gross to admit you love fame, but are there any parts that make you go, “Man, this is amazing”?

Being an it girl adds a shit-ton of pressure, mainly the pressure to stay one. To me, being an it girl is people getting hyped about the things you’ve been the whole time—they’re just noticing them in that specific moment. Every time a season of Never Have I Ever comes out, we’re “what’s hot on Netflix.” Then it fades. But we’re all so much more than being hot on the internet.

Okay, but I’m sure the thirst traps you post are better with a glam squad and some art direction behind you, right?

Thirst traps are fun, I can’t even lie. For red-carpet events, I have a photographer—with lighting. I never thought I’d be this person. I was lounging in the fetal position 10 minutes later, but a shot my cousin took of me on vacation is actually one of my most-liked photos. I hope people know how much went into that perfect pose. My toes aren’t even in it! I’m not gonna let the internet see those for free.

On the topic of image versus reality: when you play such an iconic character right out of the gate, you run the risk of fusing with them in people’s minds. What do you want everyone to know about you in your own right? Go ahead—set the record straight.

At one point, I hated Devi for that very reason: people just think I am her. I’m Devi in the same way everyone is. I make mistakes and feel a lot of emotions. I know I’m my own person. I want to play many different personalities in many genres, especially so I can prove—as a young brown woman—that I’m not just saying lines. I’m damn good at my job and I want audiences to watch me do it in 100 different ways.

So versatility is the name of the game for you?

One hundred per cent. Season one was definitely heavier on people thinking I was just Devi because, in all fairness, there wasn’t much out there about me at the time. I was like a one-year-old in my career. A famous baby. I’m still just a four-year-old, so please be nice! Unfortunately, audiences are never going to know who I really am. In fact, I realized no one in my life will know me the way I know me—except for maybe my dog. He sees me in my room, whether I’m having a dance party or a mental breakdown.

Maybe I can tell you what I think I know about you. There seems to be a perception that you’re pretty blunt. Even in My Little Pony: Make Your Mark—which is just voicework—you play the tough, no-nonsense pony.

I do.

People can also learn a lot about you from your Twitter, namely that your mom wanted to burn your old shoes, that you get motion sickness in cars and that, in addition to your spontaneous pottery, you once got a spontaneous tattoo. Are you not a planner by nature?

Whenever I do plan, I realize it’s kind of a waste of time. I love going on adventures with my friends. In the middle of the night, I’ll say, “Hey guys, let’s drive two hours away from here and see what’s happening. Let’s do it for the vibes!” I will say: I am driven, too. I’m a big dreamer.

Being plucked out of 15,000 young women at an open casting call, as you were, might make someone believe in destiny. Do you? Or is this all just a random free-for-all?

I’m a spiritual person. I believe in things like manifesting—you know, speaking things into the universe. I’m that girl who wishes on 11:11 every morning. I say all of my goals as quickly as possible in that minute. I’m sure it does nothing at all, but it is mentally nice to be positive. Like, take Ke Huy Quan, this year’s Best Supporting Actor winner: he talks a lot about never letting go of your dreams. I agree with him.

Do you ever think you’re always manifesting things, but maybe not in the exact way you thought? Example: You wanted to be an animator when you were a kid. Then you were cast in Pixar’s Turning Red.

Yes. I can think of so many things like that. I watched The Office in high school and always said, “One day, I’m going to meet the cast members!” I haven’t met Steve Carell yet, but I’ve slowly started checking off some others: the Mindy Kaling, of course. Angela Kinsey played Ben’s mom in season one of Never Have I Ever. That was a freak-out moment for me.

Were there any notable non-Office manifestations?

In real high school, I came up with something called “Maitreyimas,” which is on December 28—my birthday. I would joke to my friends that one day it was going to be an international holiday. Now my fans tweet “Merry Maitreyimas” to each other from all around the world. Isn’t that cool?

Very. Can you speak something into existence for me?

What do you want? Some career stuff? Some good ol’ happiness stuff?

Well, my childhood dream was to be the Canadian Oprah—which is a lot like what I’m doing today, actually.

Okay, so it’s going fine already. Anyway: Katie’s going to receive something super amazing and fulfilling. She has no idea what it is, but it’s going to happen.

I appreciate you using your powers for good.

My mom always says it’s important to put good energy out there.

I’m now going to kill the vibe a little and ask about your anxieties.

I love anxiety. Woo!

Never Have I Ever was watched in 40 million households in its first month. Do you ever wonder whether lightning will strike twice?

Oh, yeah. After season one came out, I was like: Wait, what if this is it for me? But then, I have other thoughts I hold on to. I don’t think a girl who is a flash in the pan makes the Time 100 Next list. I’m not even trying to toot my own horn, but: the cover. If that’s the case, people would want to see my face on screen, right? I also think about how much Mindy believes in me. I try to give myself flowers instead of waiting for others to give them to me.

There’s a certain line of conversation that tends to crop up around young, successful women of colour: She’s the one representative for everyone, so she has to be perfect! It’s nonsense, of course, but was that initial spotlight in any way empowering for you? Or was it just limiting?

In the beginning, I knew it was special to represent so many people. But it did turn into: Why am I being asked this question when white people don’t get asked this? Seventeen-year-old me was tweaking out about the fact that she had to stand for so many South Asian people. Too much pressure. And not all brown girls see themselves in Devi! Maybe they’re not fans of the show or my acting or my face—no hard feelings! Anyway, those representation questions don’t really bother me anymore. Someone has to answer them if we all want to move forward. That’s a privilege that I take very, very seriously.

When all is said and done, what’s your dream role? I heard it’s Rapunzel.

I’ve been on that agenda since, like, 2020. I have a sticky note on my vision board that just says: Rapunzel. I listen to the Tangled soundtrack once a week, so that, in the event that someone eventually asks me to sing the songs, I can be like, “Yeah, I got you.” I told my team and my agents to let everyone know.

Well, now we know it’s going to happen because you’ve said it.

I feel like this one’s gonna need me to say it a good couple hundred times. Honestly, there are so many books that I want to adapt for the screen. I even want to be on Hot Ones, that YouTube show where you eat spicy chicken. That’s a goal, and I’m gonna put it out there. That’s courage.

Years ago, you deferred acceptance to York University’s theatre program to shoot your show. Then you changed your degree program to human rights and equity studies. You just finished your first full year. Isn’t that funny—you’re back in school again.

I try to fit in as many courses as I can when work isn’t crazy. People ask me when I’m going to graduate and I don’t know. I have no plans to die soon. By the time I was 10, I knew exactly which high school courses I was going to take to get my college animation portfolio done. Now? Yeah, we don’t do that.

The post Never Have I Ever star Maitreyi Ramakrishnan doesn’t know what’s next. She likes it that way. appeared first on Macleans.ca.

Mississauga’s Laeticia Amihere is the next WNBA star

Mariyam Khaja — Fri, 02 Jun 2023 16:04:53 +0000

“In 2017, she went viral as the first Canadian woman ever to dunk during gameplay at an Amateur Athletic Union tournament.” (Photograph by Brinson and Banks; Hair and Makeup by Kimberly Acevedo)

When Laeticia Amihere was a kid, complete strangers would stop her on the street to ask if she played basketball. The reason was obvious: she hit a healthy five-foot-seven before she hit Grade 6. In reality, Amihere preferred soccer and track, and when her older brothers shot hoops, she was relegated to water girl. Yet by 11, she was donning a Mississauga Monarchs jersey in her local house league. “I think I started playing just so I wouldn’t have to have those conversations with strangers anymore,” she says.

Amihere’s skill was evident immediately. She was quite capable of charging the net, and her height made her a natural defender, meaning she could easily guard all five positions. Within four years, Amihere was playing provincial-level ball and, in 2017, she went viral as the first Canadian woman ever to dunk during gameplay at an Amateur Athletic Union tournament. When Canada’s national team came calling, she was only 15.

Nearing graduation, Amihere had racked up 54 offers from colleges and universities across North America. She ultimately chose to attend the University of South Carolina for the chance to play for Gamecocks head coach Dawn Staley—a five-time WNBA all-star. At USC, Amihere had some big wins: she and four of her teammates were known as “The Freshies,” an uber-talented five-pack who, together, only lost nine games in four years. Staley has said Amihere is the most determined player she’s ever coached, a quality that helped Amihere persevere when the losses inevitably set in: two ACL tears almost benched her for good, and her oldest brother, Kofi, died suddenly last August.

Grieving her basketball-loving brother only further pushed Amihere to become one of the game’s most powerful players. This spring, she was selected eighth overall by the Atlanta Dream in the WNBA draft, kissing a photo of Kofi before she took the stage. Off court, Amihere, now 21, is working to ensure that the next generation of towering tweens won’t need the input of total strangers to realize their potential. (If you’re curious, Amihere’s current height is six-foot-three, three inches above the WNBA’s average.) Last year, she founded Back to the Motherland, a not-for-profit that brings basketball to underserved communities in West Africa, where Amihere’s parents are from. She also signed her first big sponsorship with Under Armour in May. There’s buzz surrounding the possible creation of Canada’s first WNBA team in Toronto. If the time comes for her to play on home soil again, she certainly won’t be on water duty.

***

P O P Q U I Z W I T H L A E T I C I A

Favourite sports flick: The Game Plan. “I was totally obsessed with Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson when I was growing up.”

First concert: Maverick City Music, an American worship band

Most overused word: “I think it would probably be censored”

Can’t-lose object: Her phone—and the 10,000 photos it stores

Career goal: “I’m pursuing a master’s in sports management. Coaching is a possibility.”

The post Mississauga’s Laeticia Amihere is the next WNBA star appeared first on Macleans.ca.

The Best Places to Eat in Canada

Anna Minzhulina — Thu, 18 May 2023 13:56:47 +0000

Canada’s

Best Places

to Eat

Now

The country’s 20 most magical restaurants, from the tip of Vancouver Island to the edge of Newfoundland

By CHRIS NUTTALL-SMITH

Photography by JOHN CULLEN

this story is Brought to you by

Meet our critic

Chris Nuttall-Smith travelled cross-country to find Canada’s most delicious places to eat. Here, he describes how he did it.

As the dining business began to settle early this year into a new post-pandemic normal, I set out on an epic, 50-restaurant, coast-to-coast eating jag for Maclean’s, gorging my way from Quidi Vidi, Newfoundland, to Ucluelet, B.C. The intention: to take the temperature of the country’s re-made dining landscape—and to uncover Canada’s most spectacular restaurants along the way.

In making my best list, I ate in buzzing taco shops and boisterous ramen-yas, Tamil snack counters, pasta joints and an Indigenous pop-up. I tried luxe, high-French restaurants and dosa houses, dim sum and seafood and Nigerian cooking specialists, wine bars, Middle Eastern, South American and Southeast Asian spots, and an extremely earnest tasting-menu place where they make the bathroom’s hand soap from used coffee grounds and cooking grease. (Please: don’t ever.) No matter where I ate, I watched for warm service, reasonable value, spectacular cooking and, as always, a sense of genuineness and joy. And the good news? I found them in almost every city I visited.

Read Chris’s entire essay here.

Chris Nuttall-Smith is a former food critic for Toronto Life and the Globe and Mail, and a Top Chef Canada resident judge. In addition to all that, he’s a skilled home cook and recently published his first book, Cook It Wild: Sensational Prep-Ahead Meals for Camping, Cabins and the Great Outdoors.

MONTREAL

Mon Lapin

This joyful, candlelit spot is one of the finest places to eat—not just in Canada, but the world

The chefs at Mon Lapin make near-daily trips to Montreal’s Jean-Talon Market, where they draw inspiration for dishes like roast chicken marinated in sourdough starter (top) and raw scallops with brown butter and camomile bouillon (above left)

My friends and I were waffling, and our server knew it. It’s not that we weren’t hungry or thirsty or delighted to be there. There just wasn’t anything we didn’t want to eat and drink. The server smiled. She’d seen this before. “Do you want us to make up a little menu for you guys?” she asked. And so began one of the most flat-out delicious nights I’ve ever spent in a restaurant—or as I’ve come to see it since, a fairly typical evening at Mon Lapin. The polished and original and casually, consistently joyful restaurant and wine bar near Montreal’s Jean-Talon Market is, for my money, one of the greatest places to eat not just in Canada, but anywhere on the planet. It’s the place I dream about when I dream about going out for a meal.

“Mon Lapin is the place I dream about when I dream about going out for a meal”

The room, with its whitewashed walls and welcoming, candlelit party feel, is owned and run by a group of all-star Joe Beef alumni. Co-chefs Jessica Noël and Marc-Olivier Frappier cook with curiosity and verve and breathtaking skill. They soak whole, deboned chickens in liquid sourdough starter so the pan-roasted meat comes out crackle-crusted and tender and complexly fruity-tangy. They’re served with wine-steamed clams, or lobster jus, or chanterelle mushrooms—or the night we had one, under a lusty sauce I can only describe as “liquid chicken liver mousse.” The six of us kept looking wide-eyed around the table: can you believe how delicious this is? They do sublime chopped razor clams with white asparagus and homemade mayo, and cheesy, oven-hot gougères spiked with smoked Quebec eel, the bacon of the sea. Another hit: sliced raw fluke under hot brown butter, with tiny sungold tomatoes put up a few months before. There are diamond-like translucent hunks strewn around the plate: tomato brine jelly. As you eat, the dish melts into a summery fog. The theme behind it all is lively, seasonal, emphatically market-driven cooking; the chefs stroll over to Jean-Talon Market for groceries and inspiration nearly every day.

The wine service, run by sommeliers and co-owners Vanya Filipovic and Alex Landry, is every bit as brilliant. Mon Lapin might have the most inviting and treasure-packed natural wine list I’ve found outside of France, and it’s carefully managed so the bottles emerge from the restaurant’s cellar only once they’re drinking at their peak. And yet it never feels like the staff are trying to sell you something, or worse, to snow you; they don’t do fancy wine jargon or engage in ostentatious sommellerie. Late this winter, I walked in alone and sat at the bar. I didn’t hesitate this time to let them decide for me. A few dishes in, Alex Landry came by with a wine from near Shawinigan, Quebec. It was called Le Soir des Poubelles: Garbage Night. It’s probably worth noting I was love-drunk already. I’d just been thinking about how easily the restaurant sets the standard for modern, Canadian dining—how widely influential (and inimitable) Mon Lapin has become. When I asked about that wine, Landry told a short and charming story about its name, how the winemakers only saw their neighbours when they put out the garbage, so garbage night became a time to celebrate. But what stuck most was how proud and happy he seemed to be pouring the stuff. Like so much else I’d had here over a couple of visits, it was juicy, ethereal, beautifully refreshing, the very best thing I could imagine drinking in that moment. Then a cook turned up and set down another plate.

150 Saint Zotique Est, Montreal
vinmonlapin.com

Ucluelet, B.C.

Pluvio

A tiny restaurant on the tip of Vancouver Island, where each meal is packed with playful surprises

Co-owners Warren Barr and Lily Verney-Downey serve up delightful surprises, like a dessert of currant blossom and white chocolate ganache, citrus sponge and strawberry-kazu sorbet

The pre-dinner snacks are the first sign this place is special. There’s a miniature hot dog of grilled Humboldt squid under a frizz of fried shallots—three little bites of delicious disorientation. There’s a tiny roasted potato slathered in house HP sauce and speared on a stick, and a hunk of smoked, candied steelhead wrapped into paper like a corner-store caramel. It’s maybe the best piece of candy I’ve had in my adult life. “Don’t eat the paper,” the server says. The snacks at Pluvio, like so much of what they do here, are lighthearted and gorgeous and completely unexpected.

This clearly isn’t your usual tourist town spot. The 26-seat restaurant, on Vancouver Island’s surf-swept outer west coast, is owned by Lily Verney-Downey and Warren Barr. She runs the room, with its caring and smartly calibrated service; he’s the chef. Their ethos is to always overdeliver. Where most people move to places like this to slow down and relax, these two are among the hardest-working restaurateurs I’ve found. Barr and his kitchen make almost everything from scratch: their own miso, fish sauce, butter and wild rice soy sauce. They bake their own sourdough and smoke their own fish and painstakingly fashion tamale dough from whole-kernel B.C. corn. And their sourcing is basically a love letter to Vancouver Island. (A standout: the wild blackberry vermouth from Cowichan Valley.)

Even more importantly, they know that most customers don’t come to restaurants to hear ingredient lists or manifestos—they come to have fun. That understated brilliance shines through everything they touch. There was chopped albacore tuna when I went there recently: not some tweezery haute-tartare, but a build-your-own-adventure board, complete with lettuce leaves for wrapping, house-made (of course) potato matchsticks, a tiny bottle of Barr’s excellent homemade habanero sauce, and an unspeakably tasty lime-leaf sauce. There were perfect B.C. spot prawns grilled over charcoal, with crisp corn fritters made from that B.C. corn dough. There were waffles piled high with cheese and truffles, so wildly delicious-smelling that heads turned en masse as they travelled through the room.

For dessert, they brought a white chocolate and apple tart. It came in a crackling shell as thin as crepe paper, like so much of the kitchen’s work, a tour-de-force. When dinner was finished, Verney-Downey presented a carved wooden box. Inside was a parting sweet, what a fussier place might have called a mignardise. Here, it came as a treasure hunt—a box full of seashells, with a homemade chocolate truffle hidden in their midst. I popped it into my mouth and beamed.

1714 Peninsula Road, Ucluelet, B.C.
pluvio.ca

Montreal

Mastard

Low-key luxury is the thing at chef Simon Mathys’s delightful (and affordable) restaurant

The beauty is on the plate at Simon Mathys’s relaxed Montreal restaurant, as in a dish of tomato topped with Montreal smoked meat fat, herbs and edible flowers (Photograph: Philippe Richelet)

The room, though friendly, comfortable and filled with happy locals from Montreal’s Rosemont neighbourhood, was built on the cheap; the feel of the place, in the words of one review, is “convivial et sans fla-fla,” which is pretty much right. As for the address, Mastard is on a street of rowhouses, across from a schoolyard, a not unpleasant hike from Montreal’s Fabre metro stop, just a few steps past a long-vacant Dollar Bonheur. “Yeah, no, it’s not a cool area,” chef Simon Mathys says. The luxuries here come on the plates. Mathys, a soft-spoken star on the province’s culinary scene, turns out playful, original, often exhilarating cooking at the year-and-a-half-old restaurant, which he owns with his girlfriend, Viki Brisson-Sylvestre. And he’s making a point of doing that at prices almost any food lover can afford.

Mastard serves a five-course, ever-changing menu. There might be a humble piece of Gaspé Arctic char: ruby pink, perfectly cooked, on an emerald pool of parsley sauce and creamy-centred white beans, dotted with pop-popping beads of mullet roe. It’s a visual stunner, entrancing as a Chopard display, and delicious enough that I had to pause to gather myself between bites. Mathys naps it all under a ham hock–flavoured hollandaise, a minor miracle among many the night I went. Or maybe it’s the breakfast radishes in a springtime stew that’s both fresh and decadent, and utterly transportive. Or the simple high-summer tomato slabs he dresses with herbs and verdant-tasting camelina oil, with a savoury assist from hot Montreal smoked meat fat. What they all have in common are the focused, original, only-in-Quebec flavours, and the familiar comfort his cooking delivers in spite of their high-cuisine roots.

Mastard’s wine list, refreshingly, is every bit as thoughtful, full of natural esoterica from better-value makers; the pairings are just $50, and the bottles top out around $120. That’s around the price where wine lists at many places of Mastard’s culinary calibre just begin to hit their stride. “I don’t want people to come once a year or once every five years to celebrate,” Mathys says. “I want you to be back in a month.”

1879 Rue Bélanger, Montreal
restaurantmastard.com

Niagara, Ontario

Restaurant Pearl Morissette

The exquisite ingredients at this Niagara winery restaurant are grown on-site

Most of the produce on chefs Eric Robertson and Daniel Hadida’s menu comes from their own backyard. Recently, they did a celeriac dish with whole-grain sake lees, rice and caviar, served with a mussel sauce.

Daniel Hadida and Eric Robertson first opened their ambitious Niagara wine-region restaurant in November of 2017. Through that fall and winter and the better part of a year, the chefs routinely drove delivery runs between shifts at the stoves. Hadida ran east out to Pearson Airport every Thursday to collect Newfoundland urchins and snow crabs and B.C. geoduck clams. Robertson took care of Pearl Morissette’s longer-haul produce. When he wasn’t roaring deep southwest into Ontario’s farm country, he got his mom to help out; she’d pull up to their kitchen in her Honda Civic, its trunk overflowing with organic veg. They were farming too, and dry-aging meats, working with a full-time forager, and putting up bushel-loads of produce. Robertson and Hadida had both come up through top kitchens in Europe; they didn’t see why the ingredients in their restaurant shouldn’t be every bit as good. But what stood out even beyond their ambition was the extraordinariness of those co-chefs’ food. And what stands out to me today, nearly six years (and another seven or eight visits) since they opened, is how the experience and unhurried deliciousness of eating there gets markedly better every single time.

Hadida and Robertson lean heavily on their own gardens’ veg and berries and herbs these days (they grow the vast bulk of the restaurant’s produce on-site), along with local meats and Canadian fish, and vinegars made from the property’s stone fruit and grapes. So maybe there’s a puff pastry tart near the start of dinner, with pickled peaches and beets, with caviar and scallop roe pâté, so strange in its voluptuous balance of rich and earthy, maritime and bright, that it’s a little like hearing an unknown language. It’s so exquisite, too, that you discover you’re fluent straight out of the gate. Maybe there’s Dungeness crab with pickled pears, or dry-aged pork and white beans cooked along with slices of ham that’s been curing for nearly four years, so the beans are almost as soft and rich and gently funky as bites of triple-cream brie.

The natural wines and wine service are excellent, though the restaurant’s non-alcoholic juice pairings, made entirely from local-grown herbs, vegetables, roots and fruit, are a genuine revelation. The feel of the room, with its views out across the gardens, is high-pastoral elegance: it’s light and comfortable and deeply professional, with forager-gardener Deirdre Fraser’s herb and flower arrangements radiating humble beauty throughout the space. The desserts are every bit as standout as the mains—the chefs also run a bakeshop in nearby Jordan Village, with an all-star team of pastry hands at its helm.

In spite of the place’s constant evolution and improvement, Hadida and Robertson still drive deliveries a lot of weeks, though they’ve got a lot more cooks to help out these days. What’s also stayed the same is the joy of a lunch or dinner there, and the feeling that Pearl Morissette, already by any measure one of the very best spots to eat in Canada, has plenty of room yet to keep on maturing—that it hasn’t even begun to hit its stride.

3953 Jordan Road, Jordan Station, Ontario
restaurantpearlmorissette.com

Richmond, B.C.

The Fish Man

Chef Bo Li’s modern Szechuan and Cantonese spot is a master class in old-school seafood—with plenty of twists

The must-try at this contemporary Chinese spot is the signature—and enormous—pickled cabbage soup, loaded with wide cellophane noodles, tofu cubes and a whole B.C. rockfish cut into hunks

When the soup arrives, we all lean way back. The bowl is enormous, billowing, the size of a cauldron, filled with thick golden broth and wide cellophane noodles, with cabbage and cubes of tofu, plus a whole B.C. rockfish cut into hunks, its tail riding high up the rim. It smells sweet and fresh and beguilingly sour, not of lemon, exactly, but something close. And the scent of Szechuan peppercorns, with their red berry buzz, seems to hang above it all, loose in the steam like charged electrons. “Oh my God,” one of my lunchmates exhales. For the next transcendent, 20-odd minutes, none of us is really able to speak.

The soup, from chef Bo Li, is the go-to order in his modern Szechuan and Cantonese seafood spot, where the specialty is super-fresh wild B.C. fish. The restaurant, in a busy commercial plaza in booming Richmond, feels alive and fun, with open roof trusses and chandeliers made to look like fishnets; it’s filled most hours with young Chinese speakers. That soup is a riff of sorts on Szechuan suan cai yu, or pickled cabbage soup. Li’s version is a master class in finesse—it’s massively tasty, but somehow delicate enough to let the flavour of the fish shine through. Li, originally from northeast China, came to Canada for university, but discovered he wasn’t the academic type. So he signed up for culinary school in Winnipeg, cooking French and Italian for academic credit while working nights at an enormous Chinese buffet. He opened a sushi spot after graduating, then moved to South Vancouver, where he ran a Chinese grill for six or seven years. “I have a lot of different influences,” he says. No kidding, pal.

His non-soup menu is pretty sensational too. There are baked Pacific beach oysters the size of your hand, and geoduck clams that come sliced into opalescent discs and frazzled in a stream of hot oil. He does superb wok-fried Manila clams, and spot prawns in season. In all of it, like that soup of his, the seafood is the star. (Also, do not sleep on the pitchers of dried black plum juice they bring to drink; it’s seasoned with licorice and Chinese brown sugar, fantastically quenching stuff.) We finished with a jumbo lobster that had been wok-fried with aromatics and Chinese wine, then steamed over a lotus leaf and sticky rice. Even as we all collapsed in sighs, there was another flavour I couldn’t place, that had somehow brought that dish into an even higher realm. “Butter,” Li told me later. “It’s not typical.” In Chinese wok-fried lobster? It certainly is not. “But without butter you’re kind of missing something, right?”

8391 Alexandra Road, No. 1170, Richmond, B.C.
fishmanrestaurant.com

Toronto

Edulis

It looks like a cozy neighbourhood bistro and tastes like old-world fine dining

Every meal at chefs Tobey Nemeth and Michael Caballo’s restaurant is a special occasion. The menu includes a mix of Spanish snacks and French-influenced fine dining, like lobster salpicón with white asparagus and lobster roe.

The walls of Tobey Nemeth and Michael Caballo’s Toronto restaurant are covered with menus from the planet’s greatest kitchens, mementoes of the eating trips they build their holidays and lives around. There’s Arzak and Meadowood, Boulud and Bocuse, Akelarre and L’Ambroisie, titans all of high cuisine. And there are also the slightly lesser-known places: the countryside mom and pops and templos del producto where the specialty is obtaining impossibly perfect ingredients, then serving them with uncommon grace and skill. Edulis, the couple’s intimate and incomparable 24-seat room, is a mix of those worlds: grand and somehow humble too, fancy but decidedly fun. Now 11 years old, it is also, to my mind, the most personal fine dining spot anywhere in Canada; their touch is on absolutely everything here.

Their specialty is a mix of vernacular Spanish drinking dishes and ultra-fresh seafood and vegetables, handled with restraint. Their menus often include a ridiculously indulgent standard of high-French cooking: black truffle soup under a dome of golden pastry, say, or an elaborate canard à la presse. All of it is served at a leisurely pace, ideally with very good wine. No one will ever attempt to turn your table here. They’ve been making their own Spanish-style conservas recently: P.E.I. bluefin belly and Newfoundland razor clams, grilled over hardwood and sealed in tins, in the style of one of their favourite places on the Cantabrian Sea. They stuff ultra-creamy cheeses with fresh black truffles and smoke bushel-loads of grown-to-order paprika chilis each fall to make Spanish-style pimenton, which they grind to order so it’s always fresh.

Nemeth and Caballo don’t merely run a restaurant; they live their lives in the pursuit of deliciousness. You can’t miss that level of commitment on their plates. The last time I ate there, for a late-winter lunch, we had wild sea bream dressed with chili and fennel, and a whip-crack tasty Galician empanada filled with bonito and peppers. There were mussels and pheasant, simple salad, and blanquette de veau, then Nemeth came around with a bottle of Spanish brandy to go with the quince and apple custard cake she’d just made. My lunchmate, a first-timer here (or anywhere like it), was bug-eyed and beaming, overwhelmed by the delirious excessiveness of it all. “I feel like I’m in their home,” he said.

169 Niagara Street, Toronto
edulisrestaurant.com

Montreal

Damas

A self-taught chef’s stunning tribute to his Syrian roots

Fuad Nirabie’s gorgeous dining room turns out plates inspired by his childhood memories, like a crunchy fattoush with more than 20 ingredients (above right); pistachio kibbeh with sheep’s milk yogurt; and a rainbow of dips like beet and eggplant mutabbal, hummus and mouhammara served with delicate saj bread (above left)

Fuad Nirabie’s gorgeous dining room turns out plates inspired by his childhood memories, like a crunchy fattoush with more than 20 ingredients (above); pistachio kibbeh with sheep’s milk yogurt; and a rainbow of dips like beet and eggplant mutabbal, hummus and mouhammara served with delicate saj bread (top)

Fuad Nirabie’s polished, spare-no-effort Syrian fine dining spot draws deeply on his childhood memories. There was the night in Homs when he was 12 years old and his aunt and mother and grandmother made a fattoush salad. He remembers noticing how finely they’d chopped its herbs and vegetables, so in each bite you got a taste of everything. He remembers thinking how much time and effort they committed to get it right. He remembers the taste of sheep’s milk yogurt and its importance in his family’s diet, and how whenever they travelled half an hour west, toward the Mediterranean, they didn’t eat lamb so much as fish. And he remembers, especially, the importance of little details, how in Syrian architecture, as in its cooking, the broad strokes didn’t matter as much as the fine ones; how often he’d enter a plain-looking home to find an exquisitely finished courtyard inside its walls.

Damas is Nirabie’s tribute to the richness of those memories. The room is all lush, polished wood and tile, and jewel-coloured lanterns, as in those hidden courtyards. It’s strikingly beautiful, filled from open to close with as diverse an array of diners—young and old, formal and family casual, Syrian and otherwise—as you’ll ever find in a fancy restaurant, patrolled by all-pro staff. As for Damas’s ingredients, Nirabie imports them directly, painstakingly, from Syria and its bordering diaspora communities: container-loads of spices and pistachios, chickpeas and pomegranate molasses and fermented Aleppo pepper paste. By partnering with a sheep and goat dairy in Quebec’s Eastern Townships, he developed Syrian-style cheese and yogurt that tasted just like home. To develop a steady supply of the right kind of purslane, a leafy herb in his kitchen’s fattoush, he spent four years working with a Montreal grower. That fattoush of his, a crunchy, juicy, sublimely balanced riot of chopped veg and herbs, citrusy sumac and pita—it has more than 20 ingredients, all of them minutely chopped—is quite possibly the single greatest salad I’ll ever eat. And Damas’s lamb- and beef -based kibbeh nayyeh tartare is many multiples more comforting and cosmopolitan and profoundly tasty than any French tartare. As with almost every bite I had here, to try it is to realize just how complex and historic and spectacular Syrian food can be.

Nirabie is both a self-taught chef and restaurateur, but he’s a master culinary researcher also; before he took up cooking, he spent the early 2000s as a film student, researching an as-yet-unmade feature film he hoped to build around the roots of regional Syrian food. Herbs, nuts, and exotic sours play key roles in almost every dish, frequently with labneh or good tahini for mellow creaminess. And it doesn’t hurt that Damas’s wine list is superb, or that nearly everything arrives on hammered silver plates. Nirabie is always developing new ideas—tastes that meld his own past with regional or historic takes on Syrian dishes. (A recent effort: he stuffed vine leaves with lamb and quince and other fruits, then charred them over the kitchen’s charcoal grill.) But then even a food as commonplace as chicken shish taouk eats here like a life event: Nirabie marinates it for days in fermented chili paste and spices and sheep’s milk yogurt, then grills the chicken over charcoal, so the brightly grassy tangy taste of the yogurt floats, almost like a breeze, above the savoury depths of grill smoke and char.

1201 Avenue Van Horne, Montreal
damas.ca

Scarborough, Ontario

One2 Snacks

A humble Malaysian noodle house that outdoes many of Canada’s fanciest dining rooms

Chon, Tracy and Bryan Choy make Malaysian street food worthy of Kuala Lumpur

The first time I ever ate at this tiny, street-style Malaysian spot in Scarborough, I’d been out a few nights earlier at the many-million-dollar restaurant of a famous chef. That high-end downtown room was on all the fancy lists; the servers referred to their boss only in a reverent whisper. All I could think at One2 Snacks, as I slurped and swooned and stammered my way through the gloriously fragrant laksa noodle soup, was how the famous downtown chef had exactly nothing on Tracy and Chon and Bryan Choy.

The quietly incredible wife-husband-son trio opened on a shoestring in 2009; nothing on their menu cost more than $10. They’d never even worked as “proper” chefs—Tracy, who did the wok cooking, had trained as a typesetter back in Malaysia, and Chon, the laksa master, as a draftsman. Yet their dishes then, as today, remain some of the most delicious and skillful cooking I’ve had in Canada, made with an extraordinary measure of commitment and love. Their char kway teow, a wok-seared mix of fat yellow egg noodles, chicken, crunchy bean sprouts, scallions and dark Malaysian soy, is the greatest example I’ve found here of the power of wok hei, the sweetly smoky “breath of the wok” that comes only from timing and muscle memory and incredibly high heat. Or as a Malaysian friend of mine put it the other week, “This is on par with the best char kway teow in Kuala Lumpur.”

Wok hei, you learn at One2 Snacks, is as real and tangible an ingredient as eggs or shrimp. Their curry laksa, with its deeply orange-hued broth blushed red with chili paste, is a study in perfect balance: of sweetness and acidity, of spice and herbal lift and comforting, coconut milk richness.

“The dishes at One2 Snacks are some of the most delicious and skillful cooking I’ve had in Canada, made with an extraordinary measure of commitment and love”

The mee goreng, meanwhile, wokked noodles with chili and shrimp paste, is all endorphin-tweaking burn and deep-marine funk, tempered with tomato sweetness. And for a super simple rice-starch-driven snack, I can’t think of much nicer than the thickly rolled rice noodle dish called chee cheong fun, or the grilled, banana leaf–wrapped coconut rice and shrimp sticks called pulut panggang. The kuih dadar crepes, for dessert, taste like stepping into a crowded night market; they’re flavoured with the green, sweet-herbal juice of tropical pandan leaves, and stuffed with slow cooked palm sugar and coconut mix.

Be advised, the pandemic was not good to the Choys: Chon went through a major medical scare, and the family has moved strictly to takeout. Your best bet, always, is to order in advance by email (though there’s no website, the email address and menu are reasonably easy to find via Yelp), and plan to eat on a patch of local green space or the hood of a car. What remains constant is how firmly the Choys’ cooking grabs you, how hard it is to form any outside thoughts as you’re eating their food. And though this makes exactly zero sense, nothing on the menu costs more than $10, even today.

8 Glen Watford Drive, Scarborough, Ontario

Toronto

Prime Seafood Palace

Matty Matheson’s destination spot is all about sumptuous steak and seafood

A trip to Matty Matheson’s Toronto restaurant is all about indulgence: a plate of rosy-rare 12-ounce prime rib, for example, with fluffy Yorkshire pudding and a smoky carrot–goat cheese tart (top right), or an order of caviar with crème fraîche, shallots, chives and potato chips (top left)

A trip to Matty Matheson’s Toronto restaurant is all about indulgence: a plate of rosy-rare 12-ounce prime rib, for example, with fluffy Yorkshire pudding and a smoky carrot–goat cheese tart (middle), or an order of caviar with crème fraîche, shallots, chives and potato chips (top)

Sure, it can be a challenge to reconcile the soaring, sculptural perfection of Matty Matheson’s latest Toronto “it” spot with its owner’s persona. While the maple-clad room, with its arched, slat-wood ceiling and wood-fired grill, has rightly been described as serene and transcendent, Matheson, the chef and actor-producer (in Disney+’s hit show The Bear, most recently) is still best known in many parts as a jolly buffoon with a heart of gold. He’s the sort of guy who’ll film a cooking show in a BDSM harness and dungeon mask; whose rise as a star on social media (1.2 million Instagram followers) has featured more naked toilet selfies than it’s advisable to count. Yet Matheson has always been a restaurant guy; he knows what’s great. And as this latest effort of his affirms, he’s infinitely smarter than his for-camera persona usually lets on.

Prime Seafood Palace, a hybrid steakhouse and seafood (and vegetable) spot on Queen Street West, is a masterpiece, the very rare restaurant that gets pretty much everything exactly right. The mood and the floor service, run by an all-pro team, are smart and genuine. There’s a pride of ownership here that you don’t find in 95 per cent of high-end spots. And the cooking, run by chef Coulson Armstrong, is the sort that stays with you, that you find yourself raving about weeks later, in the park or at the dentist’s—high-effort, technique-driven dishes that manage, in spite of all that, to taste like joyful abandon. So you can nerd out, if you must, at the kitchen’s culinary pyrotechnics, or just loll for an evening in a ridiculously delicious haze.

The seafood side of the menu is spectacular: the sea urchin toasts, for instance, that combine layers of brown butter–crisped milk bread with chopped tuna belly, Hokkaido urchin and peppery Ontario ginger. It’s all mineral depth and maritime richness, melded into time-stopping bliss. Or maybe it’s the “seafood boudin” sausage from a few months back, made with whipped scallops, shrimp and house-cured lardo. The mixture was packaged in a delicate cabbage wrapper, smoked over the grill so it was all savoury thrum and smoky char, brightened with sunny Japanese yuzu juice. The veg dishes, too, are every bit as inspired: the carrots, say, that are steamed then slowly grilled to nearly fudge and set with melty Grey Owl cheese into a profoundly buttery-flaky pastry crust. The beef here, whether the dry-aged prime rib or strip steak, gets softly poached in burbling beef fat before it’s grilled to a well-crusted sizzle over wood embers. It’s then brushed down with a supercharged take on bordelaise sauce.

All that deliciousness comes at a cost: Prime Seafood Palace is easily one of Canada’s priciest restaurants. (Those urchin toasts, which are meant to feed two people, went for $90 last time I checked.) But if you’re after a splash-out dinner, it’s also, to my mind, among the best places on the continent. And as a bonus, the Palace’s main floor restroom is a gorgeous space, with a marble-tiled skylight shaft that rises some 30 feet up. Which is to say that it’s perfect, if this is your thing, for a naked toilet selfie or two—and the management will have exactly zero right to complain.

944 Queen Street West, Toronto
primeseafoodpalace.ca

St. John’s

Mallard Cottage

A one-of-a-kind culinary tour through the tastes of Newfoundland

Mallard Cottage, in a centuries-old clapboard house, pays tribute to the ingredients and traditions of Newfoundland. Its superb cod cheeks, for example, are marinated in buttermilk and dredged in corn flour.

The partridge chip at Mallard Cottage is a thing of magnificence. The meat itself is juicy and succulent, poached slowly in oil until it’s falling apart. It’s piled, just a bit of it, with a slice of foie gras onto a homemade potato chip. It’s crunchy and salty, voluptuously rich and just the slightest bit wild-tasting, a one-bite welcome gift before the real dinner starts. It’s also as local to Quidi Vidi, to this tiny, historic fishing and farming village at the edge of St. John’s, as you could possibly imagine. “The guy who shot that partridge,” chef Todd Perrin tells me later, in his thick island accent, “If you look out the window, you can see his house.”

Everything you see and eat here is somehow rooted in Quidi Vidi. Perrin’s spot, a one-of-a-kind Newfoundland dining institution and cultural centre of sorts, is built around a clapboard Irish cottage from the early 1800s—one of the oldest remaining structures in St. John’s. Perrin took it over in 2011, then built the adjoining kitchen and dining room. Nothing about it, whether the place or the cooking, is overly complicated; the specialty here is Newfoundland comfort food served with unobtrusive cheffy twists. There are cod cheeks and moose steaks, potatoes, partridge, mussels, chanterelles, scallops and cabbage. “That you can serve cod and potatoes in a small-f fine restaurant—that makes me incredibly proud,” Perrin says.

About that cod: it’s absurdly delicious. The cheeks get marinated in buttermilk, then dredged in corn flour batter and fried hot and fast. They come out molten and juicy, but still tasting like the world’s freshest fish; the deliciousness goes straight to your head. The cabbage was done tempura-style when I had it, crunchy, juicy, gorgeously seasoned. You might find carrots with romesco sauce, or spaghetti with rabbit puttanesca, or squash and brussels sprouts under a sweet-spicy hot-honey glaze. It’s simple stuff, all of it, and yet delicious enough to be a highlight of any trip.

8 Barrows Road, St. John’s
mallardcottage.ca

Ottawa

Supply & Demand

A happy neighbourhood bistro with spectacular seafood

Supply & Demand, a hybrid raw bar–bistro in Ottawa, is warm and fun, with great seafood and a sort-of-secret gin and tonic list. The house Caesar is practically a meal, topped with pepperoncini, pickled celery, an olive and an oyster, and the baked Alaska for two features spice cake, cream cheese gelato and haskap berries.

Supply & Demand is near the top of my list of fantasy neighbourhood restaurants—“fantasy” at least in some part because it’s nowhere near my actual home. And also because they do a meatball dish there that I can’t get out of my head. The meatballs are made not from beef or ground pork, but from fresh albacore tuna and good prosciutto, with chilis and lemon zest and gently cooked veg. They come on squid ink rigatoni, deep-ocean black, tossed with a sunshiney tomato and lobster sauce that pulses with freshness and depth. And how does it all taste? Like falling in love on a beach on the Aegean. Which is pretty good considering this was January when I had that dish, just off Wellington Street in Ottawa, and a solid minus a million or so outside.

The place is a raw bar and bistro with excellent cocktails and even a sort-of-secret gin and tonic list. It’s warm and fun, and the cooking is exceptional. It’s not cheap, but not expensive, and by all appearances, it’s run by genuinely good-hearted humans, too. Steve and Jen Wall are from Labrador and New Brunswick, respectively. They met in Ottawa, then married and had a couple of kids. Steve was the cook who never stopped pushing: he’d drive to New York on his days off to stage with the greats, sleeping in hostels and pulling in back home just in time for his shift. Jen was the front-of-house maestro. Supply & Demand has been rammed since they opened it in 2013.

This is a great place to order a tray of oysters, or a seafood crudo so smartly underdressed that you don’t have to use any imagination at all. The vegetables and salads are excellent, Italian-spirited, like a lot of Wall’s cooking. The pastas are made in-house, consistently superb. Another standout lately: the whorls of tonnarelli dressed with clams, and butter and lemon cooked down to citrusy caramel. It’s sour, sweet and silky-savoury, with confetti of toasted seaweed for crunch. (The pastas can come in half-portions, also—a customer-first amenity that’ll make any carb-loving diner’s heart sing.) The mains are blessedly simple and made with pride and, as for the desserts, they’re classics: Eton mess, say, or baked Alaska (you will know it by the whoosh of flames). It doesn’t have to be complicated, you know?

1335 Wellington Street, Ottawa
supplyanddemandfoods.ca

Scarborough, Ontario

Fishman Lobster Clubhouse

The GTA’s go-to bacchanalian party spot is packed with seafood towers and Instagrammers

People come to Fishman Lobster Clubhouse as much for the spectacle as for the seafood, which generally comes in heaping towers of king crab, lobster and rice dotted with roe

Everyone becomes a paparazzo at Fishman Lobster Clubhouse. When you’re faced with seafood feasts this impressive, it doesn’t make sense to resist. Here’s a tower of lobster as high as your forehead, slowly spinning at the centre of the table, the Lazy Susan–bound belle of the crustaceous ball. There are stacks of king crab legs arranged like log cabins, next to batter-fried fish and lobster roe rice, next to enormous noodle platters and mountains of greens. Fishman Lobster Clubhouse is a celebration spot unlike any I know. It’s a big-box bacchanal of 600-odd seats (plus patio) and silver poly tablecloths, of steamed and wok-fried and broiled fresh seafood. It’s all birthday parties and business dinners, buds with beers and big spenders guzzling pomerol. It’s dates and bus tours and extended family meet-and-greets.

Raymond Xie and his relatives started the business in 2009, in a room the size of a convenience store. They’ve had to move to bigger premises twice so far. By 2017, says Xie, they sold so much shellfish that they built their own lobster depot out on the East Coast. The Cantonese-style cooking is cheap, for what it is. It comes fast, and it’s consistently, resoundingly, exceedingly good. Most tables order the lobster Hong Kong–style: in a gauzy batter made with five-spice (I’m guessing) and garlic (can’t miss it) and a hit of white sugar (I’d bet my house). It’s juicy and steamy and just lightly crunchy, with a touch of welcome sweetness and the slightest warmth from chili heat. They garnish the tower with iceberg lettuce hunks, which maybe seems strange until you pop one into your mouth. Or you can get the lobsters done, if you prefer, in any of four other ways; the same story goes for the crabs. The menu-wide throughline is how cleanly the ingredients sing, how everything tastes just like itself, but better. Even the chicken soup, the test of any kitchen, is richly concentrated and dark as Jurassic amber, powerfully tasty stuff.

The way to do the place is to bring a crowd. Four people is good, but 10 is the dream. If you do 10, the Lobster Mountain Family Dinner comes with 12 pounds of lobster and seven of crab, plus oysters and pork, beef and greens, with fried rice and three whole fried fish and an old college try at dessert. If it were me I’d get a bottle of whisky and beers for the table. Pomerol really isn’t seafood wine.

4020 Finch Avenue East, Scarborough, Ontario
flctoronto.com

Toronto

Bernhardt’s

A wine bar, rotisserie chicken spot and Jewish soul food kitchen all in one welcoming package

Chef Zachary Kolomeir (pictured above, on the right, with chef Liam Donato) specializes in a fancified take on Swiss Chalet rotisserie chicken as well as more creative plates, like poached shrimp with carrots and spicy butter

Zachary Kolomeir and Carmelina Imola’s west side Toronto spot is definitely a rotisserie chicken joint, what with its half- and whole-bird meal deals, complete with the gravy that tastes like a top chef’s take on Swiss Chalet. But there’s even more heart, I’d argue, in the kitchen’s work with humble vegetables, in the silky-savoury eggplant-garlic-anchovy “baba-cauda” (baba ghanoush plus bagna cauda, get it?) they served with crunchy radishes and leaves the last time I went. With its pewter-topped counter and romance lighting, Bernhardt’s is a cozy neighbourhood wine bar, also—one of the best places I’ve found for quick-fire games of “spot the first-time Tinder date.” (You will know them by their tentatively roaming hands.) And it’s also, unmistakably, a Montreal Jewish–style soul food kitchen; come for superlative steak tartare on latkes, and stay for the Shabbat-style lamb, as they call it, with white beans. (Like so many other stars of the Canadian culinary scene, Kolomeir and Imola both came out of Montreal’s Joe Beef group.)

Yet what I find myself returning to time and again is how effortlessly Bernhardt’s manages to be so many things, all held together by a single constant thread. The house specialty, no matter what you call it, is above-and-beyond delicious cooking served with warmth and charm, and at refreshingly mid-range prices, at least by Toronto standards. That lamb, to cite just one dish, was a thing of genius, the meat roasted slowly, then seared to a crisp. It came buried under a lemony-garlicky parsley drift, in a bowl of broth and bitter greens and creamy-textured beans. Or the fennel that Kolomeir’s kitchen braised one night to soft and sweet and just gently licoricey, with a butter sauce flavoured by Old Bay seasoning, and perfect, pink-blushed shrimp all around the bowl.

There’s homemade ice cream and sorbet for dessert, a magnificently springtimey rhubarb-vanilla twist last time I went. It was garnished with toasted sunflower seed praline—a novel combination but completely inspired. I’m pretty sure they don’t have that at Swiss Chalet.

202 Dovercourt Road, Toronto
bernhardtstoronto.com

Calgary

JinBar

Chef Jinhee Lee’s fun, fresh restaurant is half pizzeria, half Korean fried chicken joint

Among the more irreverent menu items at this Calgary snack bar: a pizza topped with alfredo sauce, corn kernels and honey-butter potato chips

Jinhee Lee had spent most of a decade working her way up through Calgary’s restaurant scene when she went back home to Korea for a visit. After years of cooking fancy food, and no end of acclaim, she revelled at home in more casual tastes: Korean fried chicken, sweet bulgogi beef and soft serve ice cream. She realized how much she missed the comfort staples of her youth.

JinBar, a young, fresh-feeling restaurant that opened two years ago at the edge of Calgary’s Bridgeland neighbourhood, is her answer to those cravings. It’s just a casual fried chicken, cocktails and pizza joint if you don’t look too hard. Except the chicken comes as crisp and juicy as you might ever dream, redolent of its ginger and garlic marinade, and coated, if you’d like, in Korean chili glaze. She’s been serving it by the piece lately with crème fraîche and caviar—the most prodigally delicious use of both fried chicken and caviar you’re liable to taste any time soon. As for the pizza, Lee serves it distinctly Korean-style, topped with sweet bulgogi beef and fried buldak chicken, or a mix of kernel corn and the honey-butter potato chips they make in house—a taste you need to try only once to acquire.

“JinBar is just a casual fried chicken, cocktails and pizza joint if you don’t look too hard. Except the chicken comes as crisp and juicy as you might ever dream, redolent of its ginger and garlic marinade.”

From behind JinBar’s fast food facade, Lee also trades in more complex dishes. She makes sensational lemongrass curry sablefish, for instance, in a sweet, tangy beurre blanc built on lime juice and fish sauce. There’s slow-roasted pork belly with maple syrup and fried kimchi, too. For dessert, there are superb Korean doughnuts and profoundly creamy condensed milk ice cream, topped with brown sugar–sweetened tapioca pearls, served in antique China cups. It looks for all the world like your grandma’s ice cream and blueberries, except it isn’t even close to that, or to anything else in town.

24 4th Street Northeast, Calgary
jinbar.ca

St. John’s

Portage

This eclectic newcomer brings Chinese dumplings, hare nuggets and moose donairs to the East Coast

Chef-owners Celeste Mah and Ross Larkin are bringing fresh flavours and techniques to Newfoundland cuisine, like cod steamed with ginger and leeks, topped with chili crisp and served with sides of soy-braised cabbage and jasmine rice

Ross Larkin always wanted to serve a moose donair: roasted moose meat piled into a pita with sweet-creamy-garlicky sauce. He first got the idea from a cook at Raymonds, the iconic St. John’s fine dining kitchen where he worked as chef de cuisine. Occasionally, they’d make a few donairs for a casual staff meal. But they’d never serve one to actual guests—not in a place as fine dining as that. The very idea became a running gag.

Then the pandemic hit and Raymonds closed. A year ago, Larkin and Celeste Mah, his wife, who is also a chef, opened their own spot. They promised themselves they’d serve the sort of food they liked to eat. That moose donair of their dreams went into heavy rotation, served on fresh-from-the-oven pitas, dressed with tart-sweet Newfoundland tomatoes they’d preserved. It was very much worth the wait. Portage’s specialty is foods from away, made for the most part from the island’s bounty. So there are breaded, fried nuggets sometimes, with honey mustard for dipping, but made from wild Newfoundland hare instead of mechanically separated chicken meat. Mah and Larkin season their cod with ginger and leeks, then steam it instead of baking or frying or searing in fat; they then dollop the delicate flesh with homemade chili crisp. “Most Newfoundlanders have never had steamed cod,” says Larkin. “They can’t believe what they’re tasting.” Neither, to be fair, could I. Mah, who grew up in East Vancouver, does excellent handmade Chinese dumplings, while the roast carrots come tossed with darkly puckery tamarind glaze.

What the couple’s cooking—dumplings, nuggets, tamarind carrots and the like—might never do is meet some big city visitors’ come from away preconceptions. “I can get this sort of food in Toronto,” I’ve heard more than one of them say. Well, yes you can, and also, you can’t: not made with cod this absurdly fresh, or ptarmigan or grouse. Not with just-picked cloudberries, or Torngat mountain char, or moose of any kind, unless you personally know the hunter. You can’t get it made with ingredients this incredible in a room this open-arms hospitable—jeez, the people are nice in Newfoundland—with a wine and drinks list this inviting and fairly priced. At just a year old, Portage is already essential Canadian eating, in one of the country’s most endlessly fascinating towns.

128 Water Street, St. John’s
portagenl.ca

Mississauga, Ontario

Guru Lukshmi

This always-packed destination in Toronto’s suburbs makes sensational dosas

Guru Lukshmi’s massive dosas are stuffed with all sorts of tasty fillings, like spiced potatoes, Nutella and even M&Ms

The kitchen at this Mississauga classic specializes in vegetarian cooking from South India: tender rice-flour cakes; crisp, lentil-battered vada doughnuts; giant wheat dough puri puffballs; and the vegetable-topped, Kerala-style pancakes called uttapam, most of them served with an array of superb sauces and chutneys. But the attractions that draw no end of crowds—Guru Lukshmi is one of the suburbs’ toughest reservations—are the kitchen’s enormous, crepe-like dosas, filled with anything from ghee and herbs and chunky smashed potatoes to Nutella and M&Ms. Most of the dosas are made with tangy fermented rice and lentil batter and come burnished deep golden with clarified butter. You can go almost anywhere from that point: paper-thin or thick, pizza-style (literally; they’re topped with marinara and mozz) or kid-friendly (they do jelly roll dosas and straight-up ghee with icing sugar). You can get low-calorie (with cabbage and carrots), rava-style (made from semolina and rice batter) and even Jain (which exclude any vegetables that grow underground).

If it all seems like a lot, I’ve never regretted an order here; Guru Lukshmi, run by wife-husband-daughter trio Thana Lakshmi Guru, Kumar Gurutharan Nala and Nishaa Guru, is as consistent today as when the place first opened, albeit slightly farther north, in 2009. The room is modern and elegant and filled with South Asian families from across the GTA. And nothing costs more than around $17. The paper dosas—they look like edible airfoils—are superb here, butter-sweet and crisp as croissant shards and slightly tangy. The fillings are generally knockout good. Even the basic onion and potato is a thing of beauty, stained deep, flaxen yellow from ghee and turmeric, studded with curry leaves, cooked just enough so it’s nicely softened, but still with a hint of mellow oniony crunch and bite. The regular dosas are slightly thicker, and tangier, more about their batter than the butter. I love the spicy channa paneer (chickpea and cheese), and spinach numbers, though in truth, the chocolate and cashew version is pretty sensational too. To drink, the mango lassi and milk tea are good, but the cola-like (sort of) salted cumin soda, from Kashmir, is a fascinating—and at least to my taste, delicious—must-try.

7070 Saint Barbara Boulevard, Units 45 and 50, Mississauga, Ontario
gurulukshmi.com

Vancouver

Oca Pastificio

A feast of fresh pasta that’s worth the down-the-block lineups

Chef-owner Greg Dilabio hand-cranks some of Canada’s finest pasta, like a whorl of taglierini with tomato sauce and burrata flown in from Italy

If the phrase “pasta tasting menu” doesn’t grab you, maybe keep on shuffling, there’s nothing at all to see here. But if it does, well, wow, what a place: soft light, warm wood, just 22 seats, the chef right there at the pasta roller in the back of the dining room, sheeting, cutting, filling, saucing and lovingly plating his work, quite possibly the very best noodles of your life. Oca Pastificio opened on Commercial Drive late in 2019. The chef and co-owner, Greg Dilabio, learned to cook in Italy, then at Vancouver’s La Quercia. He wanted a place where he’d never get bored—where he’d be free to cook to the produce of the season, to his whims, to the day of the week.

There might be fat egg-dough tortelli filled with funky taleggio and sheep’s milk ricotta he brings in from Sardinia. They’re sweet and cheesy and mildly grassy, extravagantly rich (the addition of mascarpone doesn’t hurt) and as light-textured as fog, glossed in a simple almond and butter sauce. Or sugo di maiale—lights-out pork sauce, roughly—made from belly and shoulder and funky-peppery ’nduja, on shell-shaped conchiglie with exactly the right weight and chew. There’s often a gnocchi course, whether potato or polenta-based, whether with hazelnuts and gorgonzola or pesto. Whatever the sauce, Dilabio’s pasta always emerges as the star. You can order à la carte, if you’re the controlling type, but seriously, it’d be a waste. For that $70 tasting, you get salumi and salad, plus three or four plates of pasta, plus something simple and sweet for dessert. The trade-off is you can’t make reservations; you should plan to line up before 5 p.m. Is this policy necessary? Not even remotely. Is it annoying? Profoundly so. And still, I’d do it often, if begrudgingly, if I lived in town.

1260 Commercial Drive, Vancouver
ocapastificio.com

Montreal

Elena P.S.

This secret backyard pizza counter churns out blistered Neapolitan pies

The pizzas at Elena P.S. range from traditional Neapolitan to off-the-wall quirky. The feel of the place, full of revellers gorging on pies and glugging natural wine in the shade of fruit trees, is as exciting as the menu.

Just around back of Elena, a superb but perennially busy pizza and pasta spot in Montreal’s St. Henri neighbourhood, you’ll find a little bar-à-vins and all-day lunch counter that spills out into a community park. It’s got a few different names, depending who you ask: “Coffee, Pizza, Wine,” and “Club Social P.S.,” or simply “Elena P.S.,” as in postscript, or afterthought. Whatever you call it, that indoor-outdoor space, with its backyard feel and friendly, U-shaped counter, is where the locals go. That counter shares the same cooks and kitchen as its big-sister restaurant, as well as much of the menu. But unlike at Elena, with its tough-to-get reservations, you don’t have to plan ahead. So you can show up at lunch, or mid-afternoon, or at 9 p.m. for a pizza and a salad, or for the cheese-pull fever dreams called suppli al telefono—”telephone lines”—along with a cup, or bottle, or, hell, why not, a magnum of natural wine. And you can eat and drink it all legally in a public green space as the rest of Canada still clutches at its pearls. “It started out as a best-kept secret,” says co-owner and sommelier Ryan Gray. “And now it’s the star of the show.”

The sourdough pizzas are superb. There are gorgeous, blister-crusted, Neapolitan-style classics, as well as off-the-wall but seriously inspired pies. The standout, however, is the cloud-light, crispy-bottomed and notably tangy-crusted number called industrie alla palla, topped with buttery creamy drifts of the house stracciatella cheese. The kitchen makes that stracciatella, somewhat scandalously, not from the usual mozzarella, but with Quebec cheddar cheese curds and cream. The ingredients, as you’d hope, are mostly organic and local, from small-scale farms; the pizza flour is milled not a 40-minute drive away. A lot of days, the feel of the operation is even more impressive than all that: the buzz of that park when it’s filled with revellers, gorging on pizzas and hoagies while shading under the pear trees, glugging wine from compostable cups. It’s hard not to feel overwhelmed with contentment—and sorry that other parks aren’t even one-tenth as nice.

5090 Notre Dame Ouest, Montreal
coffeepizzawine.com

Vancouver

Published on Main

The Scandi-style menu is fermented, foraged and infused to perfection

Chef Gus Stieffenhofer-Brandson specializes in precise, new-Nordic cooking influenced by his German-Canadian roots

Published, a cool and elegant new Nordic–inflected spot on Vancouver‘s Main Street, is best known, at least among the gastro-tourist set, as a destination for impossibly complex, multi-hour, 20-course tasting menus. As for how those menus are, I‘ve got no idea: through two trips west I never could manage to snag a booking. Yet most of the diners who walk through the restaurant‘s doors come for an à la carte experience—a pretty terrific way of eating here.

Chef Gus Stieffenhofer-Brandson learned his craft in old-school kitchens in Germany and Vancouver, plus through a formative summer as a stagiaire at Noma in Copenhagen. That Nordic influence is unmistakeable in his work: the chef forages for mushrooms when he isn‘t fermenting, or smoking, or infusing ingredients, and his plating is so precise and deliberate, arranged as if down to the single atom, that you can only presume his kitchens buy their tweezers here by the case. Yet it‘s all married with ideas from Stieffenhofer-Brandson’s German-Canadian heritage, and with distinctively west-coast-Canadian ingredients that lend a lightness to much of what his kitchen does. So you might find German-style bone marrow dumpling soup on his menus, or lasagna that‘s made with kelp and clams, or a dish of poached spot prawns in green apple and cucumber broth. Those prawns in broth are as light and delicious as an orchard picnic, a standout through and through.

There were superb roast carrots when I went, with coffee and cashews and a sauce made from shallots, and a dish of scallops with citrus and a lusciously fragrant lime-leaf sauce. And there was smoked hay custard for dessert, so quintessentially new Nordic that I could almost hear Danish singing as I ate. Was it original? Not at all. But it absolutely was a thing of beauty, served in a cloud as wide as a soup bowl, with a meringue made from camomile and a scoop of apple granita, cold and gorgeous and clean.

3593 Main Street, Vancouver
publishedonmain.com

Calgary

River Café

A charming locavore dining room with a glorious waterfront view

River Café’s ingredients come from local farms, ranches and dairies. Among the highlights: smoked sablefish from Kyuquot Sound with salt-baked celery root (above left) and keta salmon with caviar, cucumber and dill oil (above right).

River Café’s ingredients come from local farms, ranches and dairies. Among the highlights: smoked sablefish from Kyuquot Sound with salt-baked celery root (middle) and keta salmon with caviar, cucumber and dill oil (above).

This Calgary landmark is set in a manicured island-park in the middle of the Bow River, which burbles past here, Tanqueray blue. And the inside space, with its A River Runs Through It decor, has more than enough character to compete. There are fly rods and wicker fish creels and other assorted ephemera everywhere. A birchbark canoe hangs within a roll cast’s reach of the restaurant’s centrepiece, an enormous riverstone hearth, which was crackling, when I visited, with genuine hardwood logs. If all that feels a few dancing animatronic bears removed from theme-park territory, well, sure, I can see that. But I have to admit I was also completely charmed.

The cooking, from executive chef Scott MacKenzie, is all about the sourcing. River Café’s menu is peppered with the names of local farms and ranches and small-scale cheese dairies; the restaurant was a pioneer of local, thoughtful sourcing, not merely in Alberta, but Canada as a whole. So the parsnips that come puréed with the B.C. sumac–dusted Yukon Arctic char were grown at Poplar Bluff, while the lamb shoulder served with the Leffers carrots and Highwood Crossing rye crumble was raised (where else?) at Lambtastic Farms. It’s all handled smartly, if conservatively, from what I tried; the ingredients do the talking here. The wine list, from long-time sommelier Bruce Soley, goes deep. The restaurant has one of the better cellars in Canada, and with terrific finds for budgets from the mid-$40s mark to $5,500.

25 Prince‘s Island Park, Calgary
river-cafe.com

the critic

The Great Canadian Dining Frenzy

Chris Nuttall-Smith visited more than 50 restaurants across Canada to compile his best list. Along the way, he discovered how many things have changed in the dining industry—starting with the price of eating out

Nuttall-Smith and friends feast on Hong Kong–style lobster at Fishman Lobster Clubhouse, a Chinese party spot in Scarborough, Ontario

The stop-start reopening of 2022 took all of a heartbeat to become what I can only think of today as the great Canadian dining frenzy—a record-smashing rush of packed rooms and ravenous patrons unleashing our pent-up appetites.

As the dining business began to settle early this year into a new post-pandemic normal, I set out on an epic, 50-restaurant, coast-to-coast eating jag for Maclean’s, gorging my way from Quidi Vidi, Newfoundland, to Ucluelet, B.C. The intention: to take the temperature of the country’s remade dining landscape—and to uncover Canada’s most spectacular restaurants along the way.

Yet the industry we’ve returned to isn’t the same as before. For many welcome new developments, there have been trade-offs too. The most jarring of these has been the price of eating out. It might have been the $48-per-dozen local (and completely average) oysters in St. John’s that got me. Not just at one spot, but at almost every bar and restaurant where I could find them. Or the simple weeknight pasta dinner in Toronto with my wife and kid; with just a couple glasses of wine, it came to $170 after tax and tip. The price of a cocktail has edged toward $20 in a lot of restaurants. I saw no end of main courses for $40 and up in what used to be known, I guess quaintly, as “mid-range” spots.

While some people may see those prices as straight-up gouging, in many cases it just isn’t that simple. “I can guarantee you that most of them are barely getting by,” one respected mid-range restaurant owner told me. Through much of the reopening, this restaurateur couldn’t find dishwashers for less than $30 per hour. And because so many veteran floor staff left the restaurant business during the pandemic, they had to train the basics to entire crews of first-time servers, who couldn’t work nearly as quickly or smoothly as the people they’d replaced. Even then, the business couldn’t find enough workers to run at full capacity. They’ve been turning away eager would-be customers while tables sit empty—a phenomenon I’ve witnessed over and over through the past year.

At the high end, where chefs used to hold their breath before charging more than $90 per person, $185 dinners now sell out in a flash. At Toronto’s much-lauded—and, if you’ve got the bankroll, genuinely excellent—Alo, you’re in for $300 a head now after tax and a 20 per cent tip, provided you can get a reservation. And that’s with only tap water to drink. As far as I can tell, the award for Canada’s priciest restaurant goes to Sushi Masaki Saito, in Toronto’s Yorkville neighbourhood, where the pre-drinks price of admission has climbed to $680 per head. Personally, I’d sooner jump on a plane to Japan.

On the plus side, at least some of those bigger dinner bills are paying for long-overdue changes across the industry: higher wages and once unheard-of benefits for many restaurant workers. The four-day workweek has become increasingly common, especially at upper mid-range and higher-end spots. Though 12- and 14-hour shifts are standard still, many cooks can now count on three days of built-in downtime. These aren’t fads. They’re transformational changes, professionalizing an industry that’s been built through much of its existence on staff burnout and turnover. It seems almost crazy to say this, but I’ve heard it from restaurant workers throughout the past year: it’s suddenly possible to work in restaurants and also have some sort of life.

“No matter where I travelled, I watched for restaurants that had warm service, reasonable value, spectacular cooking and, as always, a sense of genuineness and joy. And the good news? I found them in almost every city I visited.”

Bernhardt’s in Toronto, which specializes in rotisserie chicken and Montreal-Jewish soul food, is a great mid-range first-date spot

There are still plenty of affordable places, too, of course. Many of the best restaurants in Montreal remain eminently reasonable; the owners of Mastard, an ambitious neighbourhood spot I fell in love with, have made value for money a priority. In Montreal especially, it’s far from alone. For a lot of chefs there, being accessible to friends and neighbours is as important as getting a good sear on a piece of line-caught fish.

I found excellent mid-range options in Nova Scotia too, like Dartmouth’s superb, family-run Canteen. (When it’s available, the restaurant’s lobster and snow crab “crobster” sandwich might just be my vote for the single greatest sandwich on earth.) In Calgary, I found the excellent Ten Foot Henry, as well as Paper Lantern, a second-generation Vietnamese kitchen and lounge tucked away in Chinatown. As a bonus, Paper Lantern’s “better tiki” cocktails were brilliant: tiki-style, but made with rare smarts and balance, and without the usual sickly sweet. And even Calgary’s flashy (if underwhelming) new “high-end steakhouse,” called Major Tom, was priced more like a stealthy mid-range spot, with affordable options hidden between the menu’s attention-grabbing big-ticket spends.

I did double-takes at wine lists across Alberta and B.C. especially; compared to the rest of the country, drinking in restaurants out west can seem almost absurdly cheap. I routinely found good bottles in the mid-$40s range, even from fancy, best-of-class cellars like the one at Calgary’s River Café. At Arike, an ambitious Pacific Northwest– style Nigerian spot in Vancouver’s west end, the wine pairings to accompany chef Sam Olayinka’s one-of-a-kind $75 tasting menu sold, the last time I looked, for just $29.

It’s important to note, too, that even though the mid-range has faded in the priciest centres, it’s far from finished, as the success of standouts like Ottawa’s Supply & Demand and Toronto’s Bernhardt’s shows. And meantime, suburban restaurants—places like my top picks One2 Snacks and Guru Lukshmi—are more appealing than ever; they’ve been the mid-range (and lower-end) heroes all along.

Another major impact of the restaurant boom: reservations at the most popular places have become a blood sport. At Vancouver’s AnnaLena, to cite just one, you should be online at precisely 9 a.m. PST a full 30 days (no more, no less) before you hope to dine. At many other places, a two-week wait for non-prime nights and times has become the standard. The upshot? At a popular spot with a bit of hype behind it, you might be able to find a Tuesday evening table at 5 p.m.—if you’re the sort of person who thinks to book your Tuesday dinners several weeks in advance.

How people dine once they get through the doors has also undergone some dramatic changes, the most consequential of them the rapid adoption of tasting menus at the upper mid-range and high end. Even three or four years ago, tasting menus were generally seen as high-risk rarities, reserved for only the very best or most brazen places. (And also for sushi counters. Diners seem to love omakase sushi.) Today, they’re quickly becoming standard operating procedure, not merely among established, higher-end spots—Edulis and Alo in Toronto, St. Lawrence, Burdock, Kissa Tanto and Maenam in Vancouver, and too many more to name—but also for many untested chefs.

Yet the chefs and restaurants that manage to do that while truly putting the diner first remain a rarity. In spite of those menus’ surging popularity, their benefits most often accrue to the house. Tasting menus bring a rare degree of predictability to running a restaurant; it’s exponentially easier to control costs when you know in advance exactly what your customers are going to eat. And they also guarantee a minimum spend, so that diner who used to order a salad and an appetizer and a glass of tap water while—to put it bluntly—taking up a valuable seat, has no choice now but to drop $125 (or in many cases, far more) for the “menu degustation.”

Another Michelin-related phenomenon I witnessed time and again on my travels: a notable rise in what I think of as the moneyed checklist star-chaser. They’re the seen-it-all, tried-it-all types who look utterly bored and disengaged as they work through their dinners, but nonetheless photograph or video almost every single bite. Increasingly, diners are required to pay in advance, too. As for cancellations (too bad, friend) and no-shows (for a full refund, please dial 1-800-SUCK-IT), they’re on their way to extinction.

When you add all those phenomena together—pre-paid bookings, the rise of tasting menus, cash-flush diners and the continued ascent of a social media–fuelled hype economy—they can do some immense good. These are the same innovations that allowed scores of pandemic-era pop-ups, takeout businesses and small-time foodpreneurs to thrive; since the great reopening, many young and lesser-known chefs without the old-style professional or economic capital have harnessed that model to build DIY hospitality careers. And especially at the higher end, eating out in fancy restaurants is supposed to be a luxury. Even many of the priciest places in Canada are still a steal when compared to international dining towns. Yet the big “if” behind so many of these changes is how well they’ll stick once the dining frenzy ends.

Pre-pandemic dining was mostly a buyer’s market, in which customers were always right and many restaurateurs kept a lid on prices by taking advantage of their staff. Through the post-pandemic reopening, the pendulum then swung hard the other way.

In making my best list, I stayed hyper-attuned to where individual contenders fell on that spectrum. I ate in buzzing taco shops and boisterous ramen-yas, Tamil snack counters, pasta joints and an Indigenous pop-up. I tried luxe, high-French restaurants and dosa houses, dim sum and seafood and Nigerian cooking specialists, wine bars, Middle Eastern, South American and Southeast Asian spots, and an extremely earnest tasting-menu place where they make the bathroom’s hand soap from used coffee grounds and cooking grease. (Please: don’t ever.) No matter where I travelled, I watched for restaurants that had warm service, reasonable value, spectacular cooking and, as always, a sense of genuineness and joy. And the good news? I found them in almost every city I visited.

I can’t help thinking we’ll be seeing many more of them too—that the great dining frenzy, and that perpetually swinging pendulum, might soon settle out at a comfortable mid-point, where for once, just maybe, everybody wins.

“The Best Places to Eat in Canada” appears in the May/June issue of Maclean’s. Buy it today for $9.99!

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The post The Best Places to Eat in Canada appeared first on Macleans.ca.

A lot has changed at restaurants since the pandemic—starting with how much it costs to eat out

Mariyam Khaja — Thu, 18 May 2023 12:09:25 +0000

Nuttall-Smith and friends feasting on Hong Kong–style lobster at Fishman Lobster Clubhouse, a Chinese party spot in Scarborough, Ontario (Photography by John Cullen)

It’s funny what happens when you can’t eat in restaurants for a couple of years.

At their best, the kitchens and dining rooms I visited ran at a consistently higher level than I’ve ever seen, offering sensational, can’t-do-this-at-home cooking and warm, joyful service. You could tell how happy (and relieved) the staff and owners were to be back. Yet the industry we’ve returned to isn’t the same as before. For many welcome new developments, there have been trade-offs too. The most jarring of these has been the price of eating out.

It might have been the $48-per-dozen local (and completely average) oysters in St. John’s that got me. Not just at one spot, but at almost every bar and restaurant where I could find them. Or the simple weeknight pasta dinner in Toronto with my wife and kid; with just a couple glasses of wine, it came to $170 after tax and tip. The price of a cocktail has edged toward $20 in a lot of restaurants. I saw no end of main courses for $40 and up in what used to be known, I guess quaintly, as “mid-range” spots.

That mid-range, suddenly more expensive almost across the board, has taken a hit in pricier centres, Toronto in particular. Independent, original, professionally run places where you could eat well on a weeknight without too much sticker shock used to be one of the city’s strengths. Now, squeezed by rising food, labour, construction, financing, maintenance and rent costs, a lot of those restaurants have either closed or raised their prices to what many diners consider special-occasion heights. While some people may see those prices as straight-up gouging, in many cases it just isn’t that simple. “I can guarantee you that most of them are barely getting by,” one respected mid-range restaurant owner told me. Through much of the reopening, this restaurateur couldn’t find dishwashers for less than $30 per hour. And because so many veteran floor staff left the restaurant business during the pandemic, they had to train the basics to entire crews of first-time servers, who couldn’t work nearly as quickly or smoothly as the people they’d replaced. Even then, the business couldn’t find enough workers to run at full capacity. They’ve been turning away eager would-be customers while tables sit empty—a phenomenon I’ve witnessed over and over through the past year.

Chris Nuttall-Smith at Edulis, an intimate special-occasion restaurant in Toronto known for its homey service and spectacular classical cooking

I did double-takes at wine lists across Alberta and B.C. especially; compared to the rest of the country, drinking in restaurants out west can seem almost absurdly cheap. I routinely found good bottles in the mid-$40s range, even from fancy, best-of-class cellars like the one at Calgary’s River Café. At Arike, an ambitious Pacific Northwest–style Nigerian spot in Vancouver’s west end, the wine pairings to accompany chef Sam Olayinka’s one-of-a-kind $75 tasting menu sold, the last time I looked, for just $29.

At their best, tasting menus are a brilliant way to eat out. Kitchens can focus on only their best work and ingredients, nimbly adjusting their menus day-to-day to feature new ideas and peak-season product, and serving them so a meal unfolds as a thoroughly considered—and most importantly, delicious— experience from beginning to end. (You’ll find the greatest of those places on my list.) Yet the chefs and restaurants that manage to do that while truly putting the diner first remain a rarity. In spite of those menus’ surging popularity, their benefits most often accrue to the house. Tasting menus bring a rare degree of predictability to running a restaurant; it’s exponentially easier to control costs when you know in advance exactly what your customers are going to eat. And they also guarantee a minimum spend, so that diner who used to order a salad and an appetizer and a glass of tap water while—to put it bluntly—taking up a valuable seat, has no choice now but to drop $125 (or in many cases, far more) for the “menu degustation.”

That tasting-menu craze is also being driven by the dawn of tourism board–funded Michelin ratings in Vancouver and Toronto. It’s hard not to feel that many places are playing more to the inspectors’ fondness for static and perfectable multi-course menus and fancy decor than to legitimately seasonal, market-driven cooking, or, God forbid, what their customers want. Another Michelin-related phenomenon I witnessed time and again on my travels: a notable rise in what I think of as the moneyed checklist star-chaser. They’re the seen-it-all, tried-it-all types who look utterly bored and disengaged as they work through their dinners, but nonetheless photograph or video almost every single bite. Increasingly, diners are required to pay in advance, too. As for cancellations (too bad, friend) and no-shows (for a full refund, please dial 1-800-SUCK-IT), they’re on their way to extinction.

Chris Nuttall-Smith travelled cross-country to find Canada’s most delicious places to eat. Here’s his list of the country’s 20 most magical restaurants, from the tip of Vancouver Island to the edge of Newfoundland.

This article appears in print in the May/June 2023 issue of Maclean’s magazine. Buy the issue for $9.99 or better yet, subscribe to the monthly print magazine for just $39.99.

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Preston Pablo is the Canadian R&B crooner on everyone’s Spotify playlist

Mariyam Khaja — Wed, 17 May 2023 16:42:45 +0000

(Photograph by William Ukoh, styling by Chad Burton/Cadre Artists; grooming by Kristjan Hayden/Cadre Artists. Cardigan/Jacquemus; tank /stylist’s own; pants/Martine Rose; shoes/Vans)

Preston Pablo has achieved a staggering level of early-career success, unheard of even among Canada’s biggest musical mega-stars. See: 51 million streams of “Flowers Need Rain,” his debut single; a spring Juno win for breakthrough artist of the year; and a slew of sold-out headlining gigs. His origin story sounds a bit more familiar. Pablo grew up in Timmins, Ontario, hometown of country-crossover icon Shania Twain. And by 13, he’d taken up drums and guitar, posting YouTube covers of Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car” and Daniel Caesar’s “Best Part”—the same formula that made Justin Bieber Justin Bieber. “There was zero pressure then,” says Pablo of his lo-fi MacBook-and-USB-microphone setup. “It’s hard to let go of the expectations that come with making music now.”

For all of his obvious star quality—like his infinitely streamable blues-inflected croon—Pablo, now 21, has always wanted to be the author of his own artistic destiny. A break-up nudged him toward songwriting at 16, and his first self-produced effort—the moody, confessional “OMO,” released in January of 2019—amassed more than 500,000 Spotify plays within six months. “I didn’t think this would turn into a career,” he says. “The initial reaction inspired me to keep creating.”

It also pushed him to contact producers. “I’d either get no response or they’d say, ‘I’ll send you a beat for $300,’” he says. “I was in high school; I didn’t have that much money in my bank account.” In 2020, Pablo received an unexpected message from a producer named Soké, who wanted to hear more. After some light googling, Pablo discovered that fateful DM had come from one half of Banx and Ranx, a Grammy-nominated duo from Montreal whose collaborators included Dua Lipa and the K-pop supergroup Blackpink. Within five months, Pablo had left the comforts of home for a Quebec recording studio. Those sessions secured his eventual record deal with 31 East/Universal Music Canada and spawned “Flowers Need Rain,” one of Canada’s most streamed songs of 2022.

Pablo’s musical family is now much larger than Dawson, his sonically gifted older brother, who records under the pseudonym pablø. Banx and Ranx are still close friends, and in early June, Pablo will open for fellow Ontarians Walk Off The Earth at Toronto’s Budweiser Stage. His main priority, though, is continuing to define (and refine) his own soulful sound in a crowded market. “A lot of people still don’t know me beyond songs on the radio,” says Pablo, whose Twitter handle, @whotfisprestonp, is soon to be outdated. “I’m still trying to understand myself as an artist—and a person.”

***

P O P Q U I Z W I T H P R E S T O N

Hometown haunt: “My friend’s treehouse cabin in Timmins, where I spent all my summers growing up. We still hang out there.”

Background music: ’60s blues

Dream collaborator: Singer and Euphoria actor Dominic Fike

Most underrated Justin Bieber song: “‘My Bad’ from his Journals album. Wait. It’s called ‘All Bad.’ My bad.”

Favourite Preston Pablo song: “My new single, ‘For Keeps.’ How convenient!”

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BlackBerry director Matt Johnson on creating the buzziest new film in Canadian cinema

Mariyam Khaja — Fri, 12 May 2023 16:18:07 +0000

(Photography by Elevation Pictures)

BlackBerry tells the story of Canadian tech founders Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie, an opposites attract duo who turned a tech innovation (the world’s first smartphone) into a billion-dollar phenomenon—and then watched it flame out in equally spectacular fashion. The movie premiered at the Berlin Film Festival last month, and it’s already being hailed as Canada’s answer to The Social Network, a comparison director Matt Johnson takes as a compliment (though he believes the Canadian movie industry needs to stop trying to imitate our southern neighbours). BlackBerry is Johnson’s third feature film—a significant departure from earlier indie fare, but also a deeply personal project. Here he talks about why Canadian filmmakers should channel their inner Balsillie and life lessons from one of his cinematic north stars: Dolly Parton.

As a director, you’re known for experimental indie work, but BlackBerry is more of a classic biopic. Why was this iconic Canadian tech story the right project for you?

I think precisely because of what you’re saying. On its face, the BlackBerry story seems a little dry. People go, “Why would I ever watch a movie about a dead cellphone that I never cared about when it existed?” That skepticism became a bridge toward my more inaccessible style of filmmaking. I’ve always struggled trying to make films for a larger audience because my work is so personal. This film is also ridiculously personal, but that part of it is combined with this broader, real-world story.

You say your style is inaccessible, but BlackBerry doesn’t feel that way.

My previous films are these slightly arcane, hardcore fake documentaries where the audience has to buy into the format to enjoy it. The intention with BlackBerry is to make it seem like you’re in the room with these guys, which is hard to approximate with more traditional camerawork. In some ways, it’s the anti-Spielberg or anti-Fincher or anti-Kubrick approach, where it seems like it’s happening by chance and the footage has been discovered. I like making films that almost disguise themselves as being really low budget, really low effort.

I’m reminded of that Dolly Parton quote: “It takes a lot of money to look this cheap.”

That quote has been a central philosophy for me since I was 16 years old. Dolly is a genius, and you can see her influence in artists who were inspired by her, going as far as Kurt Cobain, Andy Warhol, where the brilliance just seems like a fluke but then you scratch the surface a bit, and you realize, “Oh my God…”

You were in your 20s when BlackBerry was in its heyday. Did you own one?

Before we started shooting, I had never even touched a BlackBerry. I did have a good friend who always used to make jokes about BlackBerry’s messaging service that I never really understood. Not to say I was a total luddite, but that entire generation of tech totally missed me.

So what do you mean when you say the story is very personal?

When I was first reading about the story of BlackBerry, what struck me was how much their journey was like my experience making my first film. I also had some success and then watched all of my personal relationships change overnight. I wrote the script with my producing partner, Matt Miller. We used a book called Losing the Signal: The Untold Story Behind the Extraordinary Rise and Spectacular Fall of BlackBerry, written by two Canadian journalists, as our backbone, which hinted at the tenser aspects of the relationship.

To fill in the details, we spoke to some of the young engineers who worked for the company in the early days—one guy had kept journals and photographs from that time, which was amazing. Then Matt and I transposed many of our own experiences on top of the BlackBerry story. Ultimately, we wanted to make a movie that was about work, what it means to go to work, the meaning you get from it, the justification for working all night on projects that may or may not deliver anything, that lust for power, the need to create things solely to enlarge your status. These are all the dark sides of my own personality dancing together on screen. When you see Mike, Jim and co-founder Doug Fregin, you’re essentially watching me and my life split into three people.

I can see you in Mike, the exacting creative genius, and Doug, the loyal, lovable manchild. But what about Jim Balsillie?

I’ll put it this way: if you were to ask any of my closest friends which of the three was the most like me, they’d all say Jim. In my opinion, Jim Balsillie is portrayed in this movie as being very kind. At no point is he sadistic. Deep down, all he wants is to be the best. Of course, he’s totally misguided. Without a Mike or a Doug, the Jim personality type is heartless. I remember one actor described Jim as a character who consumes without tasting, which I thought was really good. He wants to win only for the sake of winning, so when I say I’m like him, that’s only a piece of me. The Mike in me and the Doug in me also want to win for different reasons.

Director Matt Johnson

In the movie, Jim has one mode of communication: yelling. I can’t imagine that’s you on set.

No, no. I’ve never yelled at anyone in my life. It’s more Jim’s attitude: if it’s going to benefit their company, anything is justified. That’s certainly how I feel as a filmmaker, which is not very Canadian. One of Jim’s central personality traits is that he almost has an Americanness to him.

What means are justified by this movie?

I will give you an example from my last movie, Operation Avalanche, which was supposed to be set in NASA in the 1960s. We couldn’t recreate it because we didn’t have enough money, so we posed as film students making a documentary. We flew to NASA in Texas, shot our whole movie illegally and then released it. We did about 100 versions of that on BlackBerry. When you’re watching the characters drive into the offices and park in the parking lot, that’s really where it all happened.

You cast Jay Baruchel, who most audiences know as a lovable stoner, as Mike Lazaridis. Was that an obvious call?

Jay was an early partner on the film. I knew him because my editor, Curt Lobb, also edited his feature, Random Acts of Violence, so we met as friends. Very quickly, I saw that the real Jay was quite different from the one I had seen in movies. He’s a perfectionist in the best way. He has really high standards, and he seemed to understand the at-all-costs, this-must-be-right attitude that Mike Lazaridis had.

MORE: Q&A: BlackBerry’s Jay Baruchel loves movies, hockey, weed and his now-obsolete phone

BlackBerry premiered to amazing reviews at the Berlin Film Festival in February. People are already calling it Canada’s version of The Social Network. Is that a compliment?

Absolutely, I see that as a huge compliment. The Social Network was revolutionary. It came out in 2010, and people are still talking about it. The comparisons were inevitable, and we leaned into that with the script. I tried to steal as much of that Sorkin style as we could.

You wore a Jays T-shirt to the BlackBerry press event in Berlin. Was that on purpose or did they lose your luggage?

No, no, that’s one of my favourite shirts. I’m very proud to be Canadian—I would say stupidly so. When I was growing up, my dad said, “This is the greatest country in the world. You’re lucky to be here.” I still believe that. I will say that Canada is a joke as a filmmaking country. When people find out BlackBerry is Canadian, they’re shocked, in the same way that they’re shocked that BlackBerry is a Canadian product. There’s a good reason for that. Part of it is that we’re extremely modest—we’re not like Jim Balsillie.

Best advice for aspiring Canadian filmmakers?

I would encourage people to find their own style—especially a visual style—rather than trying to copy the Americans. When that happens, we end up with this sort of ersatz, uncanny valley version of American-style filmmaking, which needs budgets four, five, six times of what we’re dealing with. There’s a saying amongst filmmakers that something seems “Canadian” when there’s just something slightly wrong, like looking at a clone of your mother.

Given the early buzz, what are your hopes for the next few months?

I really have no idea. For me, it still feels like a very small movie about me and my friends, but I guess the Jim Balsillie in me is hoping it plays everywhere.

That Jim Balsillie is already walking the red carpet at the Oscars in 2024!

Right, and then the Canadian in me is saying, “Well, don’t get your hopes up.”

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Q&A: BlackBerry’s Jay Baruchel loves movies, weed and his now-obsolete phone

Prarthana Pathak — Mon, 08 May 2023 15:40:12 +0000

(Photography by Erin Leydon)

Jay Baruchel is everywhere: in slashers, sex farces and sports movies; opposite mythical lizards in Disney’s How to Train Your Dragon franchise; and he’s worked with directors as varied as David Cronenberg, Judd Apatow and even himself. If you’re wondering how an Ottawa-born, Montreal-raised kid with a Gumby body and a voice like a twisted balloon has been working steadily since 1995 (he’s now 40 and busier than ever), the answer is simple: Jay Baruchel loves movies—loves them.

Baruchel loved his BlackBerry, too. He hung on to it until 2019. It makes sense, then, that his next movie is, well, BlackBerry. The film, out this month, chronicles the rise and fall of Research in Motion, the Waterloo moonshot whose founders had the zany idea to merge computers with cellphones. Baruchel plays Mike Lazaridis, the engineering student turned RIM co-founder who watched his dreams get gobbled up by the iPhone, but not before they made him a billionaire. Playing the more level-headed partner gives Baruchel a chance to showcase his dramatic chops. It also demonstrates why, unlike the now-obsolete gadget, his success continues.

It’s rare for someone who’s made it in Hollywood to be as proudly Canadian as you.

It’s a function of Canadianness to second guess ourselves, but I was raised to believe this is the best country in the world, warts and all. Part of it is that my maternal granddad was a career soldier, and I have cousins and uncles who are, too. I hope that, one day, it’s not so rare for Canadians who love movies to make them here.

What interested you most about the BlackBerry story?

It’s a definitively Canadian story, something we can claim. It’s also a road map to how we got to this—let’s be honest—loathsome modern world we live in. It’s Canadian in another way, too, in that a lot of people don’t realize BlackBerry is Canadian.

Have you heard from any of the real-life RIM figures?

Not yet, even though we shot in Waterloo, where it all happened. I’m interested to see what those guys think—RIM’s co-CEO Jim Balsillie in particular, given his temperament.

. . . which, in the film, is fractious. Yours, however, is collaborative. You act, write screenplays and direct. When did you first have artistic ambitions?

I don’t remember not having them. My first word was a sentence, a slogan from a 1982 commercial: “Come on, Canada! Meet you at the Bay!” When I was seven, my mom filmed me saying, “I want to write stories that scare Stephen King out of his underwear.” At nine, I realized: No, I want to make movies. So, from 1991 on, that’s been my defining ambition. That, and being as good a person as I can be.

Were your parents artistic?

They were huge movie and TV nerds. We didn’t have a ton of money, so we didn’t go to the cinema a lot. But every weekend, my dad would rent two movies. If they were still in the VCR the next morning, I was allowed to watch them. If they were back in the case, my parents had deemed them too racy. And when I watched something with them, it was Film 101. They paused Monty Python and the Holy Grail 100 times to explain to me why what had just happened was funny.

I read somewhere that your father worked as an antiques dealer.

Antiques dealer, hah! That’s the simplest way to describe him. In the 1970s, he was a drug dealer who went to prison. When he got out, he sold antiques as his legit, going-straight job.

Whoa. Was he a drug dealer before or after you were born?

They overlapped.

How did that affect you?

In a profound way. Dad was a hard dude. He lived to get into fist fights, and he always had a buzz on. Most people had no idea. I can’t say, “I am this specific way because of that.” I just know you take that shit with you.

Did that feel scary?

The opposite: safe as hell. It was only after my parents divorced—and Dad was out of the house—that I felt fear for the first time. When I hit 14 or 15, he became a source of embarrassment. But now, I’m super-proud that I have some of Dad in me. If you have the gawky mannerisms I do—and if, like me, you’re a keener who’s always polite—people mistake those things for weakness. I channel my dad in those moments.

Which moments?

Every audition, and every time someone tried to muscle me. My father would’ve burned the whole city down before he let anybody fuck with me.

You’ve played your share of awkward sidekicks, as in Almost Famous and Knocked Up. How did you avoid being pigeonholed?

I’m reverent of the craft, but I’d be lying if I said I think about acting all the time. I think about stories I want to tell, and scenes I want to direct.

Did directing feel like you thought it would?

I was more assured than I thought I would be. As an actor, I’ve suffered far too many directors who were mushing through fog. I never wanted anyone on my set to not know what the hell we were doing.

What’s your director superpower?

I have a vibe: I want filming to feel as close to a backyard game of cops and robbers as possible—like when you were a kid, making up stories with your friends, fully committed. Filmmaking is the greatest job in the world; it should never feel miserable. You know your favourite movie moments? We’re in the business of creating them. What a cool thing.

Clint Eastwood directed you (playing a wannabe boxer) in Million Dollar Baby. What was that like?

I was scared shitless. Eastwood is the only guy I’ve worked with who my granddad would have been remotely impressed by. At that time, I had a masochistic approach to acting. I had to suffer to be good. I’d ask Clint after every take, “Was that all right?” and he’d say, “It was fine.” In my head, I’d hear, “He hates me!”

Well, did he?

Morgan Freeman saw me freaking out and said, “If he doesn’t say anything, it means he likes it.” I can’t overstate what an epiphany that was. As an actor, you’re always trying to get quote-unquote there. Well, there doesn’t actually exist. From that point on, I could show up on set and not torture myself.

Who else taught you something important?

Cameron Crowe on the set of Almost Famous, the first movie I made in the States. He took time out of his day to play frisbee with me in the parking lot. I was an awkward grade 11 kid from Montreal, and he’d talk to me about Billy Wilder and Alfred Hitchcock. Now, he’s like an uncle I hear from every year or two.

Let’s talk about screenwriting. Does that come easily to you?

I’m spoiled because the first thing I got paid to write—Goon—was a thing everyone loved. It just flowed. Evan Goldberg and I came up with the initial idea in about 10 minutes, on a phone call. I wrote the first pass in two weeks. And it was number one in English Canada, nominated for awards. So, in that one case, screenwriting felt exactly how I hoped it would.

We know from Goon that you’re a hockey fanatic. Tell me everything you love about it in one minute.

It’s the most beautiful and most brutal game in the world. You’ve got huge guys moving at very high speeds, yet it all comes down to millimetre shifts in the wrist. And the gap between observation, decision and execution is a second. It’s like watching a comic book come to life.

Alright, you’ve earned another minute.

I’m going to get super hokey: it’s ours. Hockey is one area where Canadians are sure-footed and definitively proud of who we are. We know this is our gift to the world. It’s an art form we’ve created and exported across the world. We’re so scared of becoming anything close to American in terms of ambition or lauding ourselves—except in hockey.

You also host Highly Legal (a podcast about marijuana) and We’re All Gonna Die, (Even Jay Baruchel), a docuseries about existential threats like climate change. Are these projects opportunities to expand your reach?

I’m in my Michael Palin travel-doc era. If, because I swore a bunch in Goon, or had a semen stain on my pants in She’s Out of My League, I can drive audiences toward stuff I care about, that’s a cool thing.

So legalized marijuana is a subject that’s dear to your heart?

Whatever gave you that impression? Yes. I’m normally a rule follower. In my younger days, I found myself consorting with characters I’d never have had anything to do with if I didn’t have to buy weed from them. So, when the clock struck 12:01 on October 17, 2018, I went onto the Ontario Cannabis Store’s website. By 12:02, I was checking out.

Let’s finish with a big question. What have you learned about people or yourself from all those films?

Not much is sacred in the 21st century. Sincere love between people—romantic, familial, platonic—is one sacred thing. The only other, in my heart of hearts, is the relationship between artist and audience. All I want is to fall head over heels in love with the book I’m reading, the movie I’m watching or the song I’m listening to. I want to think I’ve learned everything I can, then have something blow my head wide open. If I can create half of that experience for someone else, that’s a life worth living. I don’t hate-watch or hate-read. What a silly waste of time.

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A new Art Gallery of Ontario exhibit looks at the beauty and culture of the African diaspora

Mariyam Khaja — Fri, 05 May 2023 15:24:33 +0000

“The Hair Appointment,” by Jeremy Rodney-Hall, 2018 (All images courtesy of Sunday School)

At 24 years old, Josef Adamu was an aspiring model struggling to gain traction in his career. Then he had an idea: if he wanted to find a path forward in his industry, he should carve one out for himself. Adamu initially wanted to start a modelling agency, but found the concept too restrictive. Instead, while working out of his mother’s basement in Toronto, he conceived of Sunday School, a creative brand agency that would work with companies on visually striking projects. His agency’s services include corporate campaign art direction, social media marketing, photography and videography, with a strong focus on stories and subjects from the African diaspora.

At first, Adamu wanted to control every shoot and project himself. “I didn’t leave much creative breathing room for people working with me,” he says. As the agency’s only permanent member, he primarily worked with freelancers, whom he hired on a project-by-project basis. Over the years, as he built up an international network of photographers, cinematographers, stylists and makeup artists, he learned to embrace bona fide creative collaboration.

“The people behind the scenes are part of my culture,” he says. “Because the work is coming from our community, it’s easy to be intentional with every detail.” Soon, major brands noticed something special about Sunday School: the agency has worked on campaigns for Nike, Converse, Topshop and Sony, and celebrities like Lupita Nyong’o have recognized its work.

Sunday School’s first major Toronto exhibition, Feels Like Home, debuts at the Art Gallery of Ontario in May. The exhibit, which will run for a year and showcases the collaborative efforts of at least 40 people, features work from three projects.

The Hair Appointment looks at the practice and ritual of natural hair braiding, exploring salons as community spaces. Ten Toes Down depicts a Black ballerina who has finally found pointe shoes and tights that match her skin tone—a meditation on identity, representation and belonging. And Jump Ball, a five-part series, is about the intersection of basketball and the African diaspora. “These three pillars are ways for us to tell stories around what it means to feel at home, far beyond a place where you rest your head,” says Adamu. It’s also a literal homecoming for Adamu, born and raised in Toronto, who has been working in New York for the past few years.

The exhibition reveals the fruits of Adamu’s transformation as a creative director: after relinquishing some of his control, he’s become more open to spontaneity and improvisation during photo shoots. In an image from Jump Ball, which shows two Ghanaian youths wearing traditional garments on a basketball court, the use of colour is striking. Between their clothing, the basketballs and the hoop, it’s a veritable spectrum of orange—a happy accident, it turns out, and the type of creative coincidence that Sunday School has come to embrace. “I dropped my ego,” Adamu says, “and there’s real power in that.”

“Ten Toes Down,” by Kreshonna Keane, 2021

For much of her dance career, this young ballerina from Philadelphia had to use tights and pointe shoes that were too light for her skin tone. She would “pancake” the garments, applying makeup to them to match her complexion. For this photo shoot, Sunday School partnered with Freed of London, a British company that was one of the first to offer shade-inclusive ballet wear. The project’s name has a double meaning, referencing both the position of the dancer’s feet and a message to focus on what you love to do.

“Jump Ball: Toronto,” by O’shane Howard, 2019

Jump Ball is a five-part series about the cultural intersection between basketball and African tradition. Photographed on a basketball court in St. James Town, Toronto, this image is from the series’ first iteration. It depicts two Ghanaian youths wearing traditional garments that they would normally wear to a family function or special occasion. Adamu met the pair through friends, and he is interested in the way members of the African diaspora shed or don traditional attire—and in turn, parts of their identity—to adjust to their environment.

“Jump Ball: Mighty Migration,” by Joshua Kissi, 2020

The Gabriel family, photographed in their Manchester, New Hampshire, living room, escaped the civil war in South Sudan for the United States in the ’90s. Several children in the family are basketball stars, including Wenyen (not pictured), who plays for the Los Angeles Lakers; Piath, the young woman holding a basketball, is the next prospect to go pro. The house is filled with basketball jerseys and trophies, and the living room is the site of a family tradition: gathering in front of the TV on NBA draft night and waiting for a family member’s name to be called.

“Jump Ball: Mighty Migration,” by Joshua Kissi, 2020

This young man is a close friend of the Gabriel family, who are the main focus of the series. This shot was taken on a New Hampshire basketball court during a casual weekend game. Adamu chose this subject in part for his large hands—posed on the ground with his hands over the ball, looking dead centre into the camera, he suggests the strength and empowerment imparted by the game. On his left wrist, he wears a bracelet depicting the South Sudanese flag.

“The Hair Appointment,” by Jeremy Rodney-Hall, 2018

An intimate image of an auntie and her niece during their Sunday night hair-braiding routine. They are real relatives, and Adamu met the woman through a casting call for an early project. She connected Adamu to her aunt’s hair salon, which became the inspiration for The Hair Appointment series. The child mimics her aunt’s movements on the doll’s hair, depicting how this knowledge is passed from generation to generation. Adamu intentionally centred his subjects between two picture frames on either side of the mounted mirror, and kept the colours muted to pull focus towards them.

“The Hair Appointment,” by Jeremy Rodney-Hall, 2018

In this image, choreographed by Sunday School, a little girl leans on her sister, both sporting perfectly coiffed braids and posed in front of their Brooklyn apartment building. The girls are sisters (though these aren’t their real school uniforms), and the image is all about their kinship. The older child keeps her fist loosely clenched and her expression stoic, as though she’s protecting her sleepy little sibling. One child wears high white socks, while the other is bare-legged—an intentional detail meant to highlight their contrasting personalities.

“The Hair Appointment,” by Jeremy Rodney-Hall, 2018

This installment in Sunday School’s series features natural hair braiding, which takes place in salons and living rooms—spaces that have long been community hubs within the African diaspora. The image, taken in Alima’s Hair Braiding Salon in Brooklyn, recreates the moment before a client leaves the appointment, in which a stylist will often document their work with a final shot against the salon wall.

Feels Like Home is on display at the Art Gallery of Ontario until May 2024.

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Dead Ringers’ Britne Oldford is stuck in a twisty twin love triangle

Prarthana Pathak — Tue, 02 May 2023 20:51:49 +0000

(Photos courtesy of Heather Dapaah)

Any Canadian cinephile worth their salt has seen the original Dead Ringers, David Cronenberg’s 1988 body horror film about unhinged twin gynecologists played by Jeremy Irons. A new Amazon Prime adaptation gender-swaps the premise: Rachel Weisz stars as Beverly and Elliot Mantel, identical OBGYNs who dream of upending the patriarchal women’s reproductive health-care system (when they’re not switching identities to pick up lovers). The plot follows the opening of the Mantel-Parking Birthing Centre, run by the twins and financed by a morally bankrupt opioid heiress. Then everything goes off the rails when Beverly gets pregnant and Elliot gets jealous. Canadian actress Britne Oldford plays Genevieve Cotard, who begins a romantic relationship with Beverly and winds up in a sister-sister love triangle. “When I got the first two scripts, I just devoured them,” she says. We talked to Oldford about what it was like to remake a classic piece of CanCon and to act alongside Weisz, who was at the “tippity-top” of her dream co-star bucket list.

The new Dead Ringers has aspects of horror, but it’s also a love story and mystery. Is there a genre description that best fits?

I would describe it as a provocative psychosexual thriller. Everything is very intense, but when you get past all of the chaos, the show is about love and the birthing process, which is where we all come from. And then you have these brilliant characters: twin gynecologists and obstetricians who are trying to change how the health-care system functions for women. But they are also obsessed with each other, so their personal lives are quite wrought with chaos.

Are you a fan of the genre?

I can do gore, but I wouldn’t say it’s my go-to. I’m a fantasy nut. As a kid, I was obsessed with the Lord of the Rings movies. I love sci-fi. I love grounded drama, and I watch a lot of foreign films. I actually made a conscious decision to re-sensitize myself to all of the violence that is on screen in entertainment and on the news. There has been so much of that over the past couple of years, and I’m someone who believes that everything you consume has an impact on mind, body and soul.

Your character, Genevieve, meets Beverly as a patient, then gets wooed by Elliot (who is pretending to be Beverly), then starts a relationship with Beverly and drives Elliot to actual insanity. Talk about a twisted love triangle—

Right. And you have this conflict because both Genevieve and Elliot love Beverly, and they both think that they have her best interests in mind. It’s funny because on one hand, my character is grounded in this loving, adult relationship with Beverly. I haven’t had a chance to play a lot of mature characters, so that was fun. But on the other hand, Genevieve has put herself in the middle of so much chaos, she can’t be entirely psychologically healthy. That’s something I’ve been reflecting on as I watch the show and think about how audiences are seeing my character. Maybe they think Genevieve is the bad guy?

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Had you ever met Rachel Weisz before you booked this role?

I’d never met her, but I was a fan of her work and have tracked her career. She was on the tippity-top of the short list of actors I’d like to work with. It’s hard to name a favourite performance. I really loved her in The Brothers Bloom with Mark Ruffalo and Adrien Brody. I guess it’s one that a lot of people aren’t familiar with because I was talking with Rachel during a press trip to London, and she was like, “You’ve seen that?”

A real Rachel Weisz deep cut.

Yeah, exactly. The character she plays is just so quirky and wholesome and weird and beautiful. I guess all of her characters are beautiful, but this was such a great performance. I highly recommend it.

Did you audition with Weisz?

I sent in a self-made audition tape. I was in Toronto at the time, wrapping up a stint on the Netflix show The Umbrella Academy. This was early May of 2021, and they sent me the plot breakdown along with the first two scripts. I made a tape in the living room slash kitchen of my sublet. Time passed, and by July, I assumed that it wasn’t happening. I was back in New York, and then they asked if I would do a Zoom call with Rachel, Sean Durkin, who is the executive producer and director, and Alice Birch, the showrunner. We didn’t read the scenes; we just talked. It was a chance for them to get to know me and see if they would want to work with me—sort of an energy check. I remember they asked me, “What does love mean to you?” I got pretty emotional and used my hands, which I tend to do when I get passionate. My voice was doing the very Canadian, East Coast melodic thing, and Rachel said, “I could listen to you talk forever.” As soon as we got off the call, I ran to my spouse and shrieked.

Your character, Genevieve, is also an actor. Did that help you relate to her?

There are scenes where she has to sit through a junket. Or she comes in and Beverly’s family is watching her show, and she feels embarrassed. I know what that’s like. I would say that I put a lot of myself into the character. I’m a very romantic person and deeply protective of the people I love—I suppose, fiercely protective—but there are these moments of deep tenderness. You see the same contrasting traits in Genevieve: the tenderness in her relationship with Beverly and then on the flip side, when she is putting her foot down with Elliot. It’s nothing over the top—just a flicker that says, “I’m not going to put up with this.”

Part of Genevieve’s story includes her role in a slasher show. Is that an homage to David Cronenberg, a.k.a. “The Baron of Blood”?

Yes, and it’s actually an Easter egg for fans of the original movie. Genevieve plays a character named Claire in a show called Rabbit, which is the name of one of Cronenberg’s early films. Claire was also the name of my character in the original Dead Ringers movie, played by Geneviève Bujold. So there is a lot of hat-tipping going on.

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What was it like to film scenes with both twin characters from a technical perspective?

We have Katie Hawthorne, who was Rachel’s scene partner and body double. So any time both twins were in a scene, you had two physical bodies in the room playing both characters while multiple cameras were rolling.

That sounds complicated. Did you ever confuse one twin for the other?

The dynamics that Genevieve has with Beverly versus Elliot were so different. The hard part was remembering where the camera was and where you needed to be for the shot to work.

Rachel Weisz saw the original Dead Ringers in theatres in 1988. You were negative four years old, so I’m guessing your story is different.

I was one of those kids who wanted to watch the things I wasn’t allowed. I was always trying to figure out the code for the parental lock. The first time I saw Dead Ringers, I was too young to appreciate most of it. I rewatched it a couple of years ago, after I knew about the project but before I had booked the role, and I was pretty blown away by the body horror of it all.

Dead Ringers doesn’t shy away from violence, especially when showing the bloody realities of women’s reproductive health.

I think the difference is that what we see in the show is natural and part of the process of existence. Yes, it can be violent at times, but it doesn’t feel gratuitous. I think it’s really important for people to see these depictions of birth and what happens to bodies. It’s definitely not something the popular media tends to portray.

The post Dead Ringers’ Britne Oldford is stuck in a twisty twin love triangle appeared first on Macleans.ca.

The Big Idea: Defend Drag Shows

Mariyam Khaja — Mon, 01 May 2023 14:59:41 +0000

“I’d love it if these bubbles started popping up across the country, in drag capitals like Toronto and in small towns alike. I’d love it even more if we didn’t need to use them.” (Illustration by Pete Ryan)

Kristyn Wong-Tam is a member of provincial parliament and the critic on 2SLGBTQ+ issues for the Ontario New Democratic Party.

I don’t do heels very well. I never have. I came out when I was a teenager, and my introduction to the world of drag largely happened in nightclubs and at parties in downtown Toronto. There I was, an awkward kid with limited life experience, watching queens like Michelle Ross entertain their admirers at Komrads dance club, strutting like Amazons across a shining floor to the tunes of Donna Summer. One of my most powerful drag memories is of watching RuPaul perform at the March on Washington for Lesbian, Gay and Bi Equal Rights and Liberation in 1993. I was in a 10-person lineup for the porta-potty when the early beats of “Supermodel (You Better Work)” came on; everyone deserted the queue to watch Ru own the stage in her wig, American flag–inspired bodysuit and sky-high boots. Back on earth—and in runners—I was giddy.

LGBTQ+ rights have come a long way since then. (RuPaul’s Drag Race just finished its 15th season.) But certain folks want us to go back to the Dark Ages. In recent years, trans and non-binary individuals—who make up a tiny fraction of the population—have found themselves the targets of a ramped-up global disinformation campaign by conservative religious fundamentalists to sway public opinion toward hatred. Not all drag artists are trans, but their joyful, gender-blurring acts have nonetheless become a wedge issue, and the performers themselves have been wrongly vilified as “groomers.”

Canadians sometimes like to think of ourselves as different from our American neighbours, but the anti-trans sentiment flying around state senates has germinated here all on its own. Between 2020 and 2021, Statistics Canada documented a 64 per cent increase in reported hate crimes against the LGBTQ+ community—and those are just the ones we know about. Attacks on drag performers and events have also swept the country: a Calgary drag-on-ice event scheduled for February was shut down over safety concerns. Drag storytimes in Peterborough, Ontario, and Coquitlam, B.C., received torrents of online backlash, as did a recent “Winter’s A Drag” event hosted by a distillery in Elora, Ontario.

A performer named Crystal Quartz, who is based in Guelph, Ontario, opened my eyes to how these protests unfold in real life. Not only was she being doxxed—her home address was published online—Crystal had to contact the police in every jurisdiction where she’d booked shows to make sure she’d be protected. Venue owners often had to call in extra security. Last winter, I travelled to Hamilton for one of Crystal’s performances and saw the reason for myself: a dozen angry protesters, clad in balaclavas and army fatigues, yelling and waving upside-down Canada flags a few metres away from young families heading into a restaurant for a fun, glittery lunch. I’ve seen a lot of protests in my life, but that experience was entirely jarring.

In early April, I introduced a private member’s bill, the Keeping 2SLGBTQI+ Communities Safe Act, in the Ontario legislature as a way to protect this community. One clause would set up an advisory committee to establish a long-term strategy to deal with anti-LGBTQ+ hate. Until this bill, there was nothing on the books that covered sporadic, one-off events—like drag brunches and storytimes—which typically move between venues. So the bill’s other, shorter-term clause would allow “community safety zones” to protect drag performances across the province. Ontarians might recognize this term from traffic signage that threatens to double their speeding fines in school zones. But in the past, this provision has also been used to establish safe perimeters around abortion facilities and vaccine clinics, which drew protests during the pandemic. We’d essentially be borrowing this old tool for a new purpose.

In the interest of preventing any more vitriol from reaching patrons, the act (if passed) would give Ontario’s attorney general the power to establish temporary community safety zones 100 metres in front of and around the venue doors. Anyone who commits anti-LGBTQ+ intimidation, harassment or hate speech within that bubble would be subject to a fine of up to $25,000. (The upper limit of that penalty would likely be applied in cases of criminal assault, not the simple honking of horns.)

The attorney general could work with emergency services and local law enforcement—who are used to monitoring potential public disturbances online—to set the address and timelines for the bubbles and announce them via media advisories that cost taxpayers nothing. There would be no burden on business owners to call in extra police services, which pulls resources from nearby cities. When the performance is over, the bubble zone would be lifted. At the very least, the mere existence of these zones could act as a deterrent.

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I also want to make one thing clear: this legislation would not stop Canadians from exercising their right to free speech. In the days following the bill’s announcement, my staff told me it was covered by Fox News and Breitbart. (My team acted as a buffer between me and the backlash for a few days.) Online commenters did not seem particularly interested in an important nuance of the bill, which is that it protects citizens’ rights to congregate and to protest. Basically, bring your signs (within reason) and MAGA swag, but if this bill passes, you’re not crossing that invisible line.

Private member’s bills don’t typically pass because many are tabled by opposition or independent MPPs. If the attorney general pushes it through, however, the Keeping 2SLGBTQI+ Communities Safe Act could pass within weeks. If he doesn’t, it could take years. As scary as things are out there, government officials are looking for solutions on how to keep LGBTQ+ people safe. In fact, some cities already have their own community safety zones, just under a different name. I’d love it if these bubbles started popping up across the country, in drag capitals like Toronto and in small towns alike. I’d love it even more if we didn’t need to use them.

Drag means different things to different people. To bachelorette parties, it’s a fun evening-ender. To chain restaurants, it’s a novel way to fill seats outside of peak service times. A lot of drag performers will tell you that they’re just entertainers looking to make a living; others see themselves as cultural storykeepers for the queer community, peppering their routines with political commentary. Some parents aren’t into the idea of drag storytime. They’re welcome to stay home for that hour or two.

The point of these safety zones isn’t to force people to embrace drag. It’s to show that these events, and the people who run them, deserve safety—even if the pastime isn’t for everyone. Take my four-year-old son, for example. Right now, he can’t sit through a full meal, and mascots in Paw Patrol costumes scare him, so drag brunch isn’t his scene. But my wife and I are both queer, and soon we’ll bring him to one, as we’ve done with Pride events since he was born. We want him to know we live in a beautiful, diverse world. I hope one day he leaves a drag event thinking the same thing I did after seeing RuPaul in Washington all those years ago: There are so many of us. They can’t do anything to stop us.

The post The Big Idea: Defend Drag Shows appeared first on Macleans.ca.

I grew up behind the grills at Burger Baron, Canada’s weirdest fast-food franchise

Mariyam Khaja — Wed, 26 Apr 2023 17:50:26 +0000

Omar Mouallem (Photograph by Aaron Pedersen)

If you didn’t grow up in Alberta, you’ve probably never heard of Burger Baron. It’s a fast-food chain in only the loosest terms, with a menu that varies wildly from location to location. The branding? There is none in the traditional corporate sense, except for the words “Burger Baron” in each restaurant’s name. Some franchisees have pluralized it (Burger Barons), others eponymized it (Kelly’s Burger Baron) and others embellished it (Burger Baron Pizza & Steak). There have been nearly as many logos as locations—some, but not all, are reinterpretations of the original logo, a colourful little knight with crusader crosses in his shield. And the menus can run practically as long as a Chinese restaurant’s. Some of the Barons have actually sold Chinese food, or Greek, or Italian or Indigenous-inspired bannock burgers. The only guarantees are two burger recipes—the flagship Baron and the mushroom burger—their presence assured thanks to their sheer popularity with Albertans. Especially the mushroom, a curiously soupy sandwich that looks, and tastes, like Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom.

Actually, there’s one other guarantee: almost every single franchisee hails from a Lebanese family like mine.

I was made a baron as an infant, when my parents—Ahmed and Tamam Mouallem—moved from Slave Lake, Alberta, to the even smaller town of High Prairie, four hours northwest of Edmonton, to open their franchise. They were shrewd Lebanese, who had left their country, once the Middle East’s capital of commerce, before it was destabilized by ethnic cleansing and sectarian violence. My dad’s uncle, living in Slave Lake, sponsored him to come to Canada in 1971, when Lebanon was teetering on the edge of civil war. By the time my dad returned home to find a bride in his hometown near the Syrian border, “Beirut” had already become synonymous with urban ruin.

The mushroom burger at Burger Baron (Photograph by Amber Bracken/Back Road Productions)

As immigrants, they knew they were following in a proud tradition of Lebanese immigration to Alberta. Their predecessors—Lebanese peddlers, homesteaders, fur traders—had erected some of Canada’s first minarets and laid the groundwork for folks like my parents. And my parents, in turn, put a lot of work into leveraging and protecting that legacy, taking the model-minority trope straight to heart. They wanted their restaurant to be that restaurant-for-all-occasions that anchors every small town. And they wanted the townsfolk to know that even these brownfolk would sponsor the local hockey team and sign their boys up to play—and replace their son’s name on his jersey with the name of their business. At 12 years old, I was a skating billboard, “Burger Baron” emblazoned in lieu of my name on my extra-large yet too-tight jersey, for all of the five minutes I got on ice per game.

When my dad and I travelled from town to town for hockey games, he insisted we stop in at his counterparts’ businesses to meet franchise owners and reminisce/bitch about the homeland. It struck me as strange that all the Burger Baron owners were Lebs like us. Weirder still were the infinite incarnations of the chain. But despite its crapshoot reputation, my folks were tremendously proud of building a landmark in a community without many.

Omar Mouallem as a baby, wearing a blue sweater.

As I got older, I had mixed feelings about the restaurant, which seemed more like a prison at times. My relationship with it became even more complicated after I convinced my parents to pull me out of hockey—a request that backfired, because I was now expected to put extra time into the family business. I worked in the drive-thru and dish pit alongside my older brother Ali, who was being groomed more rigorously for succession on the grills. It calmed me to know that in Arab culture, the eldest son was the de facto steward of the family legacy. It was never in question who would inherit the throne; at most I’d been tapped as an understudy, in case tragedy should befall the future emir.

But I had more metropolitan ambitions. I wanted to be a filmmaker, which my parents lightly indulged by sending me to summer film camp in Red Deer and letting me work a cushy job at the local video store. I was only called into the restaurant when they were slammed, while Ali was expected to show up every day after school, and on most weekends. Once my brother could competently close the cash registers at night, my parents and I all sighed with relief. I started planning my escape, able finally to pursue my passions in peace.

Burger Baron in Edmonton, Alberta (Photograph by Amber Bracken/Back Road Productions)

In 2003, I moved from rural Alberta to downtown Vancouver to study film and writing, and later made my way back to my home province, to make a living at it in Edmonton. It was there that I began noticing people lighting up when they learned my family was part of a provincial institution. I was surprised to find a cult following for Burger Baron in the form of tattoos, a scene in the raucous comedy Fubar 2 and even a parody Twitter account: @Burger_Baron, known for trolling corporate fast-food chains. While the competition spends millions mastering reproduction, Burger Baron was the anti-chain, and people loved it. I was becoming prouder of being a baronet—not royalty, but evidence of the better life my parents had built for Ali and me.

I started investigating the chain’s origins 10 years ago as a magazine reporter, hoping to find the founder and thank him for what he gave to us. To my shock, he was not Lebanese. He was an American entrepreneur who moved his family to Calgary in 1957, with a plan to found the McDonald’s of the north. His name? McDonnell, Jack. But McDonnell had moved too aggressively on his expansion plans, and his company quickly burned up its forward momentum, leaving behind a trail of franchise owners orphaned by a bankrupted company. As far as anyone knows, the company’s intellectual property, like the name and logo, was never purchased by creditors or passed down to the next of kin. According to his son Terry McDonnell, Jack, who died in 1983, basically gave them all the recipes and wished them good luck.

Riad “Uncle Rudy” Kemaldean, a.k.a. “the Godfather of the Burger Baron,” at his palatial Edmonton home (Photograph by Amber Bracken/Back Road Productions)

They started to vanish quickly. By the mid-’60s, only a handful of Burger Barons remained, each independently owned and operated—sometimes even posted for sale in the classifieds. And who would ever want to buy a decentralized fast-food chain, with all the headaches of maintaining a brand and no corporate upside? The answer is Riad Kemaldean, a.k.a. “Uncle Rudy,” a.k.a. “the Godfather.” An astute businessman with a penchant for suits and cigars, Kemaldean bought his first Baron in Edmonton, in 1965. From its success, he sponsored friends and relatives from back home and set them up to manage new locations, which in turn became training grounds for his protégés’ own friends and relatives. The Burger Baron’s second wave spread through chain immigration, accelerating during Lebanon’s civil war from 1975 to 1990, and continues at a slower pace today. My dad apprenticed with his uncle, who bought one of the original Burger Barons from another Lebanese man, who had apprenticed with Rudy in the ’70s. Without royalties or start-up fees, the trade secrets proliferated through handshakes and favours, enduring every dining trend of the past five decades.

By the time I’d pieced together the puzzle, I’d grown fonder of Burger Baron and my family’s role in it. Like many second-generation kids, I struggled to see myself in Canadian culture, but being a Baronet makes me feel like I’m part of the fabric of Alberta—and, in a strange way, like I’m connected to the homeland.

***

In 2021, I began work on a documentary film: The Lebanese Burger Mafia. By the time I returned to High Prairie to film it, Ali had been running our parents’ Burger Baron for over a decade, doing things more or less the way our dad did—right down to sponsoring his son’s hockey team. Only he’d been doing it under a new, jazzier name: “The Boondocks Grill.” Another Burger Baron gone.

At its peak in the early ’90s, there were more than 50 completely independent locations, about twice as many as there are today. Burger Baron’s heyday is over, as owners struggle to compete amid the rise of big-box chains and foodie culture. The biggest challenge has been the next of kin, second-generation Lebanese-Canadians like me, who’ve become white-collar workers not in spite of Burger Baron’s success, but because of it.

The Lebanese Burger Mafia’s producer Dylan Rhys Howard, director Omar Mouallem and director of photography Moh Mahfouz (Photograph by Amber Bracken/Back Road Productions)

And many of those who have remained in the business, like my brother, are eager to distance themselves from its outmoded reputation. I was quick to tease Ali for betraying our family legacy—renaming the place, renovating it to look more like a steakhouse, adding upmarket bison burgers and, interestingly, my mom’s fattouche salad recipe. But my real motivation was to find out whether he felt like his succession was a choice. Did my freedoms as the baby of the family make him resent his inheritance?

“A little bit,” he admitted. “I didn’t understand why you had these options. But with me, I was already groomed for it.” But Ali said those feelings were never stronger than the pride and satisfaction that came from running a small-town diner very well. “I’ve been able to provide for the family in a community that I love, that I grew up in. It’s what I know. I guess it’s what I love.”

Omar Mouallem is the director of The Lebanese Burger Mafia, playing in Toronto at Hot Docs on May 3 and 4, and in Edmonton on May 14. Burgerbaronmovie.com

The post I grew up behind the grills at Burger Baron, Canada’s weirdest fast-food franchise appeared first on Macleans.ca.

How tarot became the latest social media craze

Mariyam Khaja — Wed, 19 Apr 2023 18:25:09 +0000

Once a patchouli-scented pastime, tarot is now decidedly chic (Photograph by iStock)

“So, the very first thing is kind of a kick in the ass,” says Lori Simeunovic, who goes by Tarot Lori professionally, as she draws the Four of Cups. We’ve connected on a Sunday morning over Zoom to talk about her 35-year career in tarot, and when she offers to read for me, I can’t pass up the opportunity. The cups, she explains, represent love and abundance, but the worried figure on the card looks distracted. “This card is asking you to be more present. I call this a ‘cranky grandpa card’ because in my head, it has this old-man voice like Clint Eastwood,” she says, radiating Old Hollywood glamour with her Corvette-red lipstick and platinum-blonde hair in front of a shelf of crystals. I’d classify myself as tarot-agnostic, but I find myself leaning closer and closer to the screen as she flips through her well-worn deck of Rider-Waite-Smith cards.

Tarot seems to be everywhere lately: on The White Lotus, where a spacey heiress played by Jennifer Coolidge receives an ominous reading; in the purse of actress Anya Taylor-Joy, who told British Vogue she loves to pull the cards out at parties; in the creations of Montreal jewellery design studio Sofia Zakia, whose tarot collection features gold-and-diamond card pendants. Simeunovic, who started out doing readings in nail salons and coffee shops, has been swept up in the craze: she just signed a two-book deal with HarperCollins to write about rituals and tarot. What was once a patchouli-scented pastime, discoverable through your witchy aunt or local crystal shop, is now decidedly chic and increasingly ubiquitous.

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Tarot cards have been a party staple since the late medieval era. Fifteenth-century Italians played parlour games with their decks, which are similar to modern playing cards: four suits, each with cards numbered one to 10, followed by four face cards. In tarot, these 56 cards are called the minor arcana, divided into swords, cups, pentacles and wands. Then there are the 22 cards of the major arcana, many of which are familiar even if you’ve never picked up a deck: the Devil, the Lovers, the Chariot. By the 19th century, the cards had become associated with divination and fortune-telling, largely after French occultist Éliphas Lévi helped popularize their esoteric symbolism.

Today, tarot is a popular tool for self-reflection and introspection, not unlike therapy. For someone like me, who finds the thought of talking about my feelings and anxieties excruciating, the open-ended nature of a tarot reading offers a comfortingly indirect approach. “It’s like a conversation with your soul, and I’m the interpreter,” says Simeunovic. “I also say that it’s like life coaching the crap out of yourself.” When my attention snagged on the Four of Cups, a figure who is always scanning the horizon for what’s missing, I felt my own worries represented.

As with pretty much every other aspect of our lives, the tarot business was transformed by the pandemic. Simeunovic says that COVID-19 exploded her reach as people started scheduling readings on Zoom, sometimes even for first dates. She believes that people became more attracted to tarot, astrology and other forms of “woo woo,” as she puts it, as a way to combat the pandemic’s isolating effect. The striking imagery and open interpretation of the cards also make them ideal for social-media algorithms; the #tarot hashtag has over 45 billion views on TikTok.

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Maybe that’s why tarot is flourishing among millennials and Gen Z, whose members are also much less likely to belong to organized religions than their elders. Several of my friends, while telling me about their tarot practices, mentioned that they used to be religious. “Tarot and other mystical practices fill that void,” says Keagan Perlette, a Quebec City writer who publishes a newsletter on tarot cards and astrology. “Why are we here? What am I doing? You can ask those questions without tying them into the dogma of religion, which can feel restrictive or unaccepting.”

Whether you think tarot is a fun party trick or a direct line to the cosmos, it can be an effective way to slice through the Gordian knot of your own tangled thoughts. “These are just pieces of paper,” Simeunovic says, but there’s pleasure to be found in listening. “When you’re shuffling your tarot deck, you’re acknowledging that there’s some force outside you that you can’t see and you can’t control,” says Perlette. “Whether you call it God, or the universe, or physics—it’s something you can’t touch, but it’s going to come and give you a message.”

This article appears in print in the April 2023 issue of Maclean’s magazine. Buy the issue for $9.99 or better yet, subscribe to the monthly print magazine for just $39.99.

The post How tarot became the latest social media craze appeared first on Macleans.ca.

The scary truth about Canada’s wrongful convictions

Mariyam Khaja — Mon, 17 Apr 2023 15:29:29 +0000

(Illustration by Celina Pereira)

The Canadian Registry of Wrongful Convictions lists 83 names. They are people who were driven to make false confessions. People who were convicted based on flawed forensics. People who were named by witnesses who got it wrong. The registry, posted online in February, was co-created by Kent Roach, a law professor at the University of Toronto who has fought to right miscarriages of justice for over three decades. “These names are the tip of an iceberg whose real size we don’t know,” he says.

With a team of volunteer law students, he combed through court records and media reports spanning decades to find people who’d been officially exonerated. The oldest case they found goes back to 1956. “This is not our judgment about who is innocent,” says Roach, “but a record of the courts admitting their mistakes.” Twenty-eight cases involve imaginary crimes—deaths that were ruled culpable homicides but in fact resulted from accidents, natural causes or self-defence—and the 83 victims are disproportionately those Roach calls “the usual suspects.” More than a fifth are Indigenous or racialized people, roughly 87 per cent are men, and many struggled with mental or cognitive issues, substance use and poverty.

In his new book, Wrongfully Convicted: Guilty Pleas, Imagined Crimes, and What Canada Must Do to Safeguard Justice, Roach dissects the blinkered legal system that has upheld and induced these miscarriages of justice in Canada for decades. One case changed the course of his career: Donald Marshall Jr., who spent over 11 years in prison for a murder he did not commit. “Marshall was a crash course in wrongful convictions and how they happen,” Roach says. “I teach it every year, and I get mad about it again every year.”

Late one night in May of 1971, 17-year-old Marshall bumped into an acquaintance, Sandy Seale, at Wentworth Park in Sydney, Nova Scotia. The pair encountered two older white men, Roy Ebsary and James MacNeil. There was a brief exchange—a request for cigarettes by the older men, an attempt at panhandling by the younger—before Ebsary grew angry and spewed racial slurs at Marshall and Seale, who are Mi’kmaw and Black, respectively. Ebsary pulled out a knife, slashed Marshall’s arm and fatally stabbed Seale in the stomach, but Marshall was the one charged with murder.

In Marshall’s case, whatever could have gone wrong did go wrong. Investigative tunnel vision was intense from the start. Marshall was an Indigenous youth with a history of liquor violations, and police were certain of his guilt. Never mind that he was cut up—investigators said his injuries must have been self-inflicted and disregarded exonerating evidence. They failed to secure the crime scene and search for the murder weapon, which was found years later in Ebsary’s former residence, still bearing fibres from Seale’s clothing.

At trial, the judge allowed the prosecutor to “refresh” the memory of a witness who wanted to recant his earlier lie about seeing Marshall stab Seale. Marshall’s defence lawyers, who also doubted his innocence, didn’t bother following up on his account of Seale’s murder. One member of the all-white jury later told a reporter, “With one redskin and one Negro involved, it was like two dogs in a field—you knew one of them was going to kill the other.” Six months after the murder, the jury convicted Marshall and sentenced him to life in prison.

More than a decade later, a steady trickle of new evidence finally forced an RCMP investigation, and a special five-judge panel heard a new appeal in 1983. The court simultaneously ruled Marshall innocent of murder and guilty of perjury—the RCMP had pressured him to enter a false guilty plea copping to attempted robbery, which the panel interpreted as lying in court, blaming Marshall for his own wrongful conviction. It took another six years before a Royal Commission exonerated Marshall completely and eviscerated everyone else involved. In a recommendation that would later be echoed by every other provincial inquiry into miscarriages of justice—there have been six since Marshall—the commissioners called for an independent institution to deal with wrongful convictions, which currently go through the Ministry of Justice. Thirty-four years later, it still doesn’t exist.

That’s finally about to change. The first federal commission probing the tangled history and impact of wrongful convictions was called in late 2021, headed by Harry LaForme, Canada’s first Indigenous appeal court judge, and Juanita Westmoreland-Traoré, who became the country’s first Black law dean at the University of Windsor, with Roach as their director of research. They presented their findings to the Minister of Justice in November of 2021, prompting Ottawa to recently introduce Bill C-40, which proposes to establish the Miscarriages of Justice Commission. The independent body would be the first of its kind in Canada, reviewing applications alleging wrongful convictions and broader miscarriages of justice.

It’s a giant step forward, Roach says, but the bill has yet to pass. In the meantime, he’s keeping a wary eye on the contours of that new commission—how effective, fast-moving and independent it will be. That’s why his book delves into the gritty and appalling details of the registry’s cases. Real change won’t occur, Roach believes, until Canadians know the stories of the people who were wronged.

***

In the three decades since the Marshall report was released, Kent Roach has invested his anger into action: he worked with the organization now known as Innocence Canada during the 1996 Morin inquiry—which looked into Guy Paul Morin’s wrongful conviction for the murder of Christine Jessop—and did pro bono work for Aboriginal Legal Services. He later acted as research director for the Goudge Inquiry into Charles Smith, the former chief forensic pathologist at SickKids in Toronto, whose persuasive but flawed testimony led to numerous wrongful convictions.

The factors that paved the way for Marshall’s conviction remain pervasive today: racism and investigative tunnel vision often cloud authorities’ ethical judgment, and defendants may be the victim of questionable or shoddily executed forensics work. In court, defendants’ chances of proving their innocence are often dashed by poor legal defence, almost always because they are unable to afford any better.

And there’s also the pressure defendants face to plead guilty to lesser charges, even when innocent, to escape the weight of mandatory minimum sentences. Twenty-nine offences in the Canadian Criminal Code, including use of a firearm and attempted murder, carry such sentences. Defendants can try their hand at court, but prosecutors—and even defence attorneys who want to wrap up a case quickly—may remind them that it’s a gamble on their future. If the defendant loses, they’re looking down the inescapable barrel of prison time. Add in a criminal justice system slow to recognize error and even slower to make amends, and it’s the perfect storm for wrongful convictions.

One of the major cases that shaped Roach’s thinking was that of Jamie Gladue, a pregnant, 19-year-old Cree-Métis woman who fatally stabbed her common-law husband in 1995 during an altercation. (He had already been convicted of assaulting her during her first pregnancy a year earlier.) When Gladue was charged with second-degree murder in 1996, her choice was stark. She could take her chances in a court system where Indigenous peoples are 33 per cent less likely to be acquitted than non-Indigenous defendants. That meant risking a mandatory minimum sentence of 10 to 15 years without a chance of parole, served in an Ontario prison far from her two young children living in B.C. Or Gladue could accept the plea deal offered for manslaughter and receive a greatly reduced three-year sentence to be served in B.C., followed by early parole and a chance to see her children grow up. She took the deal.

In 1999, Gladue became the focus of a landmark Supreme Court case—Canada’s first attempt to grapple with the over-incarceration of Indigenous people. “The Gladue case haunts me,” says Roach, who worked with Aboriginal Legal Services and later came to believe Gladue had a valid self-defence claim never asserted. He realized that the majority of criminal cases are resolved by guilty pleas, often by women and mothers of young children who choose the deal as the lesser of two evils. “In my mind, the universe of possible wrongful convictions multiplied exponentially.”

Wrongfully Convicted also details the risk defendants take when going to trial. Charles Smith frequently testified as an expert, but he held deeply conservative views about “proper” families. A coroner’s review in 2005 examined 45 child autopsies Smith had conducted and found that he’d made questionable conclusions in 20 cases, 13 of which led to criminal convictions. It turned out Smith had actively misled and lied to jurors in dozens of cases as part of his self-described crusade “against people who hurt children.” Smith resigned from SickKids, his career destroyed, but like most people who have contributed to wrongful convictions, he has never faced any legal penalty.

His victims can’t say the same. In 1993, Tammy Marquardt’s two-year-old son—who had asthma, pneumonia and epilepsy—died suddenly. She found him tangled in the sheets of his crib, gasping for air, but when she called the ambulance, she was too distressed to successfully administer CPR. Marquardt was a 21-year-old Anishinaabe mother with a drinking issue, separated from her son’s father. Like almost all of the registry’s cases, she was a marginalized person without the financial means to adequately defend herself. She looked guilty to authorities, and Smith testified that her son had been smothered or strangled, helping to secure her conviction of second-degree murder and a life sentence. She spent almost 14 years behind bars, during which her two other children were put up for adoption, until new evidence dismissed Smith’s testimony and exonerated her.

To prevent and rectify investigative missteps, Roach wants more rigorously enforced national standards entrenched in law. Many authorities aren’t trained to interrogate vulnerable people with cognitive or mental health issues. Prosecutors continue to use untrustworthy testimony from jailhouse informants, and sometimes evidence favourable to the defendant is not disclosed or found in the investigation.

Evidence also remains at risk of being lost, misplaced or even destroyed after a trial. David Milgaard, who spent nearly 23 years in prison for the rape and murder of Gail Miller, was only exonerated after a court clerk—who had always believed in his innocence—preserved Miller’s nursing uniform, which bore the semen of her real killer. “It could have been destroyed,” says Roach, “for storage reasons.”

If Roach could change one law, it would be mandatory life imprisonment. In Canada, life sentences for murder convictions are required, with no chance of parole for a minimum of 25 years for first-degree murder. The menace of such outcomes are the prime driver of guilty pleas, genuine or false, that usually bring lesser sentences. The accused—whether innocent or not—must take a gamble: if they go to trial, they risk spending the next decades of their lives in prison.

Mandatory life isn’t going anywhere though, Roach says. Politicians are terrified of being called soft on crime, and guilty pleas are built into the clogged judicial system. They remain its essential grease, and nothing will change that, nor completely eradicate human bias and error. That’s the tragic subtext running through Wrongfully Convicted. “It’s time to find a faster and more humane process to deal with mistakes after we make them,” he says.

***

As the federal committee awaits the fate of Bill C-40 and the Miscarriages of Justice Commission, Roach is sure about one thing: if there is ever a moment to reform our courts, after more than three decades of governmental foot-dragging, it is now.

The cracks in Canada’s justice system are well-worn, but Roach believes that nothing has propelled change more than the desire for reconciliation with Indigenous peoples. They make up five per cent of the population, and their over-incarceration had troubled the Supreme Court a quarter century ago when they comprised 12 per cent of inmates. It’s now a staggering 30 per cent, and no real attempt at reconciliation can ignore it.

To push C-40 through, compromises were made. The commissioners—who would number between five and nine, all appointed by the federal cabinet—are not allowed to reform the systemic factors that produce so many errors and wrongful convictions. They cannot consider, the way their counterparts in England and New Zealand can, applications for relief in regards to sentences, which can reduce or modify a defendant’s time in prison—something that Roach believes could greatly benefit Indigenous offenders and those living with mental health challenges. The new commission also isn’t allowed to delve into the complex issue of accessing compensation for defendants’ wrongful incarceration, even though fighting for it can be a long and often revictimizing process.

In the end, it will all come down to money. “There is nothing in the bill to ensure that the commission will be adequately funded,” says Roach. He wants to ensure that Canada’s commission doesn’t wind up looking like New Zealand’s team, which was understaffed and now faces a growing backlog of cases.

Yet Roach remains optimistic. The establishment of the Miscarriages of Justice Commission will be an enormous step, even with its limitations. The bill marks a hinge moment in the country’s history, signalling the culmination of decades’ worth of struggle. It will do away with the sluggish pace of the old order and provide a new path for those aggrieved by the justice system, replete with experts and the bittersweet promise of vindication. “There is more hope for the wronged now,” says Roach. But only if we do this right.

The post The scary truth about Canada’s wrongful convictions appeared first on Macleans.ca.

“I’d die immediately”: Yellowjackets star Sophie Nélisse rates her wilderness survival skills

Dave Zarum — Mon, 03 Apr 2023 12:02:53 +0000

Sophie Nélisse as teen Shauna in Yellowjackets (Photographs by Brendan Meadows/Showtime)

It takes a strong stomach to deal with sudden-onset stardom. Sophie Nélisse insists she doesn’t have one, but fame found her all the same. As one part the teen contingent of Showtime’s feral, feverishly successful series Yellowjackets, Nélisse, the 23-year-old Windsor-born, Montreal-bred ingenue, has already attracted her own personal cult following for her portrayal of the deceptively deceptive midfielder Shauna Sadecki.

In real life, Nélisse got her start as an artistic gymnast, only following her siblings into acting as a way to fund her Olympic dreams. But soon, commercial gigs gave way to star-making turns in 2011’s Oscar contender Monsieur Lazhar and, two years later, The Book Thief, whisking her onto a different path entirely. One that eventually led her deep into the British Columbia brush, with fictional teammates in tow.

To hear her explain it, Nélisse seems most at ease neither here nor there: on the road, in the woods playing TV’s current biggest covert threat, and also in the kitchen, making Instagram-ready dinners with her co-stars. Just don’t ask her to skin a rabbit. (She knows how, she’d just prefer not to).

You have to be pretty fit to hack it in the Canadian wilderness. I read that you started out as a gymnast?

Yeah, when I was four years old. It was 2004 and I was trying to make it to the 2016 Olympics. I trained 35 hours a week: I had school from 9 a.m. to noon, then trained from 12 to 5 p.m. on floor, beam, vault and bars. We needed money to support my coaching, travel and competition expenses. At the time, my brother wanted to be an actor, and I thought: I’ll just enrol in the agency with him, and if I get a few commercials, that’ll pay for gymnastics. I got Monsieur Lazhar, my first feature, after a few months. It was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at the Oscars. That put me on the map.

Were you in any commercials that Canadian audiences would remember?

I did an IKEA commercial, in English and French. I also did one for the Quebec pharmacy Jean Coutu. I remember being in one of their stores saying, “One day, I want to be in a commercial for them!” So random. Then I ended up booking one.

The Yellowjackets certainly have an atypical high school experience. As a child actor, do you ever feel like you missed out on any big milestones?

I mean, I definitely did not have a typical upbringing. I spent afternoons going to auditions. When I did The Book Thief, I was gone for months. I never really got the sense of community that kids get at school. I hung out with my teachers because they were the ones I was in contact with the most. And I missed my prom, but I didn’t really care. I didn’t have a close circle of friends; I was always just in the now. I didn’t feel like I belonged anywhere. I still feel that sometimes.

Have you experienced the kind of high-emotion, hot-cold teen-girl friendships that we see on the show?

I don’t do well with anyone who’s mean. Popular girls don’t like me because I’m too blunt. I’ve definitely had some rocky friendships, where I liked the person a lot but not certain decisions they made. Like with Jackie and Shauna on the show: they’ve been friends since they were super young. They know each other’s deepest secrets, and that’s what holds the bond. It’s hard to let go of someone you love. I’ve had friends like that in the past, and I’ve had to cut cords with them. It’s not easy.

Do you get home to Montreal often?

Yeah, I do. We got to go home two or three times during shooting, which was great. But I get a weird feeling, kind of like the girls in Yellowjackets. They’ve spent so much time out in the wilderness that no one can quite understand what they went through, except for that group. When they’re thrown back into society, they’re strangers in their own world.

I imagine it would be hard to casually ride the metro or visit the Couche-Tard after that.

When I come back to Montreal after being gone for a long time, I feel like an alien. We’ll be in Vancouver shooting the show, where we’re all very bonded. And then we all go back to normal life. My best friend, Courtney Eaton—who plays Lottie—goes back to Los Angeles. We obviously keep in touch, but it’s still weird to not see her daily. We lived together for six months. Back at home, my friends will have lived things I don’t know anything about because I haven’t been there. I call them, and try to keep up with what’s going on, but it’s always a bit of an adjustment to get my footing again.

At certain points in the woods, the vibe is very much “every Yellowjacket for themselves.” But were there any extreme off-screen bonding moments? I saw on your Instagram that you and Courtney made risotto. That takes a lot of patience!

We’re both huge food fanatics, so we cooked a lot. We made really good salads. We also hosted Thanksgiving and made an apple pie. A lot of people brought store-bought ones, and we did a pie tasting. Our guests said mine and Courtney’s was the best.

Speaking of food, the series is constantly teasing cannibalism sequences. How do you, as an actor, prepare to eat your friends? You’re not vegetarian, are you?

I’m not, but it was definitely harder for the vegetarians on set. I don’t think you can prepare for it, honestly. I remember us all sitting in a circle filming that, thinking: What is our job? What is our life? But you gotta do what you gotta do. We all had buckets next to us and when they yelled, “Cut!” we just spat it all up. The “meat” was pretty good, though. It was jackfruit with rice papers that had gone all soggy to simulate skin.

Would you say you have a high tolerance for gross-outs, in general?

No. I’m scared of needles. I’m scared of blood. I could never be a doctor. You’d think you’d eat the “meat” once and be like, “Okay, I’ve done one take! I know what this is about!” But it got grosser and grosser.

The opposite reaction probably would have been weird, but…

Yeah, like you suddenly start enjoying it? No.

Did you pick up any surprising survival skills while doing research for your role?

Not really. What’s most interesting about the girls is that they don’t know how to survive—except for maybe Misty. If anything, I learned things while shooting, and even then, it’s all a propped set. I know a little bit about how to skin a rabbit, but if you gave me a rabbit right now, I don’t think I could do it. I don’t even think I could find north, south, east or west.

So you weren’t a girl scout at any point.

No. My ex was a scout and he taught me some tricks, but I don’t really remember them. I think I would die immediately.

Melanie Lynskey, who plays adult Shauna, has really nailed the role of doe-eyed everywoman. No one would expect her character to conceal any cruelty. Do you feel like that element of surprise is your acting strength, too?

I relate to Shauna a lot. She’s kind of expected to sit back in the role of the observer, but there’s a lot of inner strength to her that she doesn’t quite know how to control. To some extent, that’s even scarier, because of how thrilling it feels for her to finally let it out. Me, on the other hand, I hate disappointing people; I think it’s my biggest fear. But even though I’m kind of quirky and shy on the outside, I’m still confident—in a mysterious way.

Your co-stars Christina Ricci and Juliette Lewis have had their own cult followings since the ’90s. Have they ever given you advice on acting or how to handle fame?

It’s not like anyone told me anything. The best advice often comes from just observing. Melanie, for example, is the kindest, most generous person. She’s always checking up on us, like a mom on set. And she’s so respected. My goal is not only to be a good actor, but one who people love working with. I also watch how the other girls act on set, like Sophie Thatcher, who plays Natalie. She’s so good at taking up space when she acts—the way she moves and uses her arms. I sometimes feel like I don’t know what to do with my body. If I don’t have pockets, I don’t know where to put my hands.

Have you ever read Lord of the Flies? Do you think the comparisons to Yellowjackets hold up?

Yeah, I think they do, especially when you see the characters’ animalistic sides toward the end. It’s interesting how, even when there are no rules, they still feel the need to have someone be the leader. People also assume that girls would just sit around and braid each other’s hair. What I love the most about season two is how physical and down and dirty it gets. It’s refreshing to see women go so dark. We’re not scared to go there.

Are there any genres aside from psychological thriller that you’d like to explore in the future, or is this your happy place?

I would love to do, like, a rom-com. I want to do everything. If I could be on White Lotus, I would be in heaven.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The post “I’d die immediately”: Yellowjackets star Sophie Nélisse rates her wilderness survival skills appeared first on Macleans.ca.

Andrea Jin is a must-watch stand-up comedian (and reluctant TikTok star)

Mariyam Khaja — Mon, 27 Mar 2023 16:02:44 +0000

(Photograph by Emma McIntyre, hair and makeup by Christina Spina)

Some might think Andrea Jin’s trademark sweet-then-dark jokes about, say, China’s one-child policy, veer into too-far territory, but 250,000 TikTok followers can’t be wrong. Mulan, her grandparents—all of it is fodder for the Vancouver comedian, who has channelled her dry, yeah-I-said-it sensibility into online acclaim and a ticket to Los Angeles (where she now lives).

Now 27, Jin was just 10 when her family immigrated from China to Vancouver. After school, she received English lessons from Family Guy and Russell Peters’s stand-up—stuff no kid should hear. “My parents didn’t speak English either, so they couldn’t tell,” she says. She got hooked on performing during a five-minute set at a campus comedy event at Western University, where she studied business. Everyone was eating and doing homework, but Jin wasn’t fazed. She quit school, took a job at a Vancouver steakhouse and gigged at small comedy clubs around the city—for free, at first. In 2019, Jin was a finalist in SiriusXM’s Top Comic competition. Then she appeared at Just for Laughs in Montreal. “Things just snowballed.”

Even as her career began to resemble those of her idols, Jin still didn’t see herself in their shoes. “Those male powerhouses were great,” Jin says, “but being an Asian girl, none of them had my perspective.” That is until Grandma’s Girl, a 2020 recording of Jin’s most crowd-pleasing bits, including “Wax Me” and “Asians Are in Movies Now.” Every single track was labelled “explicit” on Apple Music.

When gigs dried up during the pandemic, Jin’s manager, who signed her after a New Faces showcase at Just for Laughs, suggested she post clips of Grandma’s Girl online. Initially, Jin thought it was “cringe.” But her riffs on the pitfalls of social media and gently rejecting her female friends—she’s bisexual—have since earned Jin hundreds of thousands of fans, who flood her DMs with gratitude for making them feel seen. “I do this for selfish reasons—I didn’t know it would affect others positively,” she says, laughing, then uncharacteristically earnest. “It keeps me going.”

Last spring, Grandma’s Girl won a Juno for Comedy Album of the Year, and recently, Jin was hired to write for the Comedy Central series Digman! She’s gone Hollywood insofar as she’s already booked James Corden and has written a sitcom pilot (with plans to pitch), but she’s still shocked when she—“just some Canadian!”—gets recognized on the street. It brings to mind one of Jin’s favourite jokes, her long-time opener, where she asks the audience if it’s okay that she’s an immigrant. They seem to love it.

This article appears in print in the April 2023 issue of Maclean’s magazine. Buy the issue for $9.99 or better yet, subscribe to the monthly print magazine for just $39.99.

The post Andrea Jin is a must-watch stand-up comedian (and reluctant TikTok star) appeared first on Macleans.ca.

Yellowjackets is about cannibalism. It’s also about how we face trauma.

Mariyam Khaja — Thu, 23 Mar 2023 18:47:36 +0000

(Illustration by Dominic Bugatto)

Under what circumstances could you be persuaded to eat human flesh? You may already know the answer. (The only acceptable one, by the way, is: extreme duress.) If you happened to be one of the many millions of viewers masochistic enough to mainline the first season of Yellowjackets, Showtime’s breakout survival sensation, then cannibalistic hypotheticals have, at the very least, crossed your mind. On March 24, the show’s second season continues the wild, subversive horror story of a varsity girls’ soccer team from New Jersey whose fantasies of championship glory meet a violent end when their plane to nationals crash-lands in the Canadian wilderness. (The show, which airs on Crave, was filmed in the gloomy forests of British Columbia.)

In a storyline that expertly mimics the timeless headspace of anyone touched by trauma, Yellowjackets pitches back and forth between the present-day lives of the survivors and the tragic events of 1996, a year once coincidentally dubbed “the year of the teenage girl” by the New York Times. Crucially, the show attempts, in nauseating detail, to make sense of the middle. How, in 19 months, could a group of superficially basic high school students devolve from Chuck Taylor–sporting athletes into dead-eyed, pelt-draped huntresses who cook and ritualistically consume their friend—or, maybe, friends? What makes Yellowjackets so compelling is how it circles a truth that’s simultaneously soothing and hard to digest: the fall into the recesses of our back brains is nowhere near as steep as we’d like to think. Any one of us could conjure our animalistic sides if pushed.

Husband-and-wife show creators Bart Nickerson and Ashley Lyle were smart to integrate this shadow delicately. In flashes forward, they charm with doe-eyed Melanie Lynskey (as the crafty Shauna Shipman) and disarm with Christina Ricci and Juliette Lewis, beloved princesses of darkness who deliver note-perfect performances as the brooding Natalie Scatorccio and wire-haired Misty Quigley, the team’s off-kilter equipment manager. Amid the maggot-foraging and a bacchanalian party that almost leads to human sacrifice, there are periodic moments of naïveté, as if to say, “See? They’re just kids!” There’s a fumbled attempt at virginity loss. There’s a rousing group dance-along to Montell Jordan’s “This Is How We Do It,” which, of course, blares from a Walkman. And even after Misty stoically performs a DIY amputation on their injured assistant coach, she reassures her teammates with her recognizable credentials. “I took the Red Cross babysitter training class—twice!” she says proudly. Then she disinfects the wound with Sea Breeze astringent, a retro teen skin care staple. True predators first make a point of putting you at ease.

Our pop-cultural fascination with murdery wilderness porn satisfies a collective need for disaster rehearsal. It allows us to ruminate on the worst of our impulses, and on our phobias, like plane crashes, rogue wolf attacks and finding oneself in the woods without a tampon. It’s also content that comes complete with a fun—if complicated—thought experiment: how do people behave when civilization is far but death is potentially very near? But more importantly: how would I behave—you know, in theory?

It makes absolute sense that a series like Yellowjackets, which debuted in November of 2021, was met with rabid binge-watchers, adoring critics and an impressive 100 per cent rating on Rotten Tomatoes. In real life, we were all the deepest we’d been into survival mode in quite a long while—two years into a pandemic that disrupted and overhauled our lives. We encountered the usual creep of climate calamity and wealth-hoarding billionaires, but also the very real risk that simply being breathed on by our loved ones could leave us seriously ill. Whether it’s Lost or Lord of the Flies—Yellowjackets’ most frequently cited comparison—art that acknowledges our mortality and wretchedness has often proved to be more entertaining in times of trouble than cheerier forms of escape.

Part of the inspiration for Yellowjackets’ plot isn’t fictional at all, which makes the show’s it-could-happen-to-anyone ethos all the more unsettling. The series draws from the story of Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571, which was hired to transport a team of young-adult rugby players from Montevideo, Uruguay, to a game in Santiago, Chile, in October of 1972. The plane’s right wing clipped a mountain in the Andes, resulting in a disastrous accident that left only 16 of its 45 passengers alive and stranded atop a mountain. Before the surviving players were rescued—and heralded as national heroes—they took turns punching each other’s feet to maintain circulation through the freezing mountain nights. One survivor even rationed a single peanut. After a week of frigid conditions and with their food supply completely depleted, some survivors ate their deceased teammates.

In the days immediately following the crash, the players’ innate coping strategies began to emerge: one temperamental survivor screamed at and stepped on his debilitated compatriots. Another, disabled by two broken legs, pitched in by studying maps to figure out the team’s location. True to form, the captain, Marcelo, delegated busywork—like finding unbloodied, drinkable snow—to keep everyone from focusing on their grim situation.

None of the Yellowjackets’ various wilderness personalities are huge surprises. Their dangerous new conditions only amplify less-than-savoury characteristics that already existed. What those girls get up to deep in the northern backcountry is a natural progression from their promise-filled existences in New Jersey—not an aberration. For those who think the teen-girl factor precludes Yellowjackets from ever achieving Lord of the Flies–levels of feral, I’d say: have you ever met or been a teenage girl? Yes, there are dorktastic singalongs and a certain aura of sweetness, but also weird rituals, ceremonial garb (friendship bracelets), tribalism and blood. What elevates the series from pure brutality to brilliance is its focus on creatures, easily mistaken as harmless, who conceal a sharp, ruthless edge. Kind of like their insect mascot. Kind of like actual human beings.

It’s pretty easy to imagine these suburban gals as your high school friends. Back in ’90s Jersey, our anti-heroines weren’t waging battles against the elements but each other, for social supremacy. The series’ first main-character kill-off involves being ostracized to death. The relationship between resident besties Shauna and Jackie, the team’s pretty, selfish captain, looks close at first but is riddled with jealousy and backstabbing. When things get properly violent, as in the case of single-minded Taissa Turner, it involves purposely splitting the shin of a weaker teammate to preserve her chance at championship gold—even if Taissa would never admit it. (She later runs for state senate.) Other players arrive in the forest knowing their way around a gun, or medicated for delusions. The show’s writers seem to suggest that even if we’re bummed out and bogged down by our id-based qualities, they might just come in handy later on. That’s the genius—of these so-called flaws and of the show itself.

Modern-day psychologists examine the nuances of survival behaviours, now viewing them less as unsightly brain grooves to be smoothed over and more as deeply intelligent mechanisms in the right circumstances. They may not be particularly virtuous, but they keep us alive. Yet when we see the day-to-day existences of the adult Yellowjackets—many of whom make it out of the Canadian brush without a discernible moral compass—we can understand how these same impulses can keep us from really living outside of life-or-death scenarios. The adult Yellowjackets cope in ways that are more relatable than cannibalism: Natalie struggles to stay clean after multiple trips to rehab, while Shauna finds outlets in adultery and some darkly funny jokes. (When she eventually kills her paramour, partially out of self-protection, she compares remembering how to dismember a body to “riding a really gross, fucked-up bike.”) As a teen, Taissa’s ruthlessness makes her most likely to succeed: she dreams of being first-string on Howard University’s soccer team, dating beautiful women and landing a legal internship in New York. “You did do all those things,” Shauna says, once they’re both adults. But Taissa, who has dissociative episodes and a young son in therapy, replies: “But if I’m being honest, not a single one of those things felt real.”

Heading into season two, old wounds don’t appear to be healing; somehow, things are getting much scarier. In fact, one teammate seems to be leading a cult. The show’s earliest cult, though, forms around the Yellowjackets themselves. At one point in the present-day timeline, the characters chafe their way through their 25-year high school reunion as they’re greeted with a winners’ welcome and a corny slideshow of memories set to Enya’s “Only Time.” It’s not always satisfying to celebrate survival tactics as evidence of the triumphant human spirit. Sometimes, what you need is to bond over shared scars and secrets with friends who have witnessed the full extent of your human shittiness. It’s nice to hear, “Wow, that was the worst.” Or, “We are kind of the worst.” Reflection over perfection. Television often does that very well.

Most of us will not find ourselves stranded on a mountain or in a forest. (Some of us may find ourselves in the domesticated wild a couple of hours north of a major city, but likely in the context of a cottage weekend.) Our most formidable personal disasters will probably be some form of heartbreak, financial ruin or remotely educating small children during a plague. To cope, we will do what we can, if not everything we want. We will not eat people; we will pay for Crave and find another form of catharsis. And we will try, as Natalie says during her last group-therapy session at rehab, to find a way to keep the tiger in the cage.

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Canadian YouTuber Madison Tevlin is starring opposite Woody Harrelson. Here’s how it happened

Stephanie Bai — Mon, 20 Mar 2023 14:09:33 +0000

Madison Tevlin stars in the new film ‘Champions’ (Photo courtesy Tevlin)

You may remember Madison Tevlin as the 13-year-old from Toronto who went viral with her heartfelt rendition of John Legend’s “All of Me” back in 2015. Since then, Tevlin has landed a series of entertainment gigs (including her own talk show on CBC) and become a public advocate for people with Down syndrome. And this month, she stars in her first feature film, Champions, a feel-good sports comedy about a team of athletes with intellectual disabilities, and their coach, played by Woody Harrelson. “It’s been crazy and overwhelming,” Tevlin says. Here, the aspiring actress shares her dream co-star and the teacher who changed the trajectory of her career.

Champions is officially in theatres. What have the last couple of weeks been like?

They’ve been crazy and overwhelming. Since the movie came out, it’s just been boom, boom, boom: parties, press, red carpet, cameras flashing. The premiere was at a theatre in Lincoln Square in New York City. It was a really good time, and a lot of us hadn’t seen each other since filming the movie in 2021. The after-party was under a tent at a lounge in Columbus Circle. I drank Shirley Temples all night, and the dance floor was non-stop. We danced to “Tubthumping,” which is one of the big songs in the movie, and I requested “Shout” from the movie Animal House, which is one of my all-time favourites.

Who were you wearing?

My mom was my stylist for the night. I love colour, but she loves all black. We decided on a black blazer but then added glittery sequin detail on the sleeves. Then my mom had the idea to do a big spray-paint-style basketball on the back because Champions is a basketball movie.

RELATED: ‘Women Talking’ star Shayla Brown wants a more inclusive Hollywood

What does your mom think of all of your success?

She is a proud mama—I really love her. She was very supportive when the chance to be in a movie came around.

How did that happen? Did you audition?

They actually reached out to me through Instagram and asked me to send a tape. At the time, I didn’t think I wanted to do it. I just wanted to be a normal kid and hang out with my friends at school. My mom thought it was a good opportunity, and then one of my teachers was very supportive and confident that I could do it. I’m glad I listened. After doing this movie, I know what I want to do as a career.

Are you a read-the-reviews kind of person? I ask because critics are raving about your performance as Cosentino.

I don’t really read reviews, but a lot of people have been telling me about them. I played the only girl player on the team, who’s brought in as a secret weapon, and the role felt like it was made for me. She’s a badass chick who puts everybody in their place. She’s also the only female member of the team, so it was fun to be surrounded by all the boys. My favourite scene was where I gave Johnny, another player, a pep talk in the locker room. I get to swear in that scene, which I loved.

READ: “I was living this double life: law student by day and Survivor contestant by night”

Your co-star is Woody Harrelson. Were you intimidated to work opposite such a big star?

He was the best to work with. I know Woody’s a big deal with Cheers and everything, but I just treat him like an actor and a normal person. He was really great about giving me pointers on how to become a better actor, and I loved that many of my character’s best lines were delivered at him. My favourite line from the movie was when I said, “You’re no McConaughey,” when asking about his character’s dating life. We still laugh about it when we see each other.

This is not your first brush with celebrity. What can you tell me about becoming a global viral sensation at 13?

It wasn’t something I was expecting. I’d been working with a vocal coach because I love to sing, and I wanted to get better. I made that video for my family and friends, but also for myself. I wanted to show that just because I have Down syndrome, that doesn’t mean I can’t belt out an amazing song. I posted it around World Down Syndrome Day, and I guess people started sharing it on YouTube. From there, I was asked to be on some Canadian shows like Breakfast Television, and then I was on Good Morning America and a billboard in Times Square. That year, I was also chosen as an ambassador to the Special Olympics, which were in L.A. And then more recently, I got a chance to host my own TV show on CBC—an interview series called Who Do You Think I Am? I interviewed interesting people who are used to being unfairly judged like Annemieke Struyke, who is a female firefighter with alopecia, and Juice Boxx, who is a drag queen. These are people who are used to pushing past stereotypes, which I can relate to.

MORE: How this choreographer created the creepy monster movement in The Last of Us

Is there a particular stereotype you find most frustrating?

Sometimes people talk down to me like I’m a little kid because they think I’m not going to understand them. That drives me crazy! They look at me and think they have me all figured out. But just like everyone else, I have lots of different sides. I always say my disability is the least interesting thing about me—I have a lot going on. I love meeting new people and asking questions to get to know them for who they are. I love having big conversations and going to parties. I’m usually the last one to leave.

#Champions star Madison Tevlin shares her favorite moment from working on the new Focus Features film pic.twitter.com/F2Jcw8BEWh

— The Hollywood Reporter (@THR) February 28, 2023

You are also a bit of a TikTok celebrity with over 160,000 followers. What do you like about the platform?

I’ve always loved TikTok for all the fashion content and dance videos. When I decided to join, I thought it could be a good place to share my message, by sharing my life and answering any questions people might have. For example, I posted a TikTok video about dating because people always ask me if people with Down syndrome can date. Of course they can! I already have my wedding planned. I love that I get messages all the time from people who say I inspire them to embrace their differences. It feels really good to know that there are people who look up to me, and then I also hear from the moms of people with intellectual disabilities, which means a lot.

What’s next for you career-wise?

I’ve shot a couple of projects since Champions. The Adventures of Tikki the Wonder Dog, which is an animated movie about diversity and acceptance, and Screams From the Tower, a comedy set in the ’90s that we shot in Chicago. Now I’m back in L.A. and living it up. I moved here after I graduated from high school at Loretto College. Home will always be Toronto, but I think L.A. is the best place for me to work and represent the Down syndrome community.

After Woody Harrelson, who’s next on your celebrity wish list?

There are so many. At the top of the list are Reese Witherspoon, Jennifer Aniston, Adam Sandler and Drew Barrymore. I met Drew when I went on The Drew Barrymore Show with some of my Champions castmates. It was so cool. She was really nice, and I was totally starstruck.

The post Canadian YouTuber Madison Tevlin is starring opposite Woody Harrelson. Here’s how it happened appeared first on Macleans.ca.

How this choreographer created the creepy monster movement in The Last of Us

Dave Zarum — Mon, 13 Mar 2023 12:57:03 +0000

“This job didn’t involve dancing—I had to develop a language of movement for these fungus-infected characters who are a huge part of the show.” (Photos courtesy Becker)

If you’ve been tuning into The Last of Us over the past two months, you can thank Paul Becker for your nightmares. In HBO’s hit series, a mass fungal infection turns humans into a breed of lethal braindead mushroom monsters, triggering a full-scale societal collapse. Becker, a 43-year-old choreographer from Vancouver, was hired to ensure the movements of the infected population were as authentic as they were creepy. His process started with several months of homework: researching the connection between movement and neurological disease and mining the archives of National Geographic. He came up with an erratic, twitchy style of motion that evolves over different stages of infection but should, under no circumstances, be described as zombie-like. We talked to Becker about how he created the now-iconic Clicker choreography.

According to your IMDB page, you’ve spent the last two decades doing choreography on some pretty big movies. How did you get into this line of work?

I started my career as a dancer. I was breakdancing at 13 and later I got into other styles. Even then, I knew I wanted to not just dance, but create. In 2002 I got a job as a backup dancer in the movie Chicago. Rob Marshall, the director, started as a choreographer, and I was inspired by his ability to tell stories through movement. I was a sponge on that set. My big break was a few years later, when I was dancing in a commercial with Kate Beckinsale. It was for a Japanese soap called Lux, and we were shooting in Vancouver. Kate was very upset because the choreographer didn’t show up, and I said I could help. That credit helped get my foot in the door, and in 2004, I booked my first movie, doing choreography for Ice Cube’s Are We There Yet? I’ve been working steadily ever since.

READ: How HBO’s The Last Of Us transformed Alberta into a zombie wasteland

How did you end up working on The Last of Us?

I got a call from Rose Lam, the executive producer. I’d worked with her on A Series of Unfortunate Events with Neil Patrick Harris. She said, “I have a job proposal for you, but it’s pretty unorthodox.” This job didn’t involve dancing—I had to develop a language of movement for these fungus-infected characters who are a huge part of the show. After that conversation, I had a call with Neil Druckmann, who developed the original video game, and Craig Mazin, who created the TV series. They were really committed to getting the details right. I remember they said that with the infected, every movement has to have a reason, which is absolutely my language as a choreographer. I was really excited.

Was monster movement in your wheelhouse before this latest gig, or did you have to watch a bunch of old zombie movies?

This wasn’t my first time working on creature movement. I did Cabin in the Woods, a horror movie where the main characters are attacked by various monsters and zombies. I also did a couple of Wes Craven projects and some of the werewolf movement in the Twilight movies. In a lot of horror, there is a fine line between fear and laughter. For The Last of Us, we really wanted to avoid anything that came across as cartoony or schticky. We actually weren’t allowed to say the word “zombie” on set. That was a rule created by Neil and Craig. Zombies are dead, whereas the infected are still living, but braindead.

How does that play into the way they move?

It depends on their level of infection, which is something we took straight from the video game. There is a big difference between a Runner, who has just recently been infected and is more human-like, and a Clicker, who’s at a late stage of infection, where their whole body and face is covered in mushroom spores. Overall, the movement is twitchy and unpredictable. They can be eerily calm in one moment and then darting at super speed. There’s a marionette-like quality. You see that with the arm movement too, where it’s almost like the arms are being yanked by a cord.

Behind the scenes of the Infected rampage

The Making of The Last of Us, a 30 minute special, now streaming on HBO Max#TheLastofUs #TheLastofUsHBO #TheLastofUsEp9 #TLOU #HBO pic.twitter.com/bLgCojpwmm

— Atom (@theatomreview) March 13, 2023

What were some of your key inspirations?

Neil and Craig explained how all the movements stemmed from a neurological glitch caused by the cordyceps mushroom infection. My task was to figure out how bodies would react, so I hired a team, and we spent about five months doing research. Early on, we found a National Geographic video of ants infected by parasitic fungus spores, which was a key inspiration. Another touchstone was Butoh, which is a Japanese style of dance that’s based on the idea of pushing past socially acceptable movement, so there’s a lot of creepy-looking contortion. And then I researched neurological diseases like Parkinson’s to get a sense of the tremors and spasms that characterize the earliest stages of infection.

We also had to figure out the movement around how the infection spreads, which occurs through these tendrils that come out of the mouth. That movement is almost like a kiss. We had a lot of fun doing these experiments where we would have someone biting into a watermelon to get the mouth positioning exactly right. It seems a little artsy-fartsy, but it was necessary to fully understand every detail—because after I designed the movement, I had to teach it.

A member of the Infected (Photo courtesy HBO)

There were boot camps to teach extras how to move like the infected. Did you run those?

I ran many of them, although it wasn’t like one big boot camp—we did different training sessions depending on the episode. Sometimes I was working with a particular actor and their stunt double, other times it was groups to prepare for the scenes with mobs of infected characters. When we were in Calgary, we had a space on one of the soundstages that was like a big gym with mats on the floors, so we could be barefoot and play around. I would get everyone to stand in a circle and close their eyes, and then I would guide them into character, starting with their breathing and then the smaller, twitchy movements. One thing that surprised me was that the trained dancers weren’t any better at it than the actors. They often were worse, I think, because they tend to be so aware of their bodies, and there can be this inability to let go, which was essential to what we were doing.

Did you give yourself a cameo?

No, but my daughter, who is a professional ballet dancer and stunt double, was in a few scenes. There was this one set-up where there was a dogpile with 45 infected characters all in full makeup and prosthetics, and she was one of them. We did a rehearsal for that scene where everyone was lying down and twitching. I’d yell the word “sunlight,” and they would go slack, and then I’d yell “cloud cover,” and it was like human popcorn. It was fun, but in the end, they went with a wider-angle shot, so they did the scene in CGI instead.

Is there a scene or episode you are particularly proud of?

The very first time we see the Clickers is in Episode 2, when they attack Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey’s characters in the museum. That was such an important reveal in terms of the franchise and the fan base, so I felt a lot of pressure to get it right. Clickers are fully transformed, so they can’t see. Instead, they use echolocation. We put a lot of work into the first time audiences saw their scream. The Clicker’s arms launch backwards, and their chests push forward. Dinosaurs were a big inspiration, and particularly one scene in Jurassic Park where the little dinosaur lets out this giant scream. One thing I really liked about this show was the subtlety. There are a few big moments, but a lot of the terror comes from the restraint.

The post How this choreographer created the creepy monster movement in The Last of Us appeared first on Macleans.ca.

The Explorer: 19th-Century Quebec In Photos

Mariyam Khaja — Thu, 09 Mar 2023 15:35:33 +0000

Alexander Henderson was part artist, part documentarian. In the late 19th century, he was one of the most prominent photographers in Canada, shooting lively urban scenes and idyllic rural landscapes in a sweeping style reminiscent of the great Romantic painters.

Henderson’s photographs are pure Canadiana: a cluster of ice skaters on Montreal’s harbour, Indigenous people camping on the banks of the St. Lawrence River, railmen working on the Canadian Pacific Railway in British Columbia. His images are as haunting as they are beautiful. The subjects often stare coldly into the camera from far in the distance, seeming more like spectres than human beings.

Henderson chronicled a crucial period in Canadian history. British colonialism was boosting Quebec’s population, driving industry and shaping cultural life, all the while encroaching on Indigenous territory. Immigrants flocked to Montreal, where milling, brewing, textiles and shipbuilding had replaced the fur trade. Railway expansion turned the city into a major trade and travel hub, and cultural institutions like McGill and the Museum of Fine Arts were opening up. Between 1844 and 1911, Montreal’s population swelled from nearly 45,000 to more than 500,000, making it Canada’s biggest metropolis. (Toronto usurped it soon after.) Henderson was prolific during this period.

He was a descendant of Scottish gentry who enjoyed a comfortable upbringing in Edinburgh. His grandfather, Alexander Sr., had been the first chairman of the National Bank of Scotland and the lord provost of Edinburgh. Growing up, Henderson spent a lot of time at Press Castle, a large mansion on the family’s 650-acre property southeast of Edinburgh. He immersed himself in nature, exploring the neighbouring woods, hills and mountains.

Henderson studied accounting for a few years, but an experience in 1851 led him toward a career in the arts. At the age of 19, Henderson took a two-week trip to London for the Great Exhibition, where he encountered the works of famous British artists. The paintings had a huge influence on Henderson, and his future work borrowed heavily from the Romantic style, adopting an emphasis on nature, the inclusion of expressive characters to create mood and the use of light effects to enhance textures and soften edges.

In 1855, Henderson and his new bride, Agnes, immigrated to Canada. Like the throngs of other Brits who migrated across the Atlantic as part of colonial expansion, they imagined a new, exciting life in Quebec, which had a booming port economy, a rich cultural scene, a robust population of British expats and plenty of untrammelled outdoor space for fishing and hunting. They rode a steamboat called the Baltic from Liverpool to New York and train-hopped up to Montreal, where they eventually settled in a wealthy community west of downtown (now known as Golden Square Mile).

The couple started a family (nine children in total, five of whom survived into adulthood) and wasted little time establishing themselves among the local elites, leveraging their wealth and social status. Henderson was treasurer of the Montreal Fish and Game Protection Club, contributed to the Art Association of Montreal and enlisted in the Victoria Rifles. He also became acquainted with the prominent photographer William Notman, McGill College principal John William Dawson and renowned geologist Alfred Selwyn, among other bigwigs.

Henderson worked briefly as a merchant, but owing to his inheritance, he had no need for a traditional career. Instead, beginning around 1857, he pursued his newfound passion for photography, then an emerging technology, which struck a perfect balance between his love of art and the outdoors. By 1866, Henderson published his first book of photographs and opened a studio in Phillips Square, advertising himself as a portrait and landscape photographer.

Henderson saw—and photographed—Canada with the eye of an outsider, drawn to scenes that would have been novel for someone from Scotland. He showed a particular interest in our frigid, snow-packed winters. His landscapes featured urban sights, like steamboats in the harbour; traditional Canadian activities, such as ice skating and tobogganing; and older buildings, which evoked the historic architecture of his native Britain.

Over the years, Henderson travelled across Quebec, camera in tow. In the 1870s, beer tycoon John Thomas Molson took regular trips with his family on his yacht, the Nooya, snaking through the lower St. Lawrence and the Maritimes. Henderson joined him on a couple of voyages, photographing the yacht, cod-fishing stations, seashore landscapes and Molson’s family. He used a field camera, capturing images on glass plates that were later developed in a dark room.

In 1892, when the Canadian Pacific Railway created its own photography department, they brought Henderson on to oversee it, with a starting salary of $167 a month. The work took him out west, where he documented progress on the railway, broadening the scope of his portfolio.

Henderson died in 1913. By then, he’d fallen into obscurity. His obituary made no mention of his work as a photographer. All of his glass negatives, the accumulation of his life’s work, were left in the basement of the family home. And years later, in 1965, his grandson threw them in the garbage, destroying much of Henderson’s legacy.

The story could have ended there. But that year, Stanley G. Triggs, former curator of the photography collection at the McCord Stewart Museum in Montreal, discovered several hundred Henderson prints while looking through the museum archives. The photos were mesmerizing, but Triggs couldn’t find any information about Henderson’s life. Eventually, Triggs collected some 2,000 prints from Henderson’s family, which he believes is only a sliver of his total photographic output.

From now until mid-April, more than 250 period prints and reproductions of photographs are on display at the McCord Stewart, as part of the exhibit Alexander Henderson—Art and Nature. Throughout his career, Henderson exhibited his work in Montreal, London, Edinburgh, Dublin, Paris, New York and Philadelphia. But this exhibit, more than a century after his death, is the first major museum retrospective in his adopted home country.

Skating Rink, Montreal Harbour, C. 1870

In the foreground of this landscape, ice skaters glide across the frozen harbour in the winter. In the background, the building on the left is the custom house, where merchants would have their imported goods inspected and approved. And on the right is Notre-Dame Basilica, known at the time as the French Cathedral.

Highwater, Montreal Harbour, c. 1870

This shot depicts steamboats in the Montreal harbour when the St. Lawrence was at its highest levels, with the famous Victoria Bridge in the background. Gathering to watch the ships in the harbour was a popular Sunday activity.

Indigenous Fishing Camp, Restigouche River, C. 1870

This image depicts members of the Mi’kmaq Nation fishing on the Restigouche River, which flows between Quebec and New Brunswick. Back then, wealthy travellers went there to cast their rods. At this point in his career, Henderson had opened his first studio and established himself as a professional. He carried some of his equipment in a fisherman basket for convenience. He would have developed photos like this and sold them to tourists in shops or hotels.

Spring Inundation near Montreal, 1865

Shot during Henderson’s amateur days, this is one of his most iconic photographs, showing a man and two children in a boat just off the south shore of the island of Montreal.

Making a Bark Canoe, Murray Bay, before 1865

Early in his career, Henderson still considered himself an amateur. He spent a lot of time travelling around rural Quebec, documenting the landscape. This photo was taken in Murray Bay, located northeast of Montreal, along the banks of the St. Lawrence. It was a popular spot for tourists from across Quebec and the United States. Members of the Mi’kmaq Nation set up camp in the area and sold their handicrafts, baskets and objects.

Beaver River Valley, near Six Mile Creek, Canadian Pacific Railway, B.C., 1885

In 1885, Henderson travelled out west to British Columbia. His images of the railway were so popular that seven years later he became head of the photography department for the Canadian Pacific Railway. The CPR would have used his images to showcase work on the railway and to sell as souvenirs to tourists.

Montarville Manor House, Saint Bruno Mountain, C. 1870

This photo was taken in Montarville, located east of Montreal. From 1627 to 1854, Quebec operated under France’s seigneurial system, in which the state granted people land in exchange for royalties. The officials who governed the area were known
as seigneurs. And the seigneur of Montarville lived in this house, which dates back to around 1774. The manor was demolished in 1903.

Flood, Saint Paul Street, Montreal, 1864

Montreal flooded several times throughout the 1860s—either due to rising tidewaters breaking over the banks of the St. Lawrence River or leftover winter snowfall melting in the spring. Some Montrealers even kept rafts at their properties in case the city turned into Waterworld. This image shows one of those infamous floods, with horse-drawn carriages trudging through the water and Montrealers staying dry atop wooden pallets.

This article appears in print in the March 2023 issue of Maclean’s magazine. Buy the issue for $9.99 or better yet, subscribe to the monthly print magazine for just $39.99.

The post The Explorer: 19th-Century Quebec In Photos appeared first on Macleans.ca.

Hot Spot: The Winnipeg Chronicles

Dave Zarum — Tue, 07 Mar 2023 13:53:17 +0000

Winnipeg is on the cusp between the old and the new. Some architecture still bears “ghost signs” for brands like Wilder’s Stomach Powder, and although these exteriors can give the impression of a tomb, their interiors reveal a city in a chrysalis stage. Historic buildings are turning into invaluable institutions: in 2022, Hudson’s Bay gave its six-storey landmark to the Southern Chiefs’ Organization, with plans to turn it into affordable housing, an art gallery and more. (It was symbolically traded for two beaver pelts and two elk hides.) There’s a modern culinary campus for Red River College Polytechnic, and young entrepreneurs are opening pop-up vintage stores. The city is at an exciting crossroads, and these spots are a window into its future.

Since it’s hard to grow crops in Manitoba’s climate year-round, Nola is trying new preservation techniques to make the most out of the province’s fruit and vegetables

Nola

Best veggies

101–300 Tache Avenue | nolawpg.com

A lot of restaurants claim to be steering away from animal proteins, but chef Emily Butcher actually shines a spotlight on vegetables. Take, for example, a dish of carrots glazed in local honey and butter, spiced with cumin, coriander and paprika, heaped over whipped Macedonian-style feta and garnished with candied pumpkin seeds. “Celebrating vegetables is difficult in Manitoba,” Butcher says. But Nola treats its produce adoringly and honours other Manitoba staples like goldeye—a smoked fish you won’t be allowed to leave the province without tasting.

Rosé Coffee & Wine is a cozy spot for charcuterie, oysters and tartines

Rosé Coffee & Wine

Best atmosphere

474 Main Street, Unit B | rosecoffeeandwine.ca

Entering kieu nguyen’s 625-square-foot shop feels like being nestled inside a jewellery box: translucent pink curtains illuminate red velvet drapes, a pink and crimson rug, and chairs upholstered in black velvet. By day, the shop offers top-drawer espresso and flaky pastries. At night, after the champagne buckets come out, the tiny room transforms into a sexy wine bar with intimate booths and a succinct menu of oysters, charcuterie and tartines.

The Leaf

Best greenery

145 The Leaf Way | assiniboinepark.ca/leaf/lifegrows

the first day of spring can feel like a prank in Winnipeg, rarely showing any signs of new life. Except at the Leaf in Assiniboine Park, a new attraction where biomes are devoted year-round to lush indoor habitats, including a tropical rainforest, a butterfly garden and another space filled with the cool flora of the Mediterranean. If you’re there before March 19, visit the Babs Asper Display House, which will be in full bloom.

(Photography by Lindsay Reid)

Qaumajuq

Best art museum

300 Memorial Boulevard | wag.ca/about/qaumajuq

In the inuit art and culture space Qaumajuq (pronounced kow-ma-yourk), there are harpoon heads made of ivory and contemporary carvings of stone, whale bone and caribou antler. This art centre stands in stark contrast to the rest of the city, much of which is named after colonists who stole Indigenous land and resources. The museum opened in 2021 as part of the Winnipeg Art Gallery (now known as WAG-Qaumajuq), and in April it will exhibit over 400 works by Inuit people that date as far back as 200 BCE.

(Photography by Lindsay Reid)

Book ahead if you want to eat at this intimate restaurant, which is only open Wednesday to Saturday

Petit Socco

Most intimate dining

256 Stafford Street | petitsoccowpg.ca

At their 10-seat restaurant, co-owners Courtney Molaro and Adam Donnelly keep a tight menu of five to six items, including bread and dessert. “It’s out of necessity,” says Donnelly, who’s also the chef. “It’s just me in the kitchen.” This strategy also speaks to his confidence. Why make something for everyone when you believe in the quality of your concise menu? He bakes sourdough with einkorn, spelt and rye flours, served without butter or olive oil. It’s meant to be eaten throughout the meal alongside charcuterie, seasonal cheeses and family-style dishes, which often feature seafood or meat, rounded off with freshly made desserts like apple brioche tart.

At Winnipeg’s hotels, you’ll find rest, relaxation and a glimpse of the city’s past

Inn At The Forks

Where to stay: Best splurge

75 Forks Market Road | innforks.com

Visitors who want to take in the best of the city should stay at this luxury boutique hotel, located in the Forks, a roughly 54-acre public space where the Assiniboine and Red rivers meet. The rooms are sleek and minimalist (they start at $199) and the hotel’s in-house spa offers a full range of services. Nearby are the Canadian Museum for Human Rights and a food hall with over two dozen vendors, where a bag of lemon-pepper-seasoned fried pickerel bites from Fergie’s Fish’n Chips—available in limited quantities in the afternoon—is the ultimate secret snack.

Fort Garry Hotel

Where to stay: Best budget

222 Broadway | fortgarryhotel.com

Mirroring the city’s fortunes, this hotel has had its ups and downs, with ownership changing hands many times since opening in 1913. It’s where Prince (now King) Charles stayed in 1979—he was fed goldeye, like every other visitor—and it has been reinstated as the city’s premier accommodation (rooms start at $157). The restaurant features a French-leaning menu and a deep wine list, and at Ten Spa, mint tea and nibbles of Turkish delight are available alongside a Turkish hammam and fancy treatments (like an olive oil wash).

Happening this Month:

Alvvays, Burton Cummings Theatre| alvvays.com

March 8

The former Walker Theatre was built in 1907 and reborn in the 1990s as a live venue with heritage status. In recent years, the golden balconies and 1,579 poppy-red seats have been refurbished for a new generation of performers, such as Alvvays, the power-pop quintet currently touring their 2022 album, Blue Rev. Before the show, it’s a short walk for mussels and tartare at the Amsterdam Tea Room or steamed dumplings and lotus sticky rice at Kum Koon Garden, a dim sum restaurant with cart service.

Illustration by Antony Hare

Local Favourite

“Down the street from my West Broadway apartment is the Tallest Poppy, a colourful restaurant that hosts drag brunches. It’s where I chat with friends over local beers, fried tofu sandwiches and hummus plates. On weekends, we eat Talia’s Breakfast (named for the owner and chef).”— Dee Barsy, Artist

This article appears in print in the March 2023 issue of Maclean’s magazine. Buy the issue for $9.99 or better yet, subscribe to the monthly print magazine for just $39.99.

The post Hot Spot: The Winnipeg Chronicles appeared first on Macleans.ca.

I’m a 19-year-old barber and famous on TikTok. Celebs pay me $1,000 for a haircut.

Mariyam Khaja — Fri, 03 Mar 2023 15:09:08 +0000

Jamiel Bustos opened a TikTok account in July 2020. Now he has millions of followers and an impressive client list. (Photos courtesy Bustos)

I started cutting hair when I was 14 years old in 2017. I loved how fresh and confident I felt after receiving a nice haircut, and I wanted to give that to others. I started asking friends in school if I could cut their hair, but nobody trusted me with scissors, so I settled for cutting my own. Every few weeks, I would show up to school with a strange haircut that looked terrible and other kids made fun of me.

At the end of that year, a friend finally let me give him a cut. I did a decent job, so a few more classmates agreed to come to my parents’ apartment in Etobicoke and let me cut their hair, too. At 15, I was hired as an apprentice at a barber shop near my parents’ place. I swept the floors and learned tricks of the trade from older barbers, like how to replicate popular cuts. I would go there after my afternoon basketball practice and stay at the shop for six hours, making roughly $50 a shift. But I wasn’t doing it for the money: I was passionate about cutting hair and determined to learn what I could.

Two years later, when I was in grade 11, COVID-19 hit and put a stop to public haircuts for a while. The barbershop closed down, and I was left trying to figure out how to use this difficult situation to my advantage. A few months into the pandemic, I realized that everybody was on TikTok, so by July 2020, I made my own account and started posting weekly. I posted funny skits about my haircuts—cutting my boss’ hair while he was asleep or doing viral dances from the barber’s chair, all while cutting hair on the side and trying to master the craft. My channel grew steadily: by December, I had reached 300,000 followers. I started receiving tons of messages from people who wanted me to cut their hair.

READ: When nursing burned me out, TikTok became a lifeline

One of my first clients was a real estate lawyer. He has a mansion in Toronto, so I shot a video of me walking up his cobblestone driveway where his Teslas were parked, and meeting him in his living room for a haircut. We injected some humour into the video: he pretends to be asleep and we spray him in the face to wake him up, and at one point my friend pops out of nowhere to ask him what he does for a living. I titled the video “cutting my rich client”, and it went viral, hitting 10 million views on TikTok. From that video, my following on TikTok grew to one million by the end of 2020.

@jbalwaysfresh Why he flexing on me like that #fyp #foryou #haircut #dubai #dxb ♬ POPSTAR (Feat. Drake) – DJ Khaled

The concept was so well-liked that I made it into an ongoing TikTok series called “Cutting a Millionaire.” I reached out to entrepreneurs, celebrities, and millionaires and offered to cut their hair in exchange for making a TikTok video out of it. It was a snowball effect: with each celebrity I featured, it became easier to find the next one and after a while, they started reaching out to me. Over the last two and a half years, I’ve cut hair for viral Youtubers like the Dobre Brothers and Coby Persin, Indian actor Sonu Sood, and UAE internet personality Rashed Belhasa. I have almost 300 videos on my account, including clips of my travels and now 64 editions of “Cutting a Millionaire.” That series has really boosted my channel; I now have 6.7 million TikTok followers.

This new life is a pretty wild departure from my original post-high-school plans. My parents immigrated from the Philippines in 2007 and believe in a more traditional route: you go to school, then university, then you get a 9-5 job. I was supposed to go to dental school but here I am, barely out of high school and charging $1,000 for celebrity haircuts. I don’t plan on going to college.

My path may be different from what my parents envisioned for me, but they’re supportive because they know I’m putting everything I have into this craft. It’s a lot of work: cutting hair is its own job, and on top of that, I spend several hours a day running my Tiktok, Youtube, Instagram and Snapchat channels, where I have a combined following of nearly nine million people. I’ve also started modeling with American retail company Fashionova, which I enjoy doing because I love clothes. To help manage the workload, I’ve hired a manager, a videographer and a personal trainer all in the last six months.

MORE: I started skateboarding in a sari at 43. Then I went viral on TikTok.

I make more than six figures annually from my social media channels and haircuts, but I invest a lot back into my career. I have other expenses: I spend a lot on car payments, and cover my mom’s rent at $2,000 a month and help my dad pay off his mortgage at $3,000 a month. Plus, running this business can get expensive: my team and I have traveled to Dubai, Los Angeles, Vancouver and New York to meet celebrities, cut hair and collect content.

It’s barely been four years since my first barbershop gig, and in that time I’ve gotten comfortable betting on myself. I put all of my effort into building this career, and it’s paying off in ways I could never have imagined. I have a few business plans in the pipeline: I’ll be launching a hair product company next year, and I’m taking a trip to LA to shoot some more content in the next few months. One day, I would love to open my own barbershop.

I also have a bucket list of three celebrities I want to feature on my channel: Drake, Manny Pacquiao, and Elon Musk. I’ll have to make some serious noise to get their attention, but if I’ve learned anything, it’s that no challenge is too big if you’re willing to put in the work.

—As Told To Alex Cyr

The post I’m a 19-year-old barber and famous on TikTok. Celebs pay me $1,000 for a haircut. appeared first on Macleans.ca.

“I was living this double life: law student by day and Survivor contestant by night”

Dave Zarum — Wed, 01 Mar 2023 16:06:51 +0000

When Survivor premiered in the spring of 2000, Kane Fritzler didn’t know it was about to change his life. That’s probably because he was a two-year-old in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, as yet blissfully unaware of scheming alliances, tiki torches or the age-defying magnetism of Jeff Probst. But 23 years later, Fritzler is about to embark on the desert island journey of a lifetime.

When Season 44 premieres this week, he’ll be playing to be the show’s third-ever Canadian champion, after Season 41’s Erika Casupanan and Season 42’s Maryanne Oketch. Fritzler, a recent law graduate now living in Saskatoon, recently returned from his time on the remote Fijian island and sat down with us to talk about what it was like to compete on the game show he grew up watching.

READ: How HBO’s The Last Of Us transformed Alberta into a zombie wasteland

What’s your relationship to Survivor?

Survivor was a family show for us—my grandmother would come over to watch. When I was a kid, I loved watching all the different characters and archetypes on the show. As I got older, I fell in love with the show again from a gaming and strategy perspective. That was the holy grail: to figure out how to play this thing like the perfect board game.

Tell me more about that last bit. What is unique about the gaming aspect of Survivor?

In the first season, they brought out the concept of alliances and it blew people’s minds—they thought contestants were just supposed to go with their gut and vote people out. As the seasons stacked up, a meta-narrative developed, and you saw people playing the way they watched other people play. Every once in a while, someone was able to break that. By the time Season 44 rolls around, you have all these different things going on: you have alliances, you have sub-alliances, different takes on the game. So the thing that keeps the game fresh is the people who get pumped into it.

What made you think you’d be good at it?

I wasn’t sure I would be, but I wanted to try. I’m fresh out of law school, I love people, and I’m a problem solver. So I look at people like problem sets, and I think I’m very good at building relationships with people quickly. I’m good at identifying people’s interests and figuring out what they want and how I can adapt to make myself seem like I’m good for them—in the game! That sounds really manipulative. I don’t do that in real life. But in the game it’s about getting to know people and asking how can I use these relationships—which are genuine—to keep myself out of the boat but still playing a game where I’m doing cool stuff and having fun.

What was the application process like? You’re a guy from Saskatoon and you want to be on the show—what happens next?

Yeah, that doesn’t sound like the start of a successful story. They didn’t even know where Saskatchewan was! I was going, “No, I swear, I’m Canadian, please let me on the show!” I sent in an audition tape on their website like everyone else. I did that every single year that I could. Survivor was opened to Canadians I think three or four years ago. I’d update my tape every year. Then you just wait and hope that you get that phone call.

Tell me about the phone call.

It was a world-changer. I spent a lot of time knowing that Canadians couldn’t play. And then all of a sudden you get the phone call that you are heading to Fiji, that this is happening. All of a sudden your mindset changes. You’re actually going to the beach, you’re actually going to meet Jeff Probst. It’s a complete shift.

So you get on the plane, you land in Fiji, and there’s Jeff Probst. What was that moment like?

It was one of the most surreal moments of my life, honestly. I’ve watched the show for a long time. You know the camera shots, you know what’s going to happen. And then you’re standing there, and Jeff Probst is a real human being, and he’s giving you the spiel to kick off the show. It was surreal. I was thinking, If I shouted at him right now, he was going to answer! And I’m there beside all these other people who share this dream. It was a crazy experience.

Is it exactly like it looks in TV?

It feels very authentic. It is 100 per cent real. When the sun sets, it’s dark in the jungle, you know? It felt exactly the way I wanted it to feel.

And then you met all the other cast members. What was that like in those first few moments?

First impressions are huge. As soon as you’re dropped on the beach, there are 17 other people with huge grins and scary eyes looking at you, and you don’t know what’s going to happen. They might be your best friends or they might be your worst enemies, but we’re all there because we love Survivor. When I applied to this it was my dream, and now I’m sitting here with people who have the exact same thing in mind: we all want to get to the end.

Does that change the way you play the game? The fact that all the cast members are superfans?

It changed how I approached the game, for sure. In Survivor, you have to make some assumptions. Everybody knows the game. It makes it a lot faster and a lot more intense.

How did you prepare for the show?

The first thing I did was finish law school, because that was mentally taxing and something I had to do anyway. But I looked at everything I did as Survivor training. In all my negotiation classes in law school, I thought, I might use this on the island. And I did a ton of puzzles—everything I could get my hands on—and watched a ton of Survivor. I kept my regular workout routine, because I didn’t want to start trying to become a power lifter and then go and break my back—that would’ve been a huge downer—but I amped everything up to nine or 10 as the date neared. I learned how to make fire, too. I watched a lot of YouTube. I got my flint and my fire supplies and I was making fire like crazy. I was assuming, no matter what, that I was going to have to make fire on the island, so I wanted to make sure I had it down pat.

Meet Kane, a law student whose main goal is to become the Sole #Survivor and is ready to dig deep! pic.twitter.com/uP8bt3o5QX

— SURVIVOR (@survivorcbs) February 21, 2023

What was the worst part of being on the island?

The one thing that everyone asks about is the survival element, because it is real and it is intense. That’s the most daunting. To show up on an island and not have any food, to be sleeping on the ground or whatever shelter you can muster. Those are hard things. But honestly, you’re just having so much fun. Nothing really shook me to my core.

Canadians have put on a really good show these past few seasons. Are you prepared to carry that legacy?

It’s a really tough mantle to carry. When I was watching Season 41, I was like, I hope Erica wins! But also, I hope she doesn’t win, so that I can be the first Canadian to win. And then she won! And I was like, Marianne’s so awesome but I hope she doesn’t win! What’s going on here?! I think Canadians have waited so long to be on the show that when we go out there, we’re ready to perform and to play hard. I have big shoes to fill. I’m hoping I can live up to the expectation.

Were you allowed to tell anyone about Survivor?

No. For a little while I was living this double life: a law student by day and a Survivor contestant by night. And it’s weird because it’s a very important part of you that you’re getting more and more invested in and you can’t tell anyone. But I’m excited now.

What’s the response been like so far?

It was a long shot to get a person from Saskatchewan on the show. It’s weird news to deliver to people—everyone has a slightly different reaction. They either freak out or they don’t believe it, but the end response is that people are super excited. I have professors reaching out, and people from the law community. Everyone in my life has been super supportive.

What was your biggest takeaway?

When you get dropped on an island, the only things you have are the clothes on your back and who you are, your personality. That’s all you get. All I had out there was Kane Fritzler. You learn you have to rely on that. The other thing is that you meet all these different wonderful people. So it was just a good people experience.

Will you stay in touch? Any lifelong alliances?

We’ll wait and see how it plays out. I’ve got to watch the season before I reach out. But I could see it.

Are you ready for your time in the spotlight, to light up Saskatchewan?

I am so ready for it to premiere. I anticipate Saskatchewan rallying around me. I am very, very excited to kick this thing off.

The post “I was living this double life: law student by day and Survivor contestant by night” appeared first on Macleans.ca.

The Building: Labrador’s striking new cultural centre

Dave Zarum — Mon, 27 Feb 2023 15:20:17 +0000

The town of Nain, on the rugged, mountainous Labrador coast, gives new meaning to the word “remote”: it’s inaccessible by road and overlooks the wild Labrador Sea, which freezes for six months of the year. It’s also a gateway to the jaw-dropping Torngat Mountains National Park and an important cultural centre for Labrador’s Inuit community, who make up the vast majority of the area’s population. (Nain was founded in the late 1700s by Moravian missionaries.) Until recently, the community had nowhere to showcase artifacts from its rich history. That’s why, in 2009, the self-governing Nunatsiavut government commissioned Newfoundland-born, Norway-based architect Todd Saunders to design the $19-million Illusuak Cultural Centre.

Illusuak’s exhibition area has floors of blue eyes granite and a view of the nearby mountains. The windows were constructed in pieces to contend with the area’s wild winds.

Saunders is known for creating contemporary geometric structures that draw from the striking landscapes that surround them. He’s also the architect behind Newfoundland’s Fogo Island Inn, a celeb-magnet destination hotel meant to evoke the stilted fishing structures built by outport settlers 400 years ago.

For the Nain project, Saunders took inspiration from nearby Rose Island, specifically its sod houses—rounded, sunken temporary shelters the Inuit would build in the summer months. The result: a curved, flowing structure that features a café, a craft shop, studio space and a 75-seat theatre, as well as offices for the Nunatsiavut government and Parks Canada. The building opened in the fall of 2019 and now serves as a gathering spot for the community to celebrate its roots. So far, it has hosted grade school visits, presentations, meetings, cultural performances and weddings.

The centre’s gift shop and café, awash in spruce, sells locally crafted items—like beaded earrings and sealskin barrettes—and regional delicacies, like fish and brewis, a cod- and biscuit-based dish

Illusuak was built on solid permafrost in one of the country’s harshest, most isolated environments. Its building materials had to be floated in by barge. The steel-and-timber-frame structure is wrapped in ceiling-height windows and hand-cut Kebony spruce cladding, which will weather to grey with time, blending into Nain’s landscape. Inside, there’s timber panelling, stone floors and locally sourced sealskin floor coverings. Among the treasures housed in Illusuak’s exhibit space are Inuit-made soapstone pots and lamps and whalebone and ivory tools, some of which were returned home from the Smithsonian.

The building’s undulating shape wraps around the entire exterior. To find out where Saunders got his inspiration, look no further than its name: “Illusuak” means “sod house” in Inuktitut.

This article appears in print in the March 2023 issue of Maclean’s magazine. Buy the issue for $9.99 or better yet, subscribe to the monthly print magazine for just $29.99.

The post The Building: Labrador’s striking new cultural centre appeared first on Macleans.ca.

How HBO’s The Last Of Us transformed Alberta into a zombie wasteland

Dave Zarum — Tue, 14 Feb 2023 17:08:52 +0000

It hasn’t even been on the air for two months, and HBO’s The Last of Us is already being hailed as the best series of 2023, thanks to its mix of artistry, emotional resonance and nightmare-inducing action sequences. The story, based on the popular video game of the same name, follows Joel (Pedro Pascal), a grieving-father-turned-mercenary who must accompany Ellie (Bella Ramsey), a gun-slinging 14-year-old, across a mutant- and zombie-infested America in the aftermath of a near–extinction level pandemic.

The series was shot entirely in Alberta—a major coup for the province’s production industry, which calls this the biggest production in Canadian history. Jason Nolan, the show’s Calgary-based location manager, scouted and managed locations—everywhere from downtown main arteries to remote mountain villages. Here, he shares what gave Alberta the edge as a post-apocalyptic backdrop, why the show favoured real sites over CGI, and how they pulled off the scene that had his 18-year-old on the edge of his seat. (For those who are not caught up—episode five aired this past weekend—there are major spoilers ahead).

How did one of the buzziest and most expensive productions of all time end up in Alberta—and how did you get involved?

Nolan: I first heard about the possibility through the Alberta Film Commission. They were putting together a submission package to pitch the province as the location for the series, so I facilitated some photos of some of the key proposed locations. We didn’t have a lot of information at this point, just the broad strokes. It was definitely a competitive process. A show of this scale isn’t just looking in North America, but all over the world.

READ: Anatomy of a Scene: The Lake

Any ideas about what made Alberta the ideal post-apocalyptic landscape?

It was the variety we have within the province, which is very important in The Last of Us. The story starts in Texas and then goes from Boston all the way to Wyoming. Alberta has the big cities, the smaller towns, the prairies, forests, mountains—all of which are featured in the show. We have pretty much every environment you can imagine other than the ocean, so I think that was our winning angle. I know the cast had a lot of great things to say about Canmore and High River, which are both really beautiful spots. And people on set kept commenting about how clean Canada is, which was funny.

The Last of Us series co-creator Neil Druckman (who also created the video game) on set in Edmonton, with the Alberta Legislature building in the distance. (HBO)

Once the project was a go, what were your first steps as location manager?

I started having initial discussions with the producers in January of 2021 and officially signed on shortly after. The first step was getting a bible created by showrunner Craig Mazin, and then reading through the scripts. After that I was working with the production designer to break down certain key locations, get them scouted and presented and approved, starting with the most challenging, complicated sequences.

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A post shared by Bella Ramsey (@bellaramsey)

I’m guessing episode five’s epic zombie smackdown qualifies. I think I speak for all fans when I say I’ll be sleeping with the lights on this week!

That was definitely one of the key scenes in terms of planning, budgeting, everything. For all of the major scenes, the first thing we are looking at is whether we are going to shoot on location or build something. From the start, the directive on The Last of Us has been to choose real locations and real effects whenever possible. But due to both the action and the sensitivity surrounding the climax of episode five, a build on a closed set just made more sense. My team found the location, which was a five-acre lot next to the Calgary Film Centre. A production designer and art department came up with a plan to build a real cul-de-sac, including 15 houses—and the hole.

The sinkhole was real, and it was spectacular (HBO)

So that giant sinkhole was real?

Yes. I mean, I’m sure some aspects were touched up with CGI, but our construction coordinator organized a crew and an excavator, and then there were engineers involved to make sure the whole thing was safe. Bloater, which is the name of the large mushroom zombie that you mentioned, was also a real actor in prosthetics.

Wow. Well, congratulations. It really was spectacular to watch.

Thanks. I only saw the finished product for the first time over the weekend. I think episode five is everything that The Last of Us is meant to be, in terms of being amazing, terrifying, but also so having much emotion in the relationships between the characters. My 18-year-old son was on the edge of the couch the whole time, so that was cool.

Nolan found the perfect home for the main character, Joel, in High River (HBO)

Did you shoot mostly in chronological order?

For the most part, yes. Our first shoots were the opening of episode one, which takes place about 20 years ago in Texas, so we wanted to establish that setting as being distinct. That’s when the audience first meets Joel, as well as his 12-year-old daughter, Sarah. We don’t spend a lot of time in this time period, but their relationship is important to driving the rest of the series, so we needed the right location for their home. We looked at more than 300 options before landing on the final place in High River, Alberta—mostly because of some practical specifications.

What kinds of practical specifications?

A lot of technical details that audiences don’t notice, but are important to how scenes are choreographed—like where the house was in relation to the neighbours’ home, because of the action sequence where the Mrs. Elder becomes infected and Sarah must escape. The layout was very specific: we needed the living room on the right and the staircase on the left and the kitchen just beyond. That was important for the scene where Joel carries Sarah up the stairs, which is a key tender moment before he loses everything and his character hardens. I remember finally pulling up to the right house in High River and knowing, Yes, we’ve finally got it.

A shot from the plane crash scene in episode one, filmed on 24th St. in Fort Macleod (HBO)

Episode one also has that crazy scene where the plane crashes on the street. Let me guess—real plane?

That was a combination, because you can’t actually crash a jet liner. So the part where the plane was flying was CGI, but the part on the ground and the explosion—that was all real. For that scene we found a location on 24th Street in Fort Macleod. We have agreements with all of the business owners and residents to make modifications. Some buildings were painted, and we added awnings and window dressing. For that sequence, we shut down the street for a week, so we needed everybody on board.

Before-and-after of the Alberta Legislature Building (HBO)

A good chunk of episode two is set in the Massachusetts State House which, my sources tell me, was actually the Alberta Legislature. How did you manage that?

We knew right away where we wanted to shoot, because these buildings tend to look similar in most major cities. The challenge was that no one had every filmed in the building before. It houses the government offices where everybody works, including the premier. I made a call, and they were willing to entertain it. We have a lot of support for our industry within government, which is nice. They happened to be in the middle of a restoration project at the time so we had to send the construction company away and pay for that on top of everything else, but it worked out well. All of the external shots were the real building and then as much of the interior as possible. So, for example, the scene where Joel looks out the window and sees all of the zombies coming, that is the real building.

Inside the Alberta Legislature Building (HBO)

But the scene where Tess blows up the capitol was not.

Ha! No, we didn’t blow up the real building. And we didn’t cover it in vines or fungus either. That was all on a manufactured set, created by our greens crew—they do all of the organic set dressing—and then the prosthetics department, which does the mushroom stuff.

Was that sequence the biggest challenge? At least of the episodes we have seen so far?

One of the biggest challenges was a scene in episode three, where Joel and Ellie are entering Boston for the first time. We shot that on location on The Flyover, which is the major artery into the downtown core in Calgary coming off 108th Street. It’s a location I’ve used in the past—while shooting a car commercial on a Sunday afternoon—but in this case we needed it for nearly a week.

I met with just about every city department: traffic, police, parks, pathways, transit. It took us from Thursday to Saturday to create the set, and then we shot on the Sunday. There were a lot of moving parts—40 police officers, 200 cars on the stretch of highway underneath—but it looked great and captured the abandoned, overgrown quality that was our goal. First and foremost we want the actors to arrive on set and not have to think about where they are supposed to be so they can just focus on their performance. Episode two is the episode I am most proud of.

The Flyover and 108th Street in Calgary (HBO)

Certainly it was the episode the required the most Kleenex…

Episode three sticks out for being its own thing. We spend time in the world of Frank and Bill, a couple who find each other in the post-pandemic world and have this totally beautiful and unexpected love story. They are connected to the main plot with Joel and Ellie, but in many ways this episode is a standalone. I knew from the moment I read the script it was going to be different and special.

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We spent a lot of time looking for a neighourhood that was almost a hamlet, to represent how they were removed from the hell of the rest of the series because of their relationship. Trees were very important, as we the style of house and the neighbourhood. At one point we found a great option for Bill and Frank’s house but the rest of the location didn’t work. In the end we found an abandoned neighbourhood in High River, where all of the streets and sidewalks were still there but the homes were gone. I made an agreement with town council and we took over the area for four months to build the neighbourhood. Every detail is the result of teamwork and consideration.

The level of detail is mind-blowing. Do you ever miss car commercials?

I loved working on this project for so many reasons. There is a huge amount of work that went into it—almost an unimaginable amount. I’m happy that it has been so well-received.

Are you getting a lot of high fives?

Well, my mother, who is in her 70s and rarely watches any kind of television, wants to call me to talk about every episode, so that is probably the biggest compliment I can imagine.

The post How HBO’s The Last Of Us transformed Alberta into a zombie wasteland appeared first on Macleans.ca.

This U of T professor created an entire course on the Netflix mega-hit Squid Game

Dave Zarum — Tue, 07 Feb 2023 20:36:39 +0000

Hundreds of millions of people all over the world watched Netflix’s Squid Game, but only one turned the hit series into a university course. Paolo Granata is the head of the media studies program at the University of Toronto, where part of the mission is to study contemporary media in real time. In his class “Squid Game and the Media,” Granata’s students examine the broader implications of the show’s global success—and occasionally dress up like the main characters.

Before we get into your class, Squid Game was the most popular series in the history of Netflix. What was it about the show that made it such a hit?

I think you can look at the rise of the Hallyu or, in English, the “K-Wave”, which had been in the air for several years before Squid Game came out. It started with Korean dramas, and then the rise of K-Pop in general and BTS in particular—the whole world developed an interest in the Korean aesthetic and sensibility, which are very much rooted in contrasts and dichotomy: bright, extreme colours to emphasize darkness, comedy to highlight tragedy, childlike visuals and sounds during the most brutal scenes, which we see a lot in Squid Game and, before that, in Parasite. When that movie had the success it did, that was a significant benchmark.

Netflix has gotten ahead of Hollywood by developing culturally authentic programming for a global audience, which is essentially the opposite of what they started out doing—bringing Hollywood content to foreign countries. Squid Game is a perfect example of a very region-specific piece of entertainment with mass appeal.

Squid Game is also a story about wealth disparity, which became a very hot topic during the pandemic. Did that also play into the way the show resonated?

Absolutely. I’m sure you remember that people talked about the pandemic as being the “great equalizer,” but unfortunately that was not the case. Instead, we saw a lot of pre-existing inequality that was exposed. Similarly, in Squid Game we see this illusion of equality. All the players are “equal”—they all have the same chance to win the prize money. And they seem to have options.

In the first episode, every player is given the chance to leave the world of the game and go back to their regular lives. Many do, having realized that they are likely to die pursuing the prize money. But most of them come back because they realize that their financial circumstances leave them without options, which is where we see the illusion of free will, and the illusion that equality means equity, when in fact these are two very different concepts. Ultimately, the conditions created by a capitalist society do not make people free.

I really liked Squid Game and I talked about it with my friends. You must have really liked Squid Game to create a university-level seminar course based on the show.

I definitely enjoyed it enough to watch the entire series in just a couple of days. And then I went back and watched it again in the original Korean with English subtitles, which is a far better experience in terms of appreciating the performance. But it was only when I saw the numbers—hundreds of millions of viewers, the number-one show in 94 countries—that I started thinking about it from a media studies perspective. This was fall 2021, when we were starting to talk about the 2022-23 curriculum. Our motto in the media studies department is “media in real time.” In 2019 we started offering courses that capture a big trending topic. We did “Trump and the Media,” then “#MeToo and the Media,” then “#BlackLivesMatter and the Media,” and “Indigenous Cultures and the Media.” I thought Squid Game would be great because of how relevant the story was and, of course, because so many people had seen it.

Did the course fill up immediately?

We decided on an application process because I wanted to avoid students enrolling just because they loved the show. This is a fourth-year seminar class with a group research component. Every applicant had to explain their interest in the class and also what resources they would use to approach the show from an academic perspective. We received a total of 52 applications, including students from my media studies program but also from philosophy, anthropology and creative writing. We ended up with a diverse group, which is exactly what I was hoping for. We have three Korean students who have been able to explain some of the show’s linguistic nuances, students from China who can talk about how the show was received in their country, and students from the creative expression and society program, who can share perspectives on narratology and storytelling that help us to analyze the plot.

On your syllabus, the classes have the same names as Squid Game’s episodes. How else did you pay homage to the series?

I had an actor come in for the first class—a former student who was a fan of the show—to deliver the Front Man’s famous monologue on equity… in costume. I thought that was a good way to establish the right mood. I think the class really enjoyed it and they also got into the spirit. One student showed up in the green player’s uniform; another brought the board game, which we will definitely play at some point. And then on the last day of class we’re going to make the Dalgona honeycomb cookies from episode two.

I really believe that playfulness can inspire creativity, which leads to better research. My role is about more than just content. Information is everywhere these days—you can go online or watch a documentary. The professor of the 21st century is an experience designer.

Week 2 is called Red Light, Green Light. On the show, that was the game where a giant doll murdered anyone who moved when they weren’t supposed to. How have you adjusted this to avoid the needless slaughter of students?

Ha! For us, it is about looking at “Red Light, Green Light” and how it is played in so many different cultures around the world. In our group there are students from China, from Korea, from Europe, Canada, so we shared how the game differs from one culture to another and what that says about the diversity of cultures, but also commonalities.

In Canada I think it’s called “What Time Is It Mr. Wolf?”

That’s right. And in Italy, where I’m from, it’s “Un, Due, Tres, Estrella.” The game is an archetype and a metaphor for life, which is true of all the games in Squid Game. In the playground we learn about competition and co-operation. We learn to read symbolic aspects of life, and concepts of justice, equality and inequality. The very nature of play is a symbolic activity; by playing we learn how to live and how to cope. In the show the main character, Seong Gi-hun, comes in as a very childlike character and by the end has transformed into an adult by facing the cruelty of life. It is the idea of metamorphosis that is present in so many classic allegories and fairy tales. I’m a big fan of Pinocchio.

Speaking of archetypes, the VIPs in Squid Game—the evil billionaires who watch the players kill each other for sport—are all white Westerners. The creator of the show has even compared them to Trump. How does your class approach that aspect of the show?

Definitely the VIPs represent the highest peak of capitalism. The fact that they all wear gold masks evokes the old Greek tragedies. And then when you look at how they arrive on the island where the game is taking place—they fly in on helicopters like gods coming down from the heavens, which is part of a whole religious motif. The piggy bank that contains all the prize money hangs from the ceiling in a way that evokes a modern cathedral, only the religion is capitalism. So I can understand the Trump comparison. One of my students is talking about analyzing the games in the show as an allegory of imperial capitalism. The Trump era certainly feels like an accurate manifestation of that.

Season 2 is coming to Netflix later this year, or early next. With the key mystery solved and most of our favourite characters feeding worms, where do you think they’ll take it?

We have talked about this quite a bit in class. I asked my students if they would prefer a sequel or a prequel and most say the latter, so that we could have these characters from the first season return and we could learn more about their already rich backstories. I tend to agree.

In the meantime, Netflix is releasing a reality show called Squid Game: The Challenge. Did you consider trying out?

To play? No. But I will definitely watch. I have heard about some contestants on the set talking about the “intolerable conditions.” Netflix is denying that, so who knows what the truth is.

Any idea of what next year’s trending-topic course might be?

Definitely the hot topic right now, in academia and beyond, is this ChatGPT bot and similar advanced AI language models. I think that might make a good pick.

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This woman built a greenhouse that grows eye-catching exotic fruits—in Nova Scotia

Jacob Sheen — Thu, 02 Feb 2023 21:31:44 +0000

Tart Chilean guava berries, plump persimmons the size of tomatoes, and pods of blue sausage fruit, also known as dead man’s fingers. This list sounds like an inventory of the world’s most magical fruit aisle, but in fact, all of this exotic produce (and more) is currently sprouting in a massive greenhouse located just outside of Lunenburg, Nova Scotia. Exotic Fruit Nursery, an operation built and run by biologist turned entrepreneur Annette Clarke, specializes in fruit varieties native to Europe, Australia and Southeast Asia, but it’s also expanding what the “hundred-mile diet” means to hungry East Coasters.

Clarke acquired her penchant for unique fruits in childhood, during a family vacation to Lake Garda, Italy. She remembers climbing a tree loaded with sweet, ripe figs and eating them right off the branches. “They tasted almost like honey,” she says. “It was an incredible taste that I never forgot.” Clarke, who is originally from Neuss, Germany, first visited British Columbia in the late ’90s, while conducting fieldwork for her forestry and soil science master’s degree from the University of Bonn. She put down roots in the province after meeting John, her future husband, and they settled with their son, Nicholas, in Roberts Creek, a town on the Sunshine Coast. Clarke taught environmental education at public schools and ran a hobby farm, selling run-of-the-mill produce (like tomatoes and cucumbers) at local farmers’ markets in her spare time.

Her passion for exotic fruit kicked up again in 2012, when she discovered a book called Uncommon Fruits for Every Garden by Lee Reich. Clarke read about the pawpaw, a mango-shaped fruit that tastes like banana pudding and is indigenous to the eastern United States. Hell-bent on growing some herself, Clarke contacted online seed sellers and nurseries across the province and throughout the U.S. “I’m a typical German: a bit excessive when it comes to research,” she jokes. “When I learn about something, I want to know everything—150 per cent.” Eventually she found a nursery near Coquitlam that was willing to part with its plants. She made the two-hour trek to bring them home.

The results of Clarke’s loving pawpaw husbandry

Her first pawpaw crop may have been underwhelming —“Horrible, like eating under-ripe bananas”—but a determined Clarke spent years perfecting the delicate art of growing unusual plants on Canadian soil. For a while, she successfully brought flying dragon citrus and gingko biloba trees to maturity. But by 2015, Roberts Creek started issuing water restrictions that made it difficult for Clarke to maintain her growing operation. Then came the forest fires. “The sky was dark red and you couldn’t breathe,” she says. Seeking refuge from looming climate disasters, Clarke sold her land in 2021, purchased a 33-acre property just outside of Lunenberg (sight unseen) and headed across the country, with cuttings, seeds and her son in tow.

Upon arrival, Clarke embarked on her biggest build yet: a 40-by-60-foot greenhouse funded by the profits from the sale of her B.C. home. With Nicholas’s help, Clarke dug a massive pit, laid down gravel for drainage purposes and poured concrete into the trench. She spent $38,000 on the nursery’s mammoth galvanized-metal superstructure, which the duo covered in a double layer of seven-millimetre polyethylene plastic. (When inflated, it resembles a big balloon.) The build came with what Clarke describes as a “rat-tail of problems.” The initial blueprint was missing measurements. Then, a boom truck from a local construction company was needed to safely lift the greenhouse’s arches into place, and Clarke had to manually drill in holes that were conspicuously absent from the building’s steel frame.

All the work was worth it, though. More than 65 exotic fruit varieties, including yuzu and pineapple guava, now bloom in Clarke’s greenhouse. Every day, she manually opens the roof—using a complex pulley system—to make sure her beloved plants aren’t cooked by the sun, and waters them by hand. In the event the outside temperature drops below minus-10 degrees Celsius, Clarke turns on her propane heater and and lovingly wraps her plants in burlap to help protect them from the cold. “If you don’t maintain them properly for one day, they’ll die,” she says. “It’s almost like having a pet.”

Dead man’s fingers zip open to reveal a translucent pulp with notes of cucumber and melon

The slightly creepy (but delicious) Akebia fruit

At the moment, visits to Clarke’s greenhouse are by appointment only, and she sells her produce to a small list of private clients. But Exotic Fruit Nursery is on track to open to the wider public this spring, and Clarke says she’s already received a warm welcome from her East Coast neighbours. Her greenhouse has already appeared on the front page of the local newspaper, and Clarke recently received an invite to deliver a speech at a garden club in Halifax.

Persimmons. In Nova Scotia!

Eventually, she hopes to open a gift shop that sells fruit-inspired jewellery and launch tastings to educate locals about growing patterns, the environmental impacts of pesticide use and what’s possible to grow in their home province—a list that’s changing right along with the climate. Thanks to her, it now includes persimmons that taste like pudding parfaits and juicy, watermelon-esque blue sausage fruits. “It’s not just about picking up a piece of fruit and eating it,” she says. “It’s about getting people to think, Where does this come from?”

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Shania Twain’s eternal pop empire

Dave Zarum — Wed, 01 Feb 2023 14:21:00 +0000

What do Harry Styles, Diplo and Haim all have in common? They’ve all duetted with, covered or shouted out Shania Twain. More than two decades after sweeping the charts, the country superstar is still spreading her influence all over pop culture. It’s hard to imagine Taylor Swift graduating from Nashville darling to international pop icon without Shania doing it 20 years earlier.

Shania earned the nickname “Queen of Country Pop” after her 1997 album Come On Over became the best-selling record in history by a solo female artist. Along with her producer and then-husband Mutt Lange, Shania created a suite of songs that were playful, infectious and unpretentiously fun—even the ballads. You didn’t have to have a shelf full of George Jones or Waylon Jennings to stop everything when “That Don’t Impress Me Much” came on MuchMusic, or to croon along to “You’re Still The One” on the radio at the dentist’s office.

These days, Shania is once again ubiquitous on every platform. Scroll through TikTok and you’re bound to hear clips of “Let’s go, girls!” or “Okay, so you’re Brad Pitt.” Shania even recently released a trailer house EDM remix of “Man! I Feel Like a Woman” by the producer Real Hypha, which originated on the social media app. TikTok is the platform where old songs can find new life in cascading remixes, duets and memes. Decades-old tracks from artists like Kate Bush and Fleetwood Mac have become hits again on the backs of popular videos. It’s happening on Spotify, too. In 2021, listeners between 19 and 24 streamed ’90s country as much as listeners over 40. And Gen Z created 89 million playlists featuring songs by Faith Hill, the Chicks and, at the top of the list, Shania Twain.

For decades, the Nashville machine was controlled by powerful cultural gatekeepers who favoured a specific look and sound: usually white, male and cowboy-hatted. Shania defied those expectations from the beginning. Her bare midriff in the video for the 1993 single “What Made You Say That” caused many country purists to write her off as an artist more focused on image and sex appeal than artistry. “I was a disruption to the image of country music,” Shania said in the recent Netflix documentary Not Just A Girl. She went on to release her 2002 album Up! in three different styles: pop, country and an “international” version that blended twang with tabla, fiddle with sitar.

READ: How artist Stan Douglas recreates scenes of political unrest

Her defiance planted the seeds for other artists to cross over. More recently, Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road” blended honkytonk with hip-hop and R&B. The success of a country hit from a young, Black, queer artist sparked debates among conservative listeners about whether or not it belonged on the country charts—even though the genre was heavily influenced by the African-American community before executives began marketing it to white audiences in the 1940s.

This month, Shania releases her latest album, Queen of Me, and just in time—Gen Z can’t get enough of her. At last year’s Coachella, she surprised the audience onstage during Harry Styles’s headlining set, joining him for a performance of “Man! I Feel Like A Woman!” Sparkling in matching sequins, the intergenerational artists found new resonance in the song’s undertones of androgyny and gender play. That hit’s subversively sassy self-assurance has been claimed and reclaimed decades later. Billboard recently named it the greatest karaoke song of all time, and it’s a bona fide queer anthem. Like her own biggest influence, Dolly Parton, Shania has become an LGBTQ+ icon in a genre that is often painted as rigid and conservative.

On her new album, Shania is conversational and colourful, rarely taking herself seriously. The first single, “Waking Up Dreaming,” is about following your ambitions as far as they’ll take you—a nod to Shania’s own hard-fought journey to world domination. It’s the kind of track meant for throwing your arms up on the dance floor, easily slotting into a playlist between Icona Pop’s “I Love It” and Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Run Away With Me.” In the video, Shania takes nods from ’80s glam rock, donning enough wigs and costumes to fill a drag queen’s closet. Now, as then, she wears leopard print like a second skin.

Shania’s casual refusal to play by Nashville’s rules continues to rankle some genre devotees. A recent article on the blog Saving Country Music asked why she doesn’t go back to her ’90s country roots. But Shania Twain has never made music strictly for Nashville—her target audience is everyone. Going back to the sound of 25 years ago would be to abandon what makes her so relevant now. She never took the traditional country path. She went her own way, and the genre followed.

This article appears in print in the February 2023 issue of Maclean’s magazine. Buy the issue for $9.99 or better yet, subscribe to the monthly print magazine for just $39.99.

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Chosen Family: JJ Levine’s ‘Queer Portraits’ series

Katie Underwood — Tue, 31 Jan 2023 17:20:01 +0000

JJ Levine was eight years old when his mother bought him his first 35-millimetre camera. Levine was interested in photography, but at first only shot still lifes of dance shoes and tchotchkes. His mom suggested he try snapping people, too. At the time, his four siblings were in the process of establishing their own identities as young adults. Some of them identify as queer, and Levine studied their lives with great interest. “I had this unique opportunity to see my siblings have unconventional friendships and relationships,” says Levine, who is trans. “When I came of age, living in Montreal, I had them, too—and then I documented them.”

The series started as a term project for Levine’s fine arts degree at Concordia University, documenting his siblings, friends and lovers. Now, at 150 photos, Queer Portraits is Levine’s most robust collection to date, and a tender, critically lauded chronicle of queer domesticity. The project was exhibited at Montreal’s McCord Stewart Museum in 2022. The Image Centre also recently purchased the photograph “Becca and Miwa” through the Canada Now Photography Acquisition Initiative, which highlights Canadian artists whose work touches on issues of identity and belonging. “Queer Portraits is a reference to the history of portrait photography, which usually meant going to a studio in your best outfit and having your picture taken—and, for a long time, was reserved for straight, wealthy, cisgender people,” Levine says of the ongoing project. “It ended up being more of a personal archive than I initially thought it would.”

The photographs feature exes, friends, and Hubert and Joah—his partner and child. As a result, the shoots look like garden-variety hangouts among close-knit people: they involve hours-long chats and rifling through subjects’ wardrobes. Often, there is food. But where Queer Portraits deviates from pure documentary is in its deliberate construction: the lighting is artificial, the furniture is arranged just so and, sometimes, even the homes are borrowed.

Occasionally, the scenes themselves are years old, plucked and reconstructed from Levine’s memory. “I’m not catching people at a random moment, or showing you their unmade bed or pile of dirty dishes,” Levine says. “I’m showing you a person in clothes they feel really good in—maybe the best version of them.” In a sense, Levine’s collection of portraits mirrors a model of family that many queer folks can relate to: one born of loving curation rather than genetic obligation.

In the following pages, Levine tells the stories behind his intimate portraits. He is aware that his portrayals of non-monogamy and creative co-parenting dynamics in Queer Portraits might seem like political cris de coeur on behalf of the queer and trans communities at large. They are, but they’re also simply the stories Levine knows. “This was my way of showing care,” Levine says. “I just wanted to make beautiful images of the people I love.” Proud, cherished, safe in their homes. In that way, they are entirely subversive.

Hubert and Joah, 2021

“This image of Hubert (my partner) and Joah (my daughter) is from the middle of the pandemic. During lockdown, we were all forced into these isolated family structures. Hubert and Joah’s dynamic became more like that of a parent and child. That time also changed my work: I couldn’t go into anyone else’s homes, so I took this shot in our place. It’s so funny: people said, ‘Wow, that’s someone’s grandmother’s house,’ and I was like, ‘That’s my furniture.’ ”

Hubert, 2019

“This was the first time I photographed Hubert. There was no plan to have his cat, Adele, in the shot, but she kept jumping on his lap. After she died in 2021, people left us flowers and wrote notes to her. One said, ‘You ruined all of our puzzles during the pandemic, but you brought so much light into our home.’ One person even lit a candle for her.”

Family, 2020

“I moved in with Bronwen (centre) and Cee (right) in the early 2000s. We were more than roommates; we took care of each other. We were living together when Bronwen and I had our first children. I was like, ‘How does anybody do this without friends around to, like, hold their baby or let them take a shower?’ It was confounding to me.”

Crystal and Harley, 2019

“This photograph features femme-on-femme love—but sometimes, people ask Crystal and Harley if they’re sisters or best friends. This image makes explicit that these people are in a serious, long-term relationship with each other—one that’s not frivolous or for anyone else’s benefit. It’s like they’re saying, ‘Our identity is not for you to consume.’ ”

Oliver, 2015

“Oliver was my high-school sweetheart. We broke up in 2002 and we’ve been good friends ever since. I’ve photographed Oliver more than anyone, maybe. This was taken in their kitchen. The shoot was actually planned for the previous day, but it took so long for me to set up that we just decided to go to bed and shoot in the morning. The space was so tiny that I was perched on the kitchen table.”

Felix, 2015

“We’ve been friends, and extremely sporadic lovers, for 15 years. After a lunch date, Felix and I went back to his new apartment. He hadn’t set up his stuff up yet, so I found this little spot with a tiny bit of green and wedged these amazing fake flowers in the corner. I had him try on a bunch of different outfits, and this is the one he felt good in.”

Becca and Miwa, 2019

“Miwa (right) was with Becca when we shot this image, but they’re not a couple anymore. I also have a lot of images of my exes. For me, the concept of chosen family encompasses the close bonds we as queer people have with our exes. You can be in a specific kind of romantic dynamic, which can then shift into a friendship.”

Lee Lee, 2015

“I met Lee Lee around 2009 or 2010. They’re a dancer—and very much an extrovert—and we used to go out to parties and queer events together. We also connected through our creative jobs. The majority of my friends are interested in art, but they don’t have artistic careers. One of the first things my partner, Hubert, and I bonded over was our interest in analog photography.”

Miwa, 2021

“This image is one of the few from Queer Portraits that I didn’t take in the subject’s space—I shot it in another friend’s apartment. I brought in all the furniture and wallpapered the room with Hubert. Miwa is always down to do weird things. They even helped me pick out the cassette tapes in the background.”

Joah, 2019

“This shot recreates a moment that took place after my separation from Harry, Joah’s other parent. It wasn’t always smooth sailing then. I had moved into another apartment, and Joah was with me for half of the week. One day, I was putting on my shoes at the bottom of the steep stairs at the entrance to my apartment. I remember Joah was just sitting there waiting, and so patiently. I was struck by how calm she was. I had to get used to single parenthood. This image recreates a moment when things were starting to get more settled.”

Mica, 2015

“I met Mica when they moved to Montreal. We used to go camping together. They now live in California, but we’re still good friends.”

This article appears in print in the February 2023 issue of Maclean’s magazine. Buy the issue for $9.99 or better yet, subscribe to the monthly print magazine for just $39.99.

The post Chosen Family: JJ Levine’s ‘Queer Portraits’ series appeared first on Macleans.ca.

Are the new alcohol guidelines too extreme? This distillery owner—and former doctor—breaks it down.

Dave Zarum — Thu, 26 Jan 2023 18:05:03 +0000

Michael Goldney called his distillery Lucky Bastard because he launched it on the back of an unexpected windfall. Before that, the Saskatoon native worked as a family doctor, which gives him a unique perspective on Canada’s new alcohol consumption guideline. Down from two drinks a day to two drinks a week (and emphasizing the link between even moderate drinking and cancer risk), the Health Canada–endorsed recommendations have many in the alcohol industry worried about the bottom line.

Goldney’s company is a bit of an outlier—Lucky Bastard products have included safe drinking guideline labels since 2017. “We want to give our consumers the best information possible,” he says. Here, he explains why he’s planning to update his labels—with or without a mandate—and why the message of “drink responsibly” is not enough.

You are a former family doctor who now runs a distillery. How did that happen?

I wasn’t one of those young kids who knew they wanted to be a doctor. I fell in love with science and biology at university. In 2006, I was just a couple of years out of residency, working as a locum in rural Saskatchewan, which means I would relieve doctors so they could attend conferences or go on vacation. I enjoyed the work and had no notion of doing anything else. Then, one day after work, I went into the drugstore to buy a magazine and I bought a lottery ticket. The next day, I was doing rounds and I found out I had won the jackpot: $14.6 million! For a while I thought I wanted to stay in medicine, but it got to the point where I wasn’t enjoying it anymore, and because of my windfall, I had options. My wife and I were having drinks with a friend one night. He had just read an article about how micro-distilleries were popping up all over the states and we said, We’re in.

Did you know anything about the booze biz before getting into it?

I mean, I did one of those make-your-own beer kits in university. And I liked that there was some science involved in distilling, so I wasn’t completely wasting my degree. Because of my newfound wealth, my wife and I had done some travelling and discovered cocktail culture—Manhattans in New York, and then we had these amazing Ramos gin fizzes in… I don’t even remember where.

You must have had a few.

Ha! Right. None of this had reached Saskatchewan at the time, but we thought it was coming, so the timing was good. We launched in 2017 and we called the company Lucky Bastard for obvious reasons. From the start, selling a toxin was something I had to reconcile with my background. As a doctor, I saw plenty of evidence of the harms caused by alcohol: the obvious drunken stuff, like someone coming to the emergency room with facial lacerations after trying to leapfrog parking meters, or esophageal bleeding caused by alcoholic liver cirrhosis.

As a doctor, what are your thoughts on the new recommendations?

Both as a physician and as a distiller, I rather liked the old guidelines: two drinks a day for women and three for men. That doesn’t seem like problem drinking, but at the same time, if everyone drank that much, our sales would go up. The new guidelines strike me as being a bit extreme, particularly in the way the information is being reported—a 90-page report being boiled down to the most alarmist headlines.

For example?

The CCSA report highlights the link between alcohol and many different types of cancer, but the fact that alcohol is a carcinogen is not new. I honestly thought that’s something most people were aware of, but now it’s like this big bad boogeyman. I’m not saying cancer isn’t extremely serious, but if we live long enough we’re all going to die of heart disease or cancer. I think we need context to really understand what we’re looking at, starting with the distinction between absolute risk and relative risk. So maybe I’m 30 per cent more likely to contract a certain throat cancer, but that doesn’t mean I have a 30 per cent chance of getting throat cancer, which is how I think some people are processing the information. In most cases we are still talking about an extremely small number, which consumers should understand and then make their own decisions.

So then where do you stand on the CCSA’s call for mandatory labelling?

We actually started putting labels on our products in 2017 after I attended a working group spearheaded by the Saskatchewan Prevention Institute called “Let’s Talk Alcohol,” and they made a good case for why it’s important to promote specific guidelines. Of course those were the 2011 guidelines, which also included potential cardiovascular benefits of moderate consumption. I certainly prefer a drink to 30 minutes of cardio.

This is the warning label currently placed on Lucky Bastard bottles. Goldney plans to update the labels.

Will you update your labels with the new guidelines?

We will. Our goal is to give our customers the best information possible, and right now I guess that’s the information from the CCSA. I’ve been following some of the criticism. I gather that of the 6,000 studies examined, only 16 of them were used for modelling. That definitely gives me pause, but at the same time I’m not about to dust off my statistical analysis textbook.

Some of your industry colleagues say “please enjoy responsibly” labels should be enough. You don’t agree?

No, I don’t really buy that. What does responsible drinking look like? Every person has a different definition and often it just means that you know someone who drinks more than you do. At the same time, I am extremely sympathetic to the concerns of my industry. Particularly to those who have a fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders—we’re a very small, privately owned producer, so we can look at it in terms of our ethics.

You’re still a business, though. If everyone goes from two drinks a day to two a week, that’s a pretty massive hit.

It is, but I really don’t think that’s going to happen. If we look at, for example, what happened in California following the mandatory calorie labelling on fast food—it’s not like that had a significant impact on obesity rates. Or just look at the way people drive on the highway. You may be safer going at a slower speed, but that doesn’t stop a lot of us from driving faster.

Critics are comparing the CCSA to a modern-day temperance society with an anti-alcohol agenda. What do you think?

I think of course that is their agenda, but I’m not saying that in a critical way. It’s not the Centre for Substance Abuse and Addiction’s job to promote the positive aspects of drinking alcohol— the alcohol industry already does a very good job of that. And of course there are positive aspects. Alcohol is a social lubricant, we are social beings, and our mental health can be improved by social interactions.

I’ve asked you about how you feel as a business owner and a former doctor. What about as a guy who likes to unwind with a cocktail? Will the new guidelines influence your personal consumption?

No, they won’t. I love to have a couple of whiskeys and a cigar every now and then, and that’s not going to change.

The post Are the new alcohol guidelines too extreme? This distillery owner—and former doctor—breaks it down. appeared first on Macleans.ca.

Trending: Why psilocybin could be used in mental health treatment

Dave Zarum — Fri, 20 Jan 2023 15:10:22 +0000

If you hadn’t noticed psilocybin’s move toward the mainstream, a company like Numinus will come as a surprise. Led by founder and CEO Payton Nyquvest, Numinus is a brand-fantasy of the next iteration of wellness: clean, straightforward, empathetic, inclusive and self-aware. It’s one of several Canadian companies—Field Trip Health and Wellness among them—ready to capitalize on psilocybin. Its head office in Vancouver’s Gastown may look like any random vegan café, but instead of cookies, it has ketamine—currently the main psychedelic legally used in therapy in Canada. At some point the company plans to use psilocybin too. Found in “magic mushrooms,” psilocybin is in clinical trials, in Canada and internationally, for use as a potential treatment for mental illness.

Nyquvest turned to psychedelics to treat his long-term chronic pain, and his healing experience contributed to a significant career change. A smart, aggressive operator, Nyquvest transitioned from a director position at Mackie Research Capital to founding Numinus in 2018—the same year cannabis was legalized in Canada.

Why psilocybin? Caroline MacCallum, who is the medical director of the Greenleaf Medical Clinic and a clinical assistant and adjunct professor at UBC, explains that structurally, psilocybin is like serotonin. “This can lead to an antidepressant or an anti-anxiety effect,” MacCallum says. The medical community has heard that some patients have experienced visual distortions like hallucinations, powerful emotional experiences or self-reflective insights, all of which MacCallum says can lead to new ways of thinking.

READ: How the zero-waste movement is changing fine-dining

Numinus and other Canadian health companies are considering psilocybin for the treatment of addiction, depression, anxiety, PTSD and, perhaps most notably, end-of-life distress via intentionally pursued trips on the drug. A landmark 2006 Johns Hopkins study found that psilocybin might “occasion mystical-type experiences,” and NYU Langone published findings in August of 2022 that saw a significant reduction in alcohol dependence when subjects combined psilocybin and psychotherapy. Following these studies, among others, psilocybin has emerged in the medical community as an exciting potential treatment. But it remains illegal in this country outside of clinical trials and exceptions via Health Canada’s Special Access Program—which provides drugs with clinical promise to treat serious or life-threatening conditions—and through certain exemptions under the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act, in place since 2020.

Psilocybin research is necessarily slow and expensive. Spencer Hawkswell, who is a lobbyist and the CEO of non-profit group TheraPsil (which advocates for psilocybin-assisted psychotherapy), is working in support of a lawsuit against the government of Canada and the current federal minister of health to allow patients access to psilocybin-assisted psychotherapy; Hawkswell projects that it could be legal and regulated in a little over a year.

This moment in psilocybin is one of duality. At the same time as it’s being studied for therapeutic use, it’s also an established wellness trend, one of many that have moved from marginalized communities or a global majority culture to the mainstream West via curious outsiders, then influential figures and their followers, then reformed skeptics. Psilocybin has replaced weed as the respectable person’s low-key, illicit-ish drug of choice, in the form of microdose capsules, chocolate, or the magic mushroom as crudité. Celebrities talk openly about using psilocybin; “microdosing moms” have become their own subculture. The hesitant nerd’s guide to psychedelics, Michael Pollan’s 2018 book How to Change Your Mind, has inspired a Netflix docuseries.

MORE: How science is bringing psychedelic mushrooms out of the shadows

Unlike the research, perception seems to be progressing quickly. Through recent history, the narrative of psychedelics more generally has been on a wild ride of its own, from psychologist and psychedelic figurehead Timothy Leary’s outré-Harvard 1960s to the Hopkins study and Canadians’ changing attitudes. A 2021 poll done by TheraPsil and marketing research company YouGov found that 54 per cent of respondents, without having any additional information, supported changing psilocybin regulations for medical use. That number rose to 66 per cent when respondents were informed about research findings and current exemptions available. (Perception in the straight-arrow, stigma-avoidant business world is harder to shift, but perhaps this is being addressed by CEOs like Nyquvest and Doug Drysdale, a pharma veteran who heads the Toronto-based psychedelics company Cybin.)

This particular moment, mostly pre-regulation and post-stigma, has created an interesting scene made up of casual users, dealers, advocates, investors, executives and medical practitioners. With illegal dispensaries and home growers, this industry will continue to shift along with regulations and perceptions. If psilocybin turns out to be as effective as current research suggests, it will transcend its wellness-trend status and become a greater part of recognized health care. This is already happening in the medical community, and for people who find themselves on the edge of acceptability; all it takes is an open mind. And you know what might help with that?

This article appears in print in the February 2023 issue of Maclean’s magazine. Buy the issue for $9.99 or better yet, subscribe to the monthly print magazine for just $39.99.

The Building: Winnipeg’s Cornish Library gets an inviting makeover

Dave Zarum — Thu, 19 Jan 2023 16:58:10 +0000

At 107 years old, Winnipeg’s Cornish Library has changed with the times—over and over again. Its basement, which once hosted rousing lectures by Canadian activist Nellie McClung, now shelves Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s We Should All Be Feminists. The heritage building bridges the gap between two very different Winnipegs. It’s located just inside the ornamental iron-and-stone gates of Armstrong’s Point, a placid residential neighbourhood complete with million-dollar, manor-style homes. And just north, unhoused people sleep rough under the Maryland Bridge, a major commuter route along the Assiniboine River.

In 2015, hoping to make the Cornish more inviting, the city of Winnipeg commissioned Public City Architecture, a local firm, to reimagine it. “We decided to make the project about opening the library to the communities around it,” says Peter Sampson, Public City’s principal architect. “Libraries have changed a lot in the last 10 or 20 years—they’re no longer just palaces for old books.” The Cornish, in fact, is known to some of its neighbours as “the living room.”

READ: The Building: A Calgary parkade redesigned with the future in mind

On the accessibility front, Public City added a platform lift and a new, gradually sloping walkway to the existing entryway. The library’s century-old bones got some carefully refinished oak panelling, asbestos removal—surgical and extensive, given the building’s age—and generous coats of new burgundy paint on its original wainscotting to match archival photos unearthed by Heritage Winnipeg.

The jewel of the Cornish’s $2.5-million, multi-year makeover is its extension: clad in floor-to-ceiling oak, and supported by a solitary but heavy-duty concrete column, the space is made to house community shindigs and extra reading room, and to host rotating exhibitions by area artists. (The Cornish’s first in-house display is a floral piece by Winnipeg’s Michael Dumontier.) Wrapped in glass, the walls of the addition occasionally seem to disappear altogether. “In certain types of light, it’s hard to find the edges,” Sampson says.

RELATED: The Building: Vancouver’s Stack was built for both work and play

Exterior restorations included preserving the existing outdoor faucet (which provides potable water for cooking and drinking) and dismantling the long-standing chain-link fence that held northern community members, symbolically at least, at bay. Public City also planted a slew of new saplings to line the limestone patio, but left a clear sightline into the library’s public garden—and the new, welcoming reading nook within.

Limestone slabs, sourced from quarries north of Winnipeg and weighing in at 3,500 pounds each, line the exterior of the Cornish’s addition to form a seating area. Public City planted larch saplings around the perimeter, creating a reading room in the forest.

Four Flowers, a permanent artwork made by local artist Michael Dumontier, is designed to look like a vase. It’s also a continuation of the single concrete column that supports the addition. Its flowers, made of steel, sway along with fluctuations in the air.

The Cornish’s children’s reading room was outfitted with new, concealed heating elements, recycled carpet tile and refinished original oak woodwork in the panels, columns and bookshelves. The colourful plastic dogs, pops of whimsy added later by the library, are stools.

This article appears in print in the February 2023 issue of Maclean’s magazine. Buy the issue for $9.99 or better yet, subscribe to the monthly print magazine for just $39.99.

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Lauren Ashley Jiles is a global burlesque superstar celebrating her Indigenous roots

Dave Zarum — Wed, 18 Jan 2023 17:50:17 +0000

In 1991, my parents and I moved to Kahnawake, a Mohawk community across the St. Lawrence from Montreal. I was just five, but being a military kid, I had already lived on bases in Schweinfurt, Germany, and Fort Riley, Kansas. All that moving around had made me incredibly hyperactive, so my parents decided to enrol me in an Indigenous community-theatre class that only accepted children aged seven and up. They lied to get me in, and then I told people I was seven for three years straight. I was too young to realize it then, but those classes would shape the rest of my life.

I danced, performed in musicals and learned to sew and make costumes for the next 13 years. When I was 18, I left my community to pursue a health sciences degree at nearby Dawson College. I stopped doing theatre to focus on my studies, but I slowly became depressed without it. In 2005, a friend encouraged me to audition for a burlesque show. It sounded like what I’d been doing, but with a provocative twist. A few days after my 18th birthday, I signed up to audition for the Blue Light burlesque troupe at Café Campus on Rue Prince-Arthur. I wore a pink men’s suit and a black hat and did a chair dance to “Stop This World” by Diana Krall in front of 300 people.

I remember hearing cheers and claps when my number ended, but a part of it felt odd: there was a sexual element to burlesque that wasn’t included in Indigenous community theatre, and my time in Catholic school did little to make me feel comfortable removing my clothes in front of an audience. And yet I felt more at home on that stage than I did conducting experiments in a lab. The venue asked me to sign a contract to become a monthly performer, and I was hooked.

Soon, I was booking performances several nights a week at clubs around the city—the MainLine Theatre, Café Cléo and lots of random bars. I didn’t want to give up on school, so after finishing my degree, I did two years of law school at McGill, then studied art history and film at Concordia. I was still nervous about what my colleagues and family might say if they found out I was a dancer. One night, I was performing at an off-campus fundraiser for legal and medical aid for sex workers, and I heard someone shout from the crowd, “Hey, it’s Lauren!” A bunch of my classmates were there. I was mortified, but they thought it was cool that I had a hobby that had nothing to do with academia. When I told my grandmother about my night job, she said, “If you’re going to do it, be the best at it.”

By 2012, I decided to see if I could make it as a full-time dancer. I did local shows, so I wasn’t making that much money, but I took solace in the fact that I was at least doing something that I loved. When I gave birth to my daughter two years later, making more money from burlesque became top priority. I invested tens of thousands into my act— costume pieces like boas, ostrich-feather fans, competition-entry fees and bus tickets to venues farther and farther from home. It wasn’t glamorous: I left my daughter with her father on weekends to take 12-hour buses to New York City. From there, I’d take another bus to Long Island, where I’d perform in local steakhouses.

Those Long Island venues were pandemonium, with back rooms full of costumes and tons of performers—mostly from Manhattan—trying to make it big. It was classic burlesque: opulent productions combined with gritty off-stage bedlam. I’d get ready in a public bathroom with six other girls and run through the back kitchens to the stage. One time, I nearly got splashed with cooking oil.

My near-burn moment is a good metaphor for my first years in the business—I did what I had to do to stay in the game. Sometimes, when you’re trying to monetize your art, you’re faced with compromises that test your integrity. At festivals and corporate functions, I felt like I had a better shot of being booked if I did well-known numbers instead of creating original pieces. At other events, producers would fixate on my Indigenous roots and ask me to do a Pocahontas-themed act. Those requests weren’t common, but they were certainly demeaning. I refused to work with those people. I wanted to control my own act.

The 2018 New Orleans Burlesque Festival was a pivotal moment: I entered the Queen of Burlesque competition and did a spider-queen dance wearing a skirt with extra legs and a butt reveal. I had straps tied to my back that I used to swing my body into the air at the end of the striptease. I won that contest with a costume made by designer Christina Manuge. A lot changed for me after that. I had a bunch of run-ins with celebrities, for one. I did a private dance for Jason Momoa. It was just his people and me, hoping I wouldn’t forget how to take off my clothes. There was a new liberty that came with success. Thanks to my newfound notoriety, when I asked producers what they wanted my act to involve, they’d say, “You’re the performer, do what you want.”

I felt like I had more freedom to explore different themes. One of my newer acts was about the decolonization of Indigenous sexuality. My costume has classic burlesque elements, like a feather duster and corset, but the beadwork is the real highlight. The entire outfit is purple, which is an important colour to Iroquois people. The reveals aren’t bodily, but cultural: I remove my head covering and my hair falls to the floor in braids. I lift my skirt to reveal moccasins, not heels. At the end, I look joyful, a depiction of Indigenous people that’s not often seen in the media. It’s a very emotional dance for me to perform. In 2019 and 2020, I was named Canada’s number-one burlesque performer. Last June, I won Miss Exotic World—the Olympics of burlesque—and soon after, I was named the second-most-influential dancer in the world by 21st Century Burlesque magazine, which felt like the cherry on top. All of that coincided with a massive reckoning across Canada, exemplified by the discovery of unmarked graves at former residential schools. These atrocities weren’t news to my community. Representation has always been a mission of mine, and I don’t want to make “comfortable” art, so if my shows spark conversation, that’s a win in a different way.

My recent success has triggered a massive moment of now what? I still intend to dance until my knees give out, but I’m shifting away from competitions and toward giving back to my community. I’m about to start working with the Burlesque Hall of Fame in a production role, but I also recently started teaching at Anowara Dance Theatre, a Montreal-based Indigenous dance company run by Barbara Diabo. I remember how isolating it was to be a new artist, let alone an artist of colour. But I don’t know if any of this would have come my way if I hadn’t performed as my true self. I’m wearing many costumes these days. I wouldn’t have it any other way.

—As told to Alex Cyr

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Toronto entrepreneur Anika Sawni is making alcohol-free drinks mainstream

Dave Zarum — Mon, 16 Jan 2023 15:35:43 +0000

Growing up in Richmond Hill, Ontario, Anika Sawni was the rare kid you’d call a wellness buff: she ate nutritiously, hiked, skied and played ringette. Then, shortly after she left home in 2014 to study cognitive science at McGill, Anika abandoned her healthy habits in favour of tipsy nights out in Montreal. By her fourth year, she’d gone straight-edge—and not just because of the hangovers. “I saw my friends engage in sloppy behaviour, like regrettable hookups and missed tests,” she says. “I thought, Why is binge-drinking so normal?”

These days, there’s no shortage of zero-proof proxies for partying Gen Zs, the most alcohol-free cohort in recent history. But back when Anika was newly sober, she had to settle for soda water with lime. After graduation, she pitched a booze-free beverage business to her older brother, Niki, who’d just quit his account-executive gig at Salesforce. “For major breweries, like Budweiser and Heineken, the non-alcoholic market seemed like an afterthought,” Anika says. In 2019, the siblings co-founded Grüvi, named to evoke a fun-and-loose ’70s feel, but also the countercultural aspect of staying sober in a drinker’s world.

Dividing the work was the easy part. Niki handled the finances, while design enthusiast Anika created Grüvi’s punchy marketing using a combo of instinct and tips gleaned from brand-awareness webinars. The brewing process is a bit more complex. To simulate the taste of boozy beverages, Grüvi’s products are brewed with the alcohol, which is later filtered out. Wine and beer were Grüvi’s pilots—plus prosecco, a staple of birthdays and showers, where there’s extra pressure to imbibe.

Buoyed by money raised from family and friends, Anika secured a U.S. investor visa and partnered with a brewery in Denver, an area with a booming fitness (and booze) culture. She evangelized Grüvi at farmers’ markets and mom-and-pop shops, eventually landing a distribution deal with Sobeys in late 2020. “When I used to tell people about the concept, they were like, If I wanted to drink a beer, I’d have a beer,” she says. “Now, they seem excited about us.”

Grüvi has 18 full-time employees and sells its zero-proof sangria and nitro mocha stout at 3,500 North American stores. Anika, now 27, was named to Forbes’s 30 Under 30 list in its food and beverage category in 2021. At the moment, she’s laser-focused on growing Grüvi, but eventually, she’d like to make use of her degree and found a company focused on brain-based interventions. Healthy habits die hard.

This article appears in print in the February 2023 issue of Maclean’s magazine. Buy the issue for $9.99 or better yet, subscribe to the monthly print magazine for just $39.99.

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How artist Stan Douglas recreates scenes of political unrest

Dave Zarum — Tue, 10 Jan 2023 14:44:27 +0000

Earlier this year, the Vancouver-born visual artist Stan Douglas represented Canada at the Venice Biennale, one of the most prestigious art exhibitions in the world. It was the type of career-crowning opportunity that could fluster even the most seasoned pros.

Douglas, who’d shown at the biennale several times before, kept his cool. He attended a party DJed by Detroit musician Carl Craig, went to a few galleries to look at the work of Italian painter Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, and hung out with some of the other famous artists in attendance. “It gets easier and easier every time,” says Douglas, who lives in Vancouver and Los Angeles and is the chair of ArtCenter College of Design. Since the early ’80s, Douglas has been shown pretty much everywhere—MoMA in New York City, the Tate in London, the Centre Pompidou in Paris. So, in a sense, headlining the Venice Biennale was a long time coming.

Douglas is an astute social critic, often using film and photography to reimagine and rediscover the past, whether it’s by recreating Penn Station in the early 19th century or Vancouver’s Gastown Riots in 1971. He also has a knack for focusing his lens on moments of political unrest. In his 2012 series Disco Angola, for example, Douglas documents two worlds in the 1970s: New York’s disco scene and the civil war in Angola.

His latest work—2011 ≠ 1848, which made its debut in Venice—offers a similar juxtaposition. The exhibit is made up of two parts: a series of photographs showing political protests from 2011 (Occupy Wall Street, the Arab Spring, the London riots) and a two-screen video installation depicting a hip-hop cypher, which involves freestyle rapping. At first glance, each protest image looks like a photograph taken in real time, as if Douglas documented the incidents as they happened. But he didn’t: these pictures are fabrications, made by digitally rendering models and props onto a photo template. To recreate each scene, Douglas researched the events, examining photos, articles and videos—anything to help him reimagine the moment. The result is that Douglas becomes an omniscient storyteller, able to re-examine history by packing complex political turmoil into a single, striking image.

The video installation is deceptive, too. It features two screens on opposite sides of the room, facing each other. On one, the U.K. grime artists TrueMendous and Lady Sanity; on the other, the Egyptian mahraganat artists Joker and Raptor, who play electronic folk music. As the videos play on separate screens, it seems like the artists are rapping back and forth in a call-and-response, listening intently before delivering their rebuttal. Think again. Each video was filmed separately and stitched together afterwards, merely creating the appearance of a live dialogue.

So what does it all mean? Well, there are some clues in the title of the exhibit. Starting in 1848, there was a series of political upheavals in Europe, known as the Springtime of the People, that brought sweeping changes to governance but largely ended in failure. As the ≠ symbol (which means “does not equal”) indicates in the exhibit’s title, Douglas thinks these years were similar but not quite the same. In 2011, events like the Arab Spring were politically promising but didn’t bring many tangible changes. “The events of 2011 were policed and ignored,” says Douglas.

With the video installation, Douglas uses music to draw a connection between the uprisings. During the London riots, grime became an unofficial soundtrack of the movement; throughout the Arab Spring, mahraganat music played a similar role. Douglas wants to offer a utopian idea of how those two cultures could have communicated using music, which overcomes language and geographic barriers. He shows the artists in conversation, connecting, without them ever interacting at all.

Since the biennale, 2011 ≠ 1848 has been sweeping across Canada, with stops at the Polygon in Vancouver, the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa and, most recently, the Remai Modern in Saskatoon, where it’s on display from January to April. Here, Douglas describes how he created some of his most indelible images.

1: Vancouver, 15 June 2011

STAN DOUGLAS: “The people who rioted following the Canucks’ loss in the Stanley Cup enjoyed upturning the power dynamic. Vancouver is a place that’s inequitable. People can’t afford to buy or rent, which leads to a general sense of discontent. For the plate shot showing the background, we had to recreate the old Canada Post building using CGI, because it’s now being renovated by Amazon. In the middle, that’s the same model of truck that was burned at the protest. We found the truck and hired a pyrotechnical team, who lit it on fire at the PNE Amphitheatre in Vancouver. We used some of the same performers who appeared in another shot we did depicting Occupy Wall Street, except they’re shot from the front here. All the costumes are historically accurate based on what people were wearing in reference photographs.”

2: Tunis, 23 January 2011

“This event took place near the beginning of the Arab Spring. I first saw images of it in European news footage. People were out in the streets, talking politics, disobeying curfew. Early on, there was a lot of optimism. The police weren’t arresting anyone. But the revolution didn’t pan out the way everyone wanted. We planned to shoot the plate shot from a hotel across the street, where most of the news coverage was filmed during the event. But the hotel has since been condemned, so we stationed our photographer at an office building next door. When I’m directing shoots remotely, I give the photographer direction over emails and phone calls—lots of back and forth. The people in this image are also performers.”

3: London, 9 August 2011 (Pembury Estate)

“This image depicts the London riots, following the shooting of a 29-year-old Black man named Mark Duggan. I went back to the location six years after the event. During my research, it took me a while to figure out where everything happened. I got GPS coordinates by referencing hours of Sky News footage of the event and Google Maps, and then I flew overhead in a helicopter and shot my plate shot. I chose this vantage point because it showed the entire housing estate. Once I had the backdrop, I had to add the protesters, police, onlookers, fire and smoke, which we clipped from video footage of the actual event. I enhanced the flames and smoke with CGI.”

This article appears in print in the January 2023 issue of Maclean’s magazine. Buy the issue for $9.99 or better yet, subscribe to the monthly print magazine for just $39.99.

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The Building: Vancouver’s Stack was built for both work and play

Dave Zarum — Fri, 06 Jan 2023 14:21:32 +0000

These days, companies won’t be able to entice their employees back to the in-person grind with any old cubicle set-up—new offices will have to dazzle. One such design statement is the Stack, a brand-new 37-storey tower in the heart of Vancouver’s business district. Upon its completion at the tail end of 2022, it will become the tallest commercial building in the city.

Vancouver’s Department of Planning, Urban Design and Sustainability demands that any proposals for buildings surpassing 400 feet must demonstrate design merit. (The Stack tops out at 530.) In other words, if a building is going to take up a ton of space in the downtown skyline, it better be pretty. “The Stack had to earn the extra height,” says James Cheng, architect at Vancouver’s James K.M. Cheng Architects, the tower’s parent firm.

Its interior may be all business, but the Stack’s ground-level park—complete with a pedestrian footpath, eye-catching art and a healthy helping of trees—is also designed for the public to enjoy.

Shipping delays on glazing materials from Kamloops and stone travelling up the California coast pushed tenants’ official move-in dates back by a few months. But now that the glass-coated edifice has taken its final form, it’s easy to see how it got its name. Four “boxes,” each containing 10 floors or less, are stacked vertically. No standard cubicles, but plenty of cubes.

Each box has its own unique layout: the ground-floor box, which features soaring ceilings and functioning windows, is a draw for big-thinking tech firms; box two has multiple open-air decks; and box three is set slightly askew for a Jenga-esque element of visual intrigue. Box four, with its harbourside views, is where any future patio parties will pop off.

A splashy rooftop terrace, which tops the Stack’s fourth box, offers stunning views of the North Shore mountains—not a bad backdrop for company barbecues. “You can have a real party up there,” Cheng says. “It’s the best view in Vancouver.”

The Stack’s developers have also built an impressive suite of amenities. Nook, an Italian restaurant, takes up 5,000 square feet on the first floor. Elsewhere in the building, there’s a fitness centre with a dedicated studio for group workouts—like yoga and Pilates—and lots of showers. And because it’s Vancouver, there are 250 bike stalls, plus a one-megawatt, 21-plug electric-vehicle charging station in the Stack’s expansive lower parking area. Remember commuting?

This article appears in print in the January 2023 issue of Maclean’s magazine. Buy the issue for $9.99 or better yet, subscribe to the monthly print magazine for just $39.99.

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How the zero-waste movement is changing fine dining

Dave Zarum — Wed, 04 Jan 2023 17:50:10 +0000

There are few dishes as luscious as a tomato salad at the height of the season. At the Acorn, a haute vegetarian restaurant in Vancouver’s Riley Park neighbourhood, head chef Devon Latte drizzles wedges of jewel-hued tomatoes with a vinaigrette and contrasts their sweetness with a creamy homemade mayo. He textures the dish with cheese and croutons, then showers it with basil. What diners don’t see are all the scraps that Latte has layered onto the plate: the tomato leaves used to make that verdant, herbaceous vinaigrette; the scraps of tomato reduced with caramel to make a savoury, silky sauce; and even the mayonnaise, made with chickpea miso and smoked tomato scraps, and emulsified with leftover aquafaba.

The Acorn is one of a growing number of Canadian restaurants subverting expectations about fine dining through the thrifty, ingenious use of ingredients that other kitchens might toss in the compost or garbage bin. Scraps, peels, seeds, cores, leaves: through creative reinvention, these change from trash into culinary treasure. As the food world faces more pressure due to the climate crisis and skyrocketing inflation, zero-waste restaurants offer an intriguing template for how the industry can adapt. Like veganism is to vegetarianism, zero-waste aspires not to limit waste but to nearly eliminate it altogether, without compromising on the quality of the dining experience. And restaurants are gaining recognition for it: the vaunted Michelin Guide began awarding “Green Stars” in 2021 to recognize exceptional sustainable restaurants.

MORE: This Iranian-Canadian food stylist is raising awareness with these stunning dishes

In zero-waste kitchens, chefs don’t throw out any ingredients until they’re well and truly used up: pickled for preservation, simmered for stock, squeezed for every last drop of flavour. At the Acorn, celeriac skins are fermented into complex bases, peach pits transform into syrups and kiwi skins turn into powders dusted over dishes—reframing food scraps into fine-dining adventures. The end result is not one of conspicuous sustainability, but of innovative presentation and surprising flavours. We go to restaurants for culinary epiphanies, and the zero-waste approach shows us what we’ve been missing all this time.

The zero-waste movement entered the mainstream in the 2010s, when blogger Lauren Singer made headlines for fitting four years’ worth of trash into one mason jar. Interest has escalated gradually since then: in 2016, the Saskatoon chef Christie Peters, owner of the acclaimed restaurant Primal, hosted a zero-waste dinner that featured dishes made from vegetable stems, butcher trimmings and stone-fruit pits. And in July of 2021, 29 Canadian restaurants and bars participated in a global “Zero Waste Month,” designing cocktail recipes that incorporated scraps and peels. Initiatives like these signal a growing interest in sustainability from restaurants and consumers alike. They also reveal how challenging it is to shift consumption patterns across an industry.

Shira Blustein, the Acorn’s owner, has focused on sustainability since the restaurant opened in 2012. “Restaurants are notoriously wasteful,” she says, estimating that in a typical kitchen, one- to two-thirds of all produce is trimmed and discarded. A recent federal report, meanwhile, found that kitchens in hotels, restaurants and other institutions waste almost 40 per cent of their produce. Even before the food is prepared, it’s often delivered in large quantities by suppliers, swaddled in packaging that goes straight into the dumpster.

The Acorn’s cauliflower risotto uses cauliflower and mushroom trimmings in the stock and the potato-nest garnishes. (Photograph by Gabriel Cabrera)

A zero-waste philosophy is good for a restaurant’s bottom line because it maximizes each ingredient’s value. “If you’re paying for the roots and carrot tops, you might as well use them,” Blustein says. The process requires considerable planning, not just day to day but season to season. The staff at Big Wheel Burger in Victoria turn food scraps, wrappers and plates into compost and convert used oil into biodiesel to fuel their restaurant van. The Acorn preserves, pickles and cans as much summer produce as possible, which helps cut down on food costs in the winter. Reducing waste, according to Blustein and Latte, isn’t particularly difficult, nor does it involve special training. It does mean spending more on kitchen labour—perhaps the greatest roadblock to its widespread adoption. And yet Blustein and Latte have found that being thrifty with food scraps can help offset labour costs, resulting in a sustainable equation that has kept their doors open for over a decade.

Waste reduction doesn’t end in the kitchen—restaurant staff must consider where the food comes from, how it’s transported, and what happens after it leaves the kitchen. At Primal, the kitchen practises whole-animal butchery to ensure it uses up each part of the animal; kitchen staff use the bones for stock, then grind them into compost.

This dedication—and the labour needed to process each ingredient—translates into a premium price tag. The tomato dish at the Acorn is $23, and a plate of spaghetti and meatballs at Primal is $32. Blustein believes that the quality of the ingredients, and the kitchen’s efforts to extract a symphony of layered flavours from each, justifies the cost. “People are always surprised by how good peak-season food is,” she says. “You’re never going to get anything like it at Safeway or Superstore.”

To increase support for these kinds of sustainable restaurant practices, diners will have to start caring a lot more about what goes into their food: how it was grown, where it came from, how it was prepared. Restaurants have always sold us on the plated dish; zero-waste requires us to look beyond it. The strongest case for this approach comes from the food itself. “When you take a peach that has ripened on the tree, and it comes directly to our restaurant without ever seeing a fridge, it’s absolute perfection,” Blustein says. “There’s nothing better than that.”

This article appears in print in the January 2023 issue of Maclean’s magazine. Buy the issue for $9.99 or better yet, subscribe to the monthly print magazine for just $39.99.

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This Iranian-Canadian food stylist is raising awareness with these stunning dishes

Dave Zarum — Fri, 16 Dec 2022 15:59:36 +0000

Armita Hosseini was 11 years old when she immigrated with her family from Tehran to the Greater Toronto Area. “We lived a very comfortable upper-middle-class life in Tehran, but my parents gave that up,” she says. “They knew my opportunities would be limited there because I’m a woman.”

Hosseini, a registered psychological associate, spends her off hours styling plates of food on Instagram. Since Iran’s civil uprising, Hosseini has been posting her support for protesters on social media. Until recently, she would regularly visit Iran to see her extended family and explore its regional food culture. Now, like many Iranians living abroad, she fears for her life and safety if she were to go back. More than 448 people have been killed in the uprising so far, including 29 women and 60 children; 15,000 have been detained and face horrors like torture, rape and potential execution in the course of their incarceration.

“After the death of Mahsa Amini and reading the news about my people getting murdered by the state, I felt helpless watching from the sidelines,” she says. But in October, she came across #CookforIran, a volunteer-led movement in which social media users cook and share Iranian recipes to amplify the plight of protesters. “That’s what got me sketching plate designs again,” she says.

Food styling started as a pandemic hobby. Hosseini has long had a flair for cooking and design, but it turned into a solid side hustle as photos of her intricately plated dishes attracted nearly 10,000 followers on Instagram. Her work is not just about pretty designs: from the start, she’s tied it to meaningful causes. In one past project, “Baking for Beirut”—conceived after an explosion rocked Lebanon’s capital in 2020—she sold namoura, a syrup-soaked semolina cake, to her Instagram followers and raised more than $3,000 for the Lebanese Red Cross.

In her most recent work, the Toronto-based stylist has turned her attention to the uprising in her home country of Iran. The idea is to use food as a vehicle for awareness—not only for her people’s struggle for freedom, but for Iran’s diverse culinary heritage and the enduring roles of food and joy in its culture, even amid heartbreaking conflict.

Her piece features 10 dishes from some of Iran’s most populous provinces. The choice to feature dishes from across the country’s culinary landscape was deliberate. “One way the Iranian regime sows division within the population is by producing propaganda that emphasizes the lines between provinces,” she says. “But with the revolution, for the first time in a long time, people are united no matter where they’re from. That connection is what’s keeping this movement going, and food is an important part of that thread.”

Borani-e-khiar o sumaq (cucumber, sumac and yogurt salad), representing Kurdistan province

Kurdish tribes in this province have been the focus of crackdowns by the Islamic regime during the revolution; Mahsa Amini herself was Kurdish. This deconstructed version of the salad features finely chopped lettuce, cucumber, sprouts and edible flowers in a ring around a pool of homemade yogurt topped with sumac and salt.

Kuku-ye-pesteh (fresh herb pistachio frittata), representing Kerman province

Iran is the world’s largest exporter of pistachios, and Kerman is known for its verdant green pistachio fields. This frittata, filled with fresh herbs like parsley, is a popular dish in the region. Hosseini adds tomatoes, pickles and chopped pistachios and serves it with yogurt on the side.

Kufteye-ye-somagh-e-araki (walnut sumac meatballs), representing Arak, a city in Markazi province

Iranian celebrity chef Mehrshad Shahidi, often described as Iran’s Jamie Oliver, was beaten to death in Arak by security forces during an anti-hijab protest on October 31. Hosseini honours Shahidi’s culinary roots with these meatballs made with fresh tarragon, parsley, cilantro and walnuts, served on fried onions with puffed bread. “This dish brings back nostalgic memories of my grandfather’s farm in Arak, where I spent time running between haystacks and wheat fields,” she says. “The fried onions look like hay to me.”

Salad-e-Shirazi (Shirazi salad), representing Shiraz, a city in Fars province

Shiraz, a vibrant cultural centre known for its wine, gardens, and artists, is home to Hafez, one of Iran’s greatest poets. It’s also a major protest site. This salad of cucumber, tomato, onion, verjuice, olive oil and mint is a go-to for many Iranians. Hosseini designed it to evoke the brightness and liveliness of Shiraz.

Dolmeh-ye-tabrizi (stuffed grape leaves) representing Tabriz, a city in East Azerbaijan province

This dish has Turkish roots, and is a staple in several Iranian provinces. Hosseini fills tidy parcels of grape leaves with beef, rice, fresh herbs, raisins and lentils, wraps them in leek, and draws circles of pomegranate molasses around them. “This dish just brings you joy and makes you happy, like a gift, so I wrapped it like one.”

Baklava, also representing Tabriz

Here, Hosseini reimagines baklava as a bird’s nest on a delicate tree painted in pomegranate molasses. “Some of Iran’s most delicious and sophisticated cooking is from this region,” Hosseini says. “Influenced by the history of the Safavids and Ottomans, this Turkish-speaking city is one of the largest cities in the country.”

Zeytoon parvardeh (olive tapenade) representing the Caspian region.

“In the north, there are green olives everywhere,” Hosseini says. “In between the mountains, with its mild Mediterranean climate, this evergreen region is close to the Caspian Sea. Its recipe are often tangy and sour.” This tapenade is made of olives, walnuts, pomegranate molasses and lime juice.

Pistachio and cardamom halva

Halva is a common dessert throughout Iran, with variations in each region. The theme of this geometric plate is symmetry, representing unity between Iranian provinces.

Pashmak (cotton candy) representing Yazd province

A favourite childhood treat, Iranian cotton candy comes in flavours like sesame, cardamom, orange blossom and rose water. It’s often served with cake or other desserts, as in this winter wonderland design with a rosette pastry and edible flower on top. Yazd, Iran’s centre of Zoroastrian culture and religion, is known for its sweets.

Ballalat (angel hair noodles, eggs with saffron and cardamom) representing Bandar Abbas, a city in Hormozgan province

This sweet, colourful breakfast dish of angel hair with egg and saffron, reflects the flavours of cuisine in this region by the Persian Gulf. Bandar Abbas is a port city with an Iranian navy base. In the third month of Iran’s civil uprising, industrial, gas and oil workers went on strike in this region to support the movement.

To check out more of her work, follow Armita Hosseini on Instagram (@cookingwitharmita).

The post This Iranian-Canadian food stylist is raising awareness with these stunning dishes appeared first on Macleans.ca.

Masks, mops and “ugly sticks”—a look at Newfoundland’s tradition of mummering

Dave Zarum — Mon, 12 Dec 2022 18:40:30 +0000

Every year around Christmas, Canadians living in Newfoundland and Labrador participate in the costumed cultural practice of mummering. The Newfoundland version of the tradition, which has been around for roughly 200 years, consists of groups of friends disguising themselves in outlandish costumes made from a hodgepodge of household items. Once dressed up, the mummers visit the homes of five or six friends—completely unannounced—and ask: “Any mummers ‘lowed in?” Each household must then guess who’s hiding underneath the masks, lampshades, doilies and more—and it’s often harder than it sounds. In true Newfoundland fashion, there is also plenty of drinking and dancing.

Photographer Adam Coish, who grew up in Labrador City, remembers the tradition fondly. “I had mummers visit our house many times in my childhood,” he says. “It was just one of the most incredibly captivating and exciting hours of my Christmas.” Coish, 36, has lived in Toronto since he was 18, but he says he’s wanted to capture the spirit of mummering in photos for years. When he visited St. John’s last July to attend his grandmother’s funeral, he decided it was time. “I knew if I didn’t do it then, it could be years before I finally got around to it,” says Coish. “I didn’t care that it wasn’t the right time of year.”

With the help of Lynn McShane, the executive director of the Mummers Festival, Coish found local mummering enthusiasts willing to get dressed up in the middle of the summer. More than anything, Coish hopes that his photo series will show the rest of Canada that Newfoundlanders are experts at having a good-old time, no matter the season. Here, he shares the stories behind the mummers and his photography:

“Helen Mackey was the very first person I photographed in this whole series. She’s been mummering since she was 15 or 16. Her disguise is always an old man. She got different parts of her costume from her dad, her sister’s husband and her brother-in-law—her whole outfit has been passed down to her from different people in her life. Every article of clothing has some meaning behind it, which I thought was a really beautiful thing.”

“Helen came in with her friend Sharon Hynes. You could just tell that mummering was a huge part of their lives. There was a show going on right next door to where we were shooting: a bunch of teenage girls were doing Irish step-dancing. When Helen heard that, she was like, ‘We should go and surprise them! No one’s expecting to see any mummers, right?’ She and Sharon completely crashed the party, right in the middle of the girls’ dance.”

“Sharon is so full of life—laughing constantly and willing to be goofy for the camera. I always envision the colours of a mummer’s outfit to be a bit more subdued, like Helen’s, so I was really impressed with Sharon’s outfit. Apparently, she has a big ‘tickle trunk’—as she calls it—full of different outfits that she can use. She has a lot of friends who look through the trunk to find their own. No doubt the one she was wearing is just one of the many she has in there.”

“James Murphey is from my hometown, Labrador City. I grew up with her mom, Nicole. When Nicole saw that I was doing this project, she immediately reached out to me and said they wanted to be part of it. James, who is probably seven or eight, is obsessed with mummering. She really lives for it. Usually, you’d expect parents to be like, ‘Let’s go and do this for your grandparents.’ But, no, James wanted this. One of my favourite details about her is that she wears an oven mitt on her hand and her foot. That’s her little signature.”

“This could be just another story of a creepy mask, but the most genuinely sweet woman is behind it. Jill Richards has been mummering for roughly 27 years. She plays the accordion, which I thought was amazing. When she goes mummering, people always make her break out the squeeze box and play a few tunes while they’re going from house to house. Jill’s been part of the parade, and sometimes she’ll go around mummering in different places, like retirement homes. She knows how much it makes people smile—that’s really why she does it.”

“Sharon Brophy lives on a street called Tunis Court, where a big group of neighbours go mummering together. She reached out to me and got her whole group involved. Sharon’s been doing mummering since she was four or five years old. Her go-to look has always been one-piece PJs, rubber boots, a bra on the outside and a lampshade—which, believe it or not, is a common style. People are so different with their mummering outfit on. It just lets them bring their walls down. That’s one of the beautiful things about the tradition: it allows you to be wholeheartedly yourself.”

“Susan and Paul are newbies: they’re actually from Whitby, Ontario. In 2017, they came to Newfoundland for a visit and just loved it. They closed their business, sold their house and moved here the following July. Sure enough, they soon learned about mummering through their friends on Tunis Court, the same street as Sharon Brophy. They only partook in the festivities for the first time last year, so they’re still relatively new. A couple that mummers together is a recipe for a long-lasting relationship.”

Tunis Court crew

“This crew got to know each other through mummering. They all got together and made their ‘ugly sticks’ as a group. People usually nail a bunch of bottle caps to it to give their stick a jingling sound. Then they’ll nail a rubber boot to the bottom and create a head—often with tin cans and some kind of mop for hair. The stick is almost like an extension of themselves; it gives people something to make music with when they’re all dancing. You don’t need a stick in order to be a mummer, but they’re very common. This group became even closer through mummering. It really brings people together.”

The post Masks, mops and “ugly sticks”—a look at Newfoundland’s tradition of mummering appeared first on Macleans.ca.

Inside the new Toronto home of The Second City

Dave Zarum — Tue, 06 Dec 2022 19:27:45 +0000

In 1973, The Second City opened its first Canadian location on Adelaide Street East in Toronto. A year later, it moved to an old firehall downtown, which became a long-standing icon of the improv group in the city. Comedy would never quite be the same after that. The Second City quickly became an incubator for some of the funniest people in history, including John Candy, Eugene Levy, Martin Short, Catherine O’Hara and Mike Myers.

And when Saturday Night Live debuted, in 1975, it borrowed a handful of cast members from The Second City, tapping into a definitive source of laughter. Soon after, The Second City launched its own show, SCTV, beaming iconic characters like Bob and Doug McKenzie across the Canadian airwaves. Canada was the butt of every joke—in the best way possible.

Then something funny (or maybe not) happened. In 1997, The Second City moved from the aging firehall into a bigger, better venue in downtown Toronto, with a training centre and a 350-seat theatre. By 2020, after changing Toronto locations on a couple of occasions, The Second City closed its doors to make way for a condo.

But there’s reason to smile again: the Second City just opened a new Toronto location, with three theatres and nine studio classrooms, where the latest class of jokesters could hone their comedic sensibility. The nearly 30,000 square foot space, located at One York Street, also features a restaurant by top-class hospitality group Oliver & Bonacini. Here’s a look inside the new, improved Second City.

The entrance to The Second City is located near the corner of Harbour and York. It’s right off the PATH, making it easily accessible for the cast members, students and visitors.

On the exterior of the building, at the entrance, there’s a distinctive red chair and a bunch of sitting silhouettes. The red, bentwood chair has been the logo of The Second City since the beginning, dating back to its first Chicago location in 1964. They’re a mainstay of every stage. Improv scenes at The Second City can take place anywhere—outer space, the Sahara, a train car—but the bentwood chair always remains the same.

The Second City is located on the third floor of the building, accessible via escalator or elevator. There are three bars and a restaurant up here, along with The Second City’s three improv stages and nine training centres.

There’s banquette seating near the bar. Here, guests can enjoy food by Oliver & Bonacini, made in a kitchen on-site.

This is one of the three bars at The Second City. “It’s true that the more audience members drink, the funnier we get on stage,” says Carly Heffernan, creative director of The Second City Toronto. Above the bar, a neon sign reads, “Yes, And…” That’s a reference to the golden rule of improv, whereby participants are supposed to accept their partner’s suggestion and add something to it.

Here’s another bar,.

To the right, the main desk, where guests can buy tickets, ask for information or purchase some merchandise. Tickets for shows range in price from $29 to $69, t-shirts and sweaters cost anywhere from $20 to $40. To the left, it’s Theatre ’73, named after the year The Second City was founded in Toronto.

Check out the inside of Theatre ’73. It was created by set designer Camellia Koo to look like the exterior of The Second City’s first Toronto location, The Old Firehall, at 110 Lombard Street. (Hence the brick and big red doors.) The maximum capacity in this room is 160.

This is the Main Stage, also designed by Camellia Koo. It looks sort of futuristic. The lights on the stage are LED. “They can change colour, flash and move throughout a performance,” says Heffernan. “It’s a party set.” The main stage is where The Second City’s primary cast performs eight shows a week. Max capacity: 244.

Comedy nerds will love the John Candy Box Theatre, the student performance space. It features original floorboards from The Old Firehall. “When students are on stage, they’re quite literally following in the footsteps of comedy greats,” says Heffernan. “John Candy, Catherine O’Hara and Eugene Levy all walked across those floorboards.”

The post Inside the new Toronto home of The Second City appeared first on Macleans.ca.

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The Best Places to Eat in Canada

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Meet our critic

The List

MONTREAL

Mon Lapin

This joyful, candlelit spot is one of the finest places to eat—not just in Canada, but the world

Ucluelet, B.C.

Pluvio

A tiny restaurant on the tip of Vancouver Island, where each meal is packed with playful surprises

Montreal

Mastard

Low-key luxury is the thing at chef Simon Mathys’s delightful (and affordable) restaurant

Niagara, Ontario

Restaurant Pearl Morissette

The exquisite ingredients at this Niagara winery restaurant are grown on-site

Richmond, B.C.

The Fish Man

Chef Bo Li’s modern Szechuan and Cantonese spot is a master class in old-school seafood—with plenty of twists

Toronto

Edulis

It looks like a cozy neighbourhood bistro and tastes like old-world fine dining

Montreal

Damas

A self-taught chef’s stunning tribute to his Syrian roots

Scarborough, Ontario

One2 Snacks

A humble Malaysian noodle house that outdoes many of Canada’s fanciest dining rooms

Toronto

Prime Seafood Palace

Matty Matheson’s destination spot is all about sumptuous steak and seafood

St. John’s

Mallard Cottage

A one-of-a-kind culinary tour through the tastes of Newfoundland

Ottawa

Supply & Demand

A happy neighbourhood bistro with spectacular seafood

Scarborough, Ontario

Fishman Lobster Clubhouse

The GTA’s go-to bacchanalian party spot is packed with seafood towers and Instagrammers

Toronto

Bernhardt’s

A wine bar, rotisserie chicken spot and Jewish soul food kitchen all in one welcoming package

Calgary

JinBar

Chef Jinhee Lee’s fun, fresh restaurant is half pizzeria, half Korean fried chicken joint

St. John’s

Portage

This eclectic newcomer brings Chinese dumplings, hare nuggets and moose donairs to the East Coast

Mississauga, Ontario

Guru Lukshmi

This always-packed destination in Toronto’s suburbs makes sensational dosas

Vancouver

Oca Pastificio

A feast of fresh pasta that’s worth the down-the-block lineups

Montreal

Elena P.S.

This secret backyard pizza counter churns out blistered Neapolitan pies

Vancouver

Published on Main

The Scandi-style menu is fermented, foraged and infused to perfection

Calgary

River Café

A charming locavore dining room with a glorious waterfront view

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