November 8, 2025 • 37 mins
Tanner and Jerry dig into the delicious world of food names—why they change, what they mean, and how they shape the way we eat. From French fries versus chips to biscuits versus cookies, they explore how the same foods get different identities around the world. The conversation continues with protected names like Champagne, Bourbon, and regional cheeses that can only come from one place. Then it’s on to the art of rebranding, from rapeseed becoming canola and slimehead becoming the far more appealing orange roughy. Finally, they catch up with Tanner's former boss and Top Chef Canada host Mark McEwan to talk about excellence, evolution, and how he's lasted 40 years as a restauranteur.
Thank you for listening! Join us again every weekend for more food inspired fun. Have questions you want answered, comments to make the show better, do you want to join our growing list of radio stations partners, or just keep in touch? Let us know at Flavorphiles.com.
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Thank you for listening! Join us again every weekend for more food inspired fun. Have questions you want answered, comments to make the show better, do you want to join our growing list of radio stations partners, or just keep in touch? Let us know at Flavorphiles.com.
Follow on Instagram:
Flavorphiles: https://www.instagram.com/flavorphilespod/
Tanner: https://www.instagram.com/tagaragar/
Follow on Tik Tok:
https://www.tiktok.com/@flavorphiles
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Flavor Files. I'm Jerryegan, broadcaster. He's Tana Regar,
my son. He's a restaurant tour he's a bartender and
he's a chef. So what we do here is talk
about food and drink and we just have fun. And
we always start with a segment called Amuse Booze, a
takeoff on the emuse boosh, which is a little bite
before you start your meal. So what's your drink today, Tanner?
Speaker 2 (00:23):
Well, you know, I just actually came back from a vacation.
I took my partner, Grace. We went to London to
visit my friend. And there's a lot of things there
that have different names. Right, It's chips, not French fries.
It's crips, crisps not potato chips. So I've just been
thinking a lot about the names and what do you
names mean? And we're going to talk about that today.
But to get started, we're going to start with a cocktail.
(00:43):
It's a very classic cocktail, originally named the swashal Keys.
It's the name of a French field gun from World
War One. Not very big, but absolutely knocks.
Speaker 1 (00:54):
You off your feet.
Speaker 2 (00:56):
This cocktail I started getting made and it was named
after it to be an allusion to that. This cocktail
then got into places like the American Bar in Paris.
They knew it needed an English name to get English
people to drink it, and it became the French seventy five.
This is one of the most classic cocktails ever. It's
so simple to make. It's just gin, a little lemon,
(01:18):
a little sugar, and then you top it with champagne,
serve it in a champagne flute.
Speaker 1 (01:23):
It's beautiful, it tastes great.
Speaker 2 (01:25):
I don't know if it'll knock you off your feet,
but liquor plus champagne can definitely knock you off your feet.
So it's a delicious zipper. But you can only have
so many of them before you do start to feel
like you're going down.
Speaker 1 (01:39):
Okay, well, I mean that's the case with any cocktail,
isn't it The French seventy five, Gin, lemon, sugar and champagne. Yeah,
that's it.
Speaker 2 (01:46):
It's so frushing, it's so light. I just in addition
to being a wonderful cocktail, it's a cocktail you can
make anytime. Every single menu we write, we make a
French seventy five variation and it's always one of the
top few selling cocktails. Everybody liked it, crowd pleaser, and
you get a fun little story to go along with it.
So all that about the French seventy five leads into
(02:08):
the first thing I really wanted to go over today.
Like I was saying while I was in England, it's
just funny.
Speaker 1 (02:14):
You know, you go.
Speaker 2 (02:15):
Order, you want French fries with your burger. Nope, you
have to have chips. So why is this? So I
started asking, I started looking, and there's actually a lot
of foods that are like this. So the French fries,
apparently in England it's called that. They're called chips in
England because the way they look is that they're chipped
off of a potato, as if you took a little
(02:38):
knife and sort of just hacked away at it like
you were doing wood. Yeah, wheedling, right, like you're sort
of knocking these pieces off, so you're chipping away at
the potato. Therefore, oh well, they're chips. They're potato chips. However,
in American English, what happened was they got their name
because American soldiers they go over they're fighting in Europe,
(03:00):
they're in Belgium. They eat these chips. They come from
the French speaking part of Belgium, so people went, oh,
they're the French fries. They're the Fried French food that
we used to eat over there. So they bring it
back and we get the French fries. So even though
they're from Belgium, they're called French fries. And that's how
they got that name, all right.
Speaker 1 (03:22):
Also, we have staying with the potato here, we have
potato chips. They call them crisp.
Speaker 2 (03:28):
Right, So the potato chip as we know, or the
crisp they know, got invented after we already had French
fries and British chips, so they need a new name.
We called it the chip, and they decided, well, we'll
just call it crisps because it's a crispy potato.
Speaker 1 (03:45):
And this was the thing that confused me a little
bit when I would hear British people on shows or
movies or whatever and they would refer to biscuits. But
it's just that's a cookie.
Speaker 2 (03:56):
So yeah, so they'll call a cookie a biscuit. And
then once you know, American people, they took it and
biscuit sort of was kind of this catch all term
for some sweets. But then Dutch immigrants around the same time.
The word cookie actually comes from Dutch, and so cookie
would refer to this specific type. So it used to
(04:18):
be that people would sort of say, here are all
the biscuits all together, all here are all the different suits.
But then the Dutch went, well, this one we call cookie,
and Americans went, great, cookie, let's go that's a cookie.
So it's sort of an interesting blend because we had
a lot of Dutch people coming over. You know, you
think about the founding of America and the British, I
(04:41):
guess never got their Dutch invasion.
Speaker 1 (04:44):
Okay, So something that I've never heard of, and that's rocket.
Speaker 2 (04:50):
Yeah, it's it's very funny if you see especially expensive
restaurants like to write rocket like it's in the it's
a rocket salad.
Speaker 1 (04:58):
Rocket is just the French word for arugula.
Speaker 2 (05:01):
Arugula is an Italian word, rocket is the French word,
and so it's the exact same thing. But if you're
coming up on the holidays and you're looking for ways
to sound very fancy, it's the same thing. By the way,
with air covert, air covert literally means bean green, so
it's just green bean, that's all.
Speaker 1 (05:20):
It means. Air covert salad sounds a lot great or
entertaining and perhaps something I would try versus your being salad.
Speaker 2 (05:29):
And air covert and rocket salad is thirty dollars. Green
bean and arugula salad's like fourteen. Okay, I always see this.
I love shrimp and I'll love a prawn. What's the difference.
So technically they're the same thing. The British kind of
just use prawn for everything. They're all everything's a prawn, right.
(05:50):
Shrimp is a word that we use that's more common
over here in America now in American Canadian vernacular. The
what will happen a lot of times, especially in restaurants,
is if we use the word prawn, we're referring to
one that's generally larger. You know, we've gotten ones in
before that are eight ounces or more.
Speaker 1 (06:13):
So you think about it.
Speaker 2 (06:14):
I mean, these are big boys, like you put them
on the plate and they just shock people. And so
we kind of use the word pron to refer to
very very big shrimp. But technically they're the same thing.
The other thing that's funny about shrimp, Okay, I'm sure
you're a fan, like I feel everyone is of shrimp scampy. Right,
It's an amazing Italian pasta. Do you know what shrimp
scampy means? Scampy is just Italian for shrimp, right, It's
(06:38):
just shrimp shrimp. It's not a type of dish at all.
It's just a thing we've made up as shrimp pasta
is shrimp scampy, but it just shrimp shrimp.
Speaker 1 (06:46):
Another one that apparently has a bunch of names in
different places around the world is cotton candy. Cotton candy
is the perfect name for it.
Speaker 2 (06:53):
Yeah, cotton candy is a good name. But this, by
the way, it was invented by a dentist, which must
make a dentists everywhere miserable because I can't think of
a worse food than a food you run like, you
bite into it and you let it dissolve on your teeth.
It's sugar into your enamel. It's a dentist nightmare. But originally, yeah,
(07:13):
it's called cotton candy.
Speaker 1 (07:14):
Or fairy floss.
Speaker 2 (07:17):
Yeah, I think fairy floss is a good name, right,
I think it's a it's a cute name. I do
think the French name is horrible, which is daddy's beard.
What does that sound like in French though, Baba Papa? Okay, Yeah,
well it only sounds okay in French because we don't
speak French, so it like sounds it sounds cool. It
sounds foreign in Chic But like daddy's beard, that's not
(07:40):
a food I want my kids eating. It's just I'm
not gonna be like, hey, come over here from some
of daddy's beard. That's a very different thing in the
way I hear it.
Speaker 1 (07:48):
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try Babies First Baileies and Jello versus Jelly. I thought
one was just a brand name. Isn't that the case? Yeah?
Speaker 2 (08:30):
Yeah, Jello is a brand name, it's a band, it's
a brand name. But the same way that like band
aid or Kleenex has sort of become so ubiquitous, Jello
for a lot of people, refers to specifically that kind
of gelatin like product, whereas jelly, you know, is very different.
It can mean either sweets, it can mean jelly the
(08:53):
way that we think of it. It can mean jam.
By the way, jelly can actually be made with no
real fruit. It can just be basically this sort of thickened,
artificially flavored spread, whereas jams are actually made with real fruits. So,
just as an aside, I'm not a jelly person, but
(09:15):
I do love jams, and I highly recommend making that
choice while you're in the grocery store. Okay, an eggplant
versus what aubergine? So again, Aubergine's the French term. If
you go to England, they call them all aubergines, you know.
In over here we call them eggplants, But aubergine it
(09:36):
just means eggplant. What's really funny about it, though, my
understanding is the British didn't have this such tool. They
don't get it until the French introduce it to them.
By the time they're getting them, they're getting these big
purple what you think of when you get an eggplant,
and so they go, it's aubergine. It's called aubergine, okay, fine,
(09:56):
But in America we named it after what it looks
like when and it begins its life. So if you
ever see eggplant growing, you'll understand why. If you google
a picture of it, it looks like a little egg.
It comes out and it has this cute little top
like this little it looks like an egg that's wearing
a cute little hat. It's actually an adorable vegetable. When
you see it, or you see little baby ones, it's
(10:18):
so cute. But as it matures, then it grows and
it lengthens, it takes on that night shade purple, and
it becomes what we know as the eggplants are aubergine.
But if you've never grown eggplant, people are always surprised
when they see baby eggplant because they don't know what
it is. This next section we're calling you can't call
it that. This is about drinks foods that have legally
(10:41):
protected names. And you might not understand this. You might
think that these are catch all terms. But things like champagne.
Champagne is an amazing example. A lot of people think
champagne means sparkling wine. Champagne does mean sparkling wine, but
it means sparkling wine that comes from a specific place
in France. That place is called champagne. It means wine
(11:04):
that can only be made out of three grapes and
is generally a blend of those three grapes. It means
there's specific laws about how it's grown, and how it's aged,
and how it's bottled and sold into the market. So
what's funny is a lot of people think champagne and
restaurants do this too. By the way, a lot of restaurants.
(11:24):
There's one in Dallas where if you come you get
a free glass of champagne as you ride the elevator.
I went to this restaurant and it was cheap prosecco,
which is Italian sparkling wine.
Speaker 1 (11:35):
It isn't champagne.
Speaker 2 (11:37):
It's literally illegal for that prosecco company to call themselves champagne.
But we can get a little bit more into that.
I want to talk about why, because this is a
really cool thing. I think a lot of people don't understand.
I find myself explaining it to a lot of guests
at my restaurant. So you have to go back a few.
Speaker 1 (11:56):
Hundred years ago.
Speaker 2 (11:57):
And this is really when international trade picks up. That's
kind of when this story takes place, is you get
a lot of products. It's really the British that are
kind of driving this. Their navy's huge, they're moving stuff
from port to port, and seafaring areas have a lot
of ability to sell into the British market. For the
(12:18):
very first time, Bordeaux, which is a part of France
that's right on the coast, becomes really known for this.
They make fantastic wine in Bordeaux. They make some really
wonderful grapes, really full bodied, a very specific style of
wine in Bordeaux, and the British loved it. And since
Bordeaux is right on the coast, it was fairly affordable
(12:40):
for them to get their wines onto the boats and
get them up to England. So Bordeaux is making a
lot of money. It's growing, people are prospering. Things are
great in Bordeaux. Well, the people of Bordeaux come to
find out that people who are not following the rules
of Bordeaux that people who are not making wines that
are good quality are just writing Bordeaux on the bottle
(13:05):
and then selling it to the British, or even worse,
making really bad wine in England, not even from French grapes,
and where grapes come from really really matters, and they're
calling it Bordeaux. So Bordeaux goes to the French government
and says, this can't be, this is unjust. We the
(13:25):
region of Bordeaux are going to pass a bunch of
laws about what is Bordeaux, and we expect you to
enforce that in international trade because it's French interest. And
of course you can count on the French for not
a lot sometimes, but you can absolutely count on them
for pride in themselves and hatred of the British. So
(13:48):
the French government agrees and says we're absolutely going to
do this. And this AOP, you know, this appellation of
origin control a AOC, and French it is AOP and
other places basically gets established for Bordeaux. Champagne then picks
it up and now a ton of people have picked
it up across many, many different countries. And what's interesting
(14:10):
about this is if I were to start growing grapes
here in Texas and label them champagne. The French government,
because it has trade agreements with the United States, can
sue me and take my ability to do that away
and sue me for damages I've inflicted onto the champagne
market and its reputation.
Speaker 1 (14:31):
All right, But the same thing, in turnabout would be
the case if somebody in France started producing bourbon. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (14:38):
So Bourbon's a perfect example, right. The French really started
this with wine, but other countries as they come online
and as they get known for things, Bourbon being the
perfect example. Bourbon has to be made in the United States,
it has to be fifty one percent corn, it has
to be aged in new American oak barrels, only American
oak barrels, by the way, And so they they say, well,
(15:01):
we're doing all of this, we want that. So it's
sort of part of the reason these trade agreements get
made is because America says, fine, will keep champagne Champagne,
but you better keep bourbon. Bourbon and whiskeys are big
with this. Scotch is another one. Scotch has to come
from Scotland and it has to be made a very
(15:23):
specific way. It's actually made out of barley, it's not
made out of corn, and it has to be aged
for at least three years. And there's all these types
of rules. We don't have to get into all of them.
But I think a lot of people don't necessarily think,
you know, I'm buying scotch, that's what scotch means.
Speaker 1 (15:39):
Or tequila.
Speaker 2 (15:39):
Another example, we've talked about tequila on this show. Tequila
has to come from Mexico. There are people, it's very
funny they here in Texas. They will say this is
Texas tequila.
Speaker 1 (15:52):
No, it isn't.
Speaker 2 (15:53):
The Only way you can have Texas tequila is you
a bought tequila and Mexico and then slap the Texas
logo like slap the state on front and said, oh
it's from Texas. It isn't if it has the word
tequila on it. Or what you did is you took
a gave and you made what is tequila, but you
(16:13):
have legally have to call it a gave spirit. Or
there's a brand here in Texas that makes vodka, so
they call it a Gave vodka even though it's actually tequila.
Speaker 1 (16:23):
Oh MI. Understanding two on bourbon, is it's not just
in the US. It's in the continental US. You can't
make it in Hawaii or Alaska.
Speaker 2 (16:30):
No, that's no longer the rule. You can make it
in Hawaii and Hawaii in Alaska.
Speaker 1 (16:34):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (16:34):
I used to think that too, and I found out
that wasn't the case when one of my servers corrected
me in front of my whole staff.
Speaker 1 (16:44):
So at least you're hiring smart people.
Speaker 2 (16:46):
Yes, I've got smart and bold people on my team.
That's always a good thing.
Speaker 1 (16:51):
Let's talk about feta and roquefort. Put those two together.
Speaker 2 (16:55):
Yeah, so feta is a Greeks cheese. You know, it's
that kind of crumbly white cheese. You get it when
you get hero raps or at every Greek restaurant. I
actually didn't know this while we were looking things up.
I didn't know feedo was a protected word. Rockefert is
like that blue cheese that comes from It's kvah blue cheese.
That's a protected one. Parmisano reggiano is also a protected cheese.
(17:18):
So you can have parmesan. But if you think, like
you know, like that pizza parmesan that like powder that
people will do. Yeah, so that is not parmisano reggiano,
and if it has that whole long name that means
it comes from Alia Amelia, Romaanna. It's made this very
specific way. So parmesan is one of those ones that
(17:39):
I think, you know, if you're a member of the public.
One of the reasons people think they should do this,
why the governments were doing it, was to say you
the public should also get to know what you're buying.
And this is a perfect example where I think it
is right. Are there lots of amazing sparkling wines that
aren't champagne. Yes, and we've talked about it on the show,
But Parmisano reggiano is very different than shelf stable pizza cheese,
(18:04):
and I want to know that I'm getting the good stuff.
Speaker 1 (18:06):
All right. Well, let's talk about one that has is
probably newer to us, certainly in North America at least,
and that's kolbe beef.
Speaker 2 (18:14):
Yeah, so Kobe is Japanese. Right, people have talked about Kobe,
They've talked about Wagu. That's one which is really protected.
It is a specific herd of cows. They're treated in
a specific way. You know, I don't know exactly how
they're done, and they don't put out that information because
they don't want people replicating it. But I have heard
(18:36):
some wild stories, including raised exclusively by monks with regular
massages and specialty diets. Basically, they try to have the
beef have the like laziest, most comfortable life ever. And
if you've ever bought really high grade wagu, a five
is the top rating. It has this amazing marbling. It's
(18:58):
almost more white then read that's what you buy it for.
I mean, I can only eat about three or four
ounces before it's just too much. And I'm a professional eater,
you know. But so it's really wonderful. There is something
funny though. The Japanese were concerned about what if a
natural disaster happens and we lose our cows, So they
(19:19):
actually sent a bunch of cows to Texas to live,
and then they had a natural disaster and they actually
had to come to Texas and bring some of their
cows back. So you could be eating Japanese wagou with
a little bit of Texas in there.
Speaker 1 (19:36):
And we've been talking about the words that attached to
all kinds of foods because this show is about food
and drink, and this segment is called rebranding. Dinner. This
has to do in some cases standard with words that
have fallen out of favor, so to speak.
Speaker 2 (19:51):
Yeah, absolutely, I think, you know, sort of. Maybe the easiest,
clearest example of that is rape seed. And when you
grew up, rape seed was everywhere.
Speaker 1 (20:00):
Yeah, all around me. Gilbert Plain's, Manitoba's where I grew up,
a farming country, and I remember people growing rape seed.
And then all of a sudden, it wasn't that anymore.
It was canola. Well, I could see where that's more approachable.
Speaker 2 (20:14):
Yeah, So rape seed oil had two problems, the first
of which was I think obvious it wasn't It was
sort of a tough sell to women who were doing
a lot of the grocery shopping. Two, it was kind
of high acidity, and so even though it was affordable,
it wasn't always people's favorite option. And the Canadian government
(20:38):
actually got involved with a lot of researchers and said,
this grows so well here, this should be such a
pillar of our agricultural community. How we're going to fix
this issue. So they started breeding. They started breeding it
and trying to create options that had lower acid so
that they would taste better, they taste more neutral, basically,
how do we make it taste sort of like nothing
(20:59):
so that it can be the affordable, tasteless option for everyone.
So what's really funny is Canadian oil low acid is
can olaugh.
Speaker 1 (21:11):
Okay, well, and it is a very important crop on
the prairies in Canada. The name part is the need
for a change was, as you said, obvious, Chilean sea bass. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (21:23):
So the Chilean sea bass. If you've seen it before,
you probably saw it at a nice restaurant. You probably
saw that a commands premium. And it's really funny because
this is a pretty ugly fish if you look it up,
it doesn't have that much sex appeal. Its original name
was Patagonian toothfish, which also made it super difficult to sell. Meanwhile,
(21:44):
sea bass was really rising in popularity, and so basically
fisheries said, sea bass is popular. It's a lot like
sea bass, even if it isn't. So if we tell
people it's Chilean sea bass, we can basically ride the
tail of the sea bass and make it something that
(22:06):
will be really popular and that'll be great for the economy,
you know, here in Chile. And that's exactly what happened.
I mean, Chilean sea bass sort of like the next
fish I want to talk about, was really facing like
an overfishing problem because with the rebranding meant that they
could sell it at a certain price point. And one
thing that drives a lot of this, by the way,
as and aside, is restaurant tours. People like me are
(22:28):
kind of the problem. I'm always looking for what's affordable
that I can make look really great, that I can
get my good margin on that I need because I'll
talk all about the how happy the restaurant makes me,
and however it's great, and all those things are true.
I love to cook, I love making people happy. But
it is a business, and it's a business with not
a lot of corporate backing, and so I need to
(22:51):
have I need to manage my margins really well. So
had I been there at this time, I would have gone,
taste like sea bass, taste great. You're gonna sell it
to me at what price? While that's so low, I'm
gonna put that on my men. You make a killing.
So many restaurants start doing that, the Chilean sea bass
starts getting overfished, and they then now it's not cheap
(23:12):
anymore because it's become so popular. The exact same thing
happened to the Orange Ruffy. The Orange Ruffy, which isn't
as popular as Chilean sea bass, it's still a really
great fish. Its original name is slime head.
Speaker 1 (23:25):
Yeah, that's what I want to order, right.
Speaker 2 (23:28):
Can you imagine, Like, honey, it's our anniversary. I made
this reservation. Please come out to this fancy restaurant for
slime head dinner.
Speaker 1 (23:37):
They make a great slime head dinner.
Speaker 2 (23:39):
I'm telling you, Yeah, they have the best slime head.
That sounds like the place you take your wife when
you forgot it was your anniversary. It's the only place
you can get into is the old slime head.
Speaker 1 (23:51):
Let's talk about another fish, and that's a monk fish.
Speaker 2 (23:55):
I don't know why it's so many fish that this
has happened to. Maybe you know, as land based animals,
we are more comfortable with some of the funny names
we have. But munkfish, Okay, I love monkfish. I think
monkfish is absolutely great. I think the flavor is incredible.
I mean even the liver, like monkfish liver is fantastic.
But if you see a monkfish, it's kind of funny.
(24:17):
This has happened to me, both with Grace and with
a friend of mine. They didn't know what a monkfish was.
I take them to the store. The thing has a
mouth as wide as your head, and it's just nothing
but teeth, and it's this big, fat mouth on this
flat head. The thing is so ugly and so scary.
I would never show it to a child. So it's
(24:37):
this hideous, toothy, scary looking you know those videos you
see of like those deep sea fish that are just
really it looks like one of those. It's so ugly.
So it was sort of a bycatch. It was one
of those fish. A bycatch means things you caught on
accident while you're fishing for something else, and people would
throw it away or fishermen would eat it because hey,
(24:59):
it's it's free, it's pretty fresh. And what they realized was, man,
it has a texture a lot like a lobster, and
it has a really great flavor. So it sort of
got this nickname as the poor man's lobster, which, going
back exactly what we talked to. Enterprising chefs said, Oh,
it's like lobster, huh, but it doesn't cost anything, huh.
(25:23):
Great can I please get some of that? So they
renamed what was called the goosefish at one time because
it has sort of teeth that are kind of like
a goose if you've ever seen one with its mouth open,
changes saying to the monkfish, and it became the poor
man's lobster, which, by the way, lobster also used to
be trash. Lobster literally was fed two prisoners because it
(25:43):
was garbage. And what's hilarious about the history of food
is fine dining is pretty much just old poor people food.
If you think about whatever poor people used to eat,
chefs have then dressed it up and gotten their margin.
Speaker 1 (25:58):
And that's exactly what happened among fish.
Speaker 2 (26:00):
That's exactly what happened to every single thing that we're
talking about now, including lobster.
Speaker 1 (26:04):
We're going to get to a couple of vegetables in
a minute, but like you said, a lot of this
of renaming has happened with fish.
Speaker 2 (26:10):
So Mahi mahi, yeah, so originally called dolphin, and that
created a lot of confusion. This actually happened over my lifetime.
I remember being a kid, and nothing is more of
a come down from your trip to Sea World than
sitting down at a restaurant across the street and being
asked if you want dolphin tacos. Yeah, yeah, they're so cute.
(26:30):
I just saw them play with the ball. The mah
mahi mahi is the Hawaiian term. It was already called that,
So some of these were just a marketing game. Mahi
mahi was just the public saying, yeah, we got to
stop calling this stuff dolphin. Is there any other name
we can use? And mahi mahi stuck. Yes, but a
dolphin is not a porpoise. But people were making those connections.
(26:52):
So let's talk about a couple of vegetables, the Chinese gooseberry. Yeah,
the Chinese gooseberry. So there's a little tiny nation called
New Zealand and that's where they come from.
Speaker 1 (27:04):
They grow there.
Speaker 2 (27:05):
It's a delicious little fruit. We don't eat a lot
of them in my house because actually, Grace is allergic
to kiwi. She's the only person I've ever met with
a kiwi allergy. But so the people in New Zealand,
they have this fruit. During the Cold War, they want
to start exporting it, but they're concerned that Americans won't
buy Chinese fruit because of anti communist sentiment. So they
(27:27):
look around, they take their little beautiful bird and they say,
let's just call this a kiwied and put it into markets.
And obviously it's been incredibly successful since.
Speaker 1 (27:36):
Well, because it's a cute name. Kiwi great.
Speaker 2 (27:39):
And that's the thing that's funny about all of this, right,
is the branding of these things are almost become more
important than the thing itself. Right, Kalamari sounds so much
better than squid, and so therefore people want to eat
We're having katalamari.
Speaker 1 (27:57):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (27:58):
Actually I don't eat kalamari anymore because of how difficult
Mark McEwan made it to cook it every single day
up to his expectation. I'm actually really excited to talk
to him, just to connect with my old boss. This
will actually be the very first time we've sat down
in a professional setting, and I can't get in trouble
with him. One of Canada's most celebrated chefs and restaurant tours.
(28:19):
From founding the mckewan Group and creating iconic spots like
North forty four Buy Mark One Restaurant, to judging on
Top Chef Canada and mentoring generations of chefs, he's helped
to find modern Canadian dining. He also happens to be
a longtime friend of Jerry's and, fun fact, my former boss.
Speaker 1 (28:36):
Speaking of which, this is a good idea to hire
your friend's son.
Speaker 3 (28:40):
Always a good idea when it works out, and when
it doesn't, you don't talk about it.
Speaker 2 (28:44):
Right, we wouldn't be having you on the show today
if it hadn't worked out, if you had to fire me,
that would have been a bummer.
Speaker 3 (28:49):
Indeed, I've hired many friends' kids. Oftentimes it doesn't.
Speaker 1 (28:52):
Work out, right, absolutely.
Speaker 2 (28:54):
You know, people will ask me too that my son
wants to be a chef, and I'm like, does your
son know how to cook?
Speaker 1 (28:59):
Does he know any thing?
Speaker 2 (29:00):
Or does he just want to watch TV and pretend
he's going to be a TV chef someday.
Speaker 3 (29:05):
Well, that's a symptom of the Food Network, right, So
young people get very very addicted to it. They don't
understand the game, and they try it and then they
burn out once they realize the life of a chef
it's not all that glamorous. It's very physical job, isn't
it incredibly physical? And yeah, you have to be a
certain animal to survive the rigors of the restaurant business.
(29:27):
And I look back on my career and that was
twenty five years where I did nothing but work. I
literally can barely recall the television programs from those days
or the music.
Speaker 2 (29:39):
What I want to know is you've stayed in business.
You've been relevant for decades, profitable, People love your restaurants,
You've expanded. I'm at year seven. I am tired all
the time. How have you held up to this? How
have you been able to pull this off?
Speaker 3 (29:56):
Well? You have to stay in shape, you have to
listen to your body right, and you can't indulge in
all the things that you create every day, especially the
alcohol and beverage side, and certainly the drug side. Like
that is a kind of a symptom of the industry.
Late at night relax kicked back, and I never did
any of that. I've always enjoyed the industry, and the
(30:17):
one thing I love about it is that it's so
tactile and so full of color and texture and taste
and interesting things that everybody looks too for conversation, and
so many people pay so much attention to your industry
that that helps fuel you as well. You're working in
this very cool environment when it's successful. That is a
(30:39):
bit addictive. So yeah, I've been at it for fifty
years now. I've always told that story that the really
most interesting day that I have when when I open
a business is when the business actually develops legs and
I can walk back and sit on a park bench
across the street and watch it. It's very cool because
(31:01):
you've created this ecosystem. People are working, people are making
a living, Customers are coming in and having a great time,
and it has an energy like it has an energy
that perpetuates itself.
Speaker 1 (31:14):
Why is it that it's considered a bad investment?
Speaker 3 (31:16):
Do we?
Speaker 1 (31:17):
In many cases, the wrong people open the restaurant, the
guy who thinks that being a chef is going to
be fun like it appears to be on Food Channel.
What's the problem?
Speaker 3 (31:27):
Banks are not really receptive to most restauranteurs. So what
people do is they go out and they land up
having four partners. And as soon as you have five
or six people calling you and oh, I'm coming in
for six guys tonight, and you know, my daughter's coming
in with their girlfriends. And then the other category is
that people think, well, I have a lot of money,
(31:47):
this will be fun. I'll have a place to hang out.
You know, you're an accountant or a lawyer or a
doctor by trade and you want to own a restaurant. Well,
God bless you, you probably made the wrong choice.
Speaker 1 (31:58):
I want to ask you something about the competition shows.
You've been the judge for many years of Top Chef Canada.
You're into a new season. You told a contestant I
wouldn't serve this to prisoners. I thought, wow, I asked
you about it and you said, well, no, I wouldn't
And I said, well, I thought they could cook, and
you said it's the clock.
Speaker 3 (32:14):
Well, the problem is the competitions are very real and
they're very raw. Because they're so difficult, they don't know
what they're getting into. They really have no way of
preparing themselves. Then you throw them into this situation. Maybe
they don't have any ideas, maybe they didn't sleep well
the night before. So I try to be very nice.
(32:34):
Having said that to that particular chef, they must have
disappointed me in a bunch of other ways for me
to be that generous with my commentary.
Speaker 2 (32:44):
You know, if you did get to sit them down
and say you're going to be on TV against other
great chefs, here's what you need to keep in mind
if you're going.
Speaker 3 (32:52):
To win, and end of the day, it's always produced
a dish that is really flavorful, right, number one? Number one?
All right, So it's this balancing act. I always try
to put them in. I say, stay in your comfort
zone where you know you can produce a good dish.
If I tell them, I said, you know, you spend
all your time making twels and little fancy garnishes for
(33:15):
your plate. And I hated eating it. I hated it.
You know, you know, our industry is all about, oh,
what's new, what's new? Have you gone through this new restaurant.
It's always about what's new, and it's become a bit disposable.
So the thing the real game for me is to
stay relevant and to stay in the game and still
(33:38):
have a super strong business.
Speaker 2 (33:40):
So how do you stay relevant without chasing what's always new?
Speaker 3 (33:44):
I ignore it and I focus on the clients. What
I'm seeing now is a lot of restaurants are opening,
but man, oh man, when you look at the prices
in these restaurants, they're just gargantuan. Everybody's gone uber uber
crazy with pricing. So I'm I'm staying in the other direction,
I want to try to keep our menu prices in
(34:06):
a reasonable range so that people can afford to be out,
because I think Canada's already in recession, and I think
we're going to have that for the next couple of
years in Canada, so I'm going to be very careful.
Speaker 2 (34:16):
We feel the same thing about the Dallas market because
there's literally a restaurant in Dallas they spent twenty million
dollars to open. Absolute insanity. I think a lot of
these restaurants you become so expensive you can only visit
them one time I went there, I.
Speaker 1 (34:30):
Checked it off the list in one percent.
Speaker 2 (34:33):
You know, then I, as a restaurant tour don't have
the opportunity to develop the relationship.
Speaker 3 (34:38):
No, and there's there's a raft of those restaurants in Toronto,
and I won't name names, but I haven't heard of
one of the new restaurants being opened for under sixteen
million dollars and as high as twenty two million dollars.
How do you rationalize that cost? I certainly can't.
Speaker 2 (34:54):
It's really funny because our first restaurant we did for
one hundred and twenty thousand dollars.
Speaker 3 (34:58):
That's great.
Speaker 1 (35:00):
It was not enough.
Speaker 2 (35:00):
As we discovered that caused plenty of other problems.
Speaker 3 (35:04):
Well, I think you can capitalize on misadventure. Other people
go out and they build these facilities and they fail.
They spend all the money on the makeup air and
the plumbing, the electrical, the kitchen. All you have to
do is reskin it and open the restaurant properly again,
with good food and proper service. I think the core
(35:26):
becomes irrelevant. You can have a very downscale restaurant that
serves great food and has extraordinarily good service. Nobody cares
what the chair is, nobody cares that the washroom is
all granite or some expensive material. All they really focus
on is the service and the food. You can build
(35:47):
that twenty million dollar restaurant and have cold, mediocre service
and average food that is overpriced, and you will piss
everybody off. And that's exactly how that will go. So
for me, I'd rather have the underdog restaurant and focus
on the client experience and genuinely good food and a
(36:09):
perception of value. And I think there you win ninety
percent of your clients. You know, and if some fashionista
has to have the newest restaurant and the coolest decor
for them to feel whole. Well, let them go someplace else.
Don't need them, don't need them. Restauranteurs have an uncanny
(36:31):
knack of kind of being nasty because they all think
they're better than everybody else when they're cooking the same
damn short rib right, like, oh my, most potatoes are
creamier like the level of arrogance among restauranteurs is hard
to imagine. I've always chuckled about it.
Speaker 1 (36:48):
Restaurant tour chef and TV personality Mark McEwan, thanks for
doing this, Luedge.
Speaker 3 (36:54):
You guys ten are nice to chat with you, and
I'm very happy to see her. You're being so successful
down there.
Speaker 1 (37:00):
Thank you, chef. I appreciate it.
Speaker 3 (37:01):
Well, all that hair you got is does it go
in a ponytail or a bun? During service?
Speaker 1 (37:06):
It's got to go in a bunt.
Speaker 2 (37:07):
My nightmare is a guest pulling a long, brown, curly
hair out of their food and saying, do you think
this is if they're going to find a hair in
their food, it's going to be at the restaurant next door.
Speaker 3 (37:17):
Well, I've got the image in my mind, though. There
you go with a lot of fun talking guys.
Speaker 1 (37:21):
Thanks Mark, I'm Chierry Aegar and I hope you join
me and Tanner and his hair again next week for
Flavor Files
Welcome to Flavor Files. I'm Jerryegan, broadcaster. He's Tana Regar,
my son. He's a restaurant tour he's a bartender and
he's a chef. So what we do here is talk
about food and drink and we just have fun. And
we always start with a segment called Amuse Booze, a
takeoff on the emuse boosh, which is a little bite
before you start your meal. So what's your drink today, Tanner?
Speaker 2 (00:23):
Well, you know, I just actually came back from a vacation.
I took my partner, Grace. We went to London to
visit my friend. And there's a lot of things there
that have different names. Right, It's chips, not French fries.
It's crips, crisps not potato chips. So I've just been
thinking a lot about the names and what do you
names mean? And we're going to talk about that today.
But to get started, we're going to start with a cocktail.
(00:43):
It's a very classic cocktail, originally named the swashal Keys.
It's the name of a French field gun from World
War One. Not very big, but absolutely knocks.
Speaker 1 (00:54):
You off your feet.
Speaker 2 (00:56):
This cocktail I started getting made and it was named
after it to be an allusion to that. This cocktail
then got into places like the American Bar in Paris.
They knew it needed an English name to get English
people to drink it, and it became the French seventy five.
This is one of the most classic cocktails ever. It's
so simple to make. It's just gin, a little lemon,
(01:18):
a little sugar, and then you top it with champagne,
serve it in a champagne flute.
Speaker 1 (01:23):
It's beautiful, it tastes great.
Speaker 2 (01:25):
I don't know if it'll knock you off your feet,
but liquor plus champagne can definitely knock you off your feet.
So it's a delicious zipper. But you can only have
so many of them before you do start to feel
like you're going down.
Speaker 1 (01:39):
Okay, well, I mean that's the case with any cocktail,
isn't it The French seventy five, Gin, lemon, sugar and champagne. Yeah,
that's it.
Speaker 2 (01:46):
It's so frushing, it's so light. I just in addition
to being a wonderful cocktail, it's a cocktail you can
make anytime. Every single menu we write, we make a
French seventy five variation and it's always one of the
top few selling cocktails. Everybody liked it, crowd pleaser, and
you get a fun little story to go along with it.
So all that about the French seventy five leads into
(02:08):
the first thing I really wanted to go over today.
Like I was saying while I was in England, it's
just funny.
Speaker 1 (02:14):
You know, you go.
Speaker 2 (02:15):
Order, you want French fries with your burger. Nope, you
have to have chips. So why is this? So I
started asking, I started looking, and there's actually a lot
of foods that are like this. So the French fries,
apparently in England it's called that. They're called chips in
England because the way they look is that they're chipped
off of a potato, as if you took a little
(02:38):
knife and sort of just hacked away at it like
you were doing wood. Yeah, wheedling, right, like you're sort
of knocking these pieces off, so you're chipping away at
the potato. Therefore, oh well, they're chips. They're potato chips. However,
in American English, what happened was they got their name
because American soldiers they go over they're fighting in Europe,
(03:00):
they're in Belgium. They eat these chips. They come from
the French speaking part of Belgium, so people went, oh,
they're the French fries. They're the Fried French food that
we used to eat over there. So they bring it
back and we get the French fries. So even though
they're from Belgium, they're called French fries. And that's how
they got that name, all right.
Speaker 1 (03:22):
Also, we have staying with the potato here, we have
potato chips. They call them crisp.
Speaker 2 (03:28):
Right, So the potato chip as we know, or the
crisp they know, got invented after we already had French
fries and British chips, so they need a new name.
We called it the chip, and they decided, well, we'll
just call it crisps because it's a crispy potato.
Speaker 1 (03:45):
And this was the thing that confused me a little
bit when I would hear British people on shows or
movies or whatever and they would refer to biscuits. But
it's just that's a cookie.
Speaker 2 (03:56):
So yeah, so they'll call a cookie a biscuit. And
then once you know, American people, they took it and
biscuit sort of was kind of this catch all term
for some sweets. But then Dutch immigrants around the same time.
The word cookie actually comes from Dutch, and so cookie
would refer to this specific type. So it used to
(04:18):
be that people would sort of say, here are all
the biscuits all together, all here are all the different suits.
But then the Dutch went, well, this one we call cookie,
and Americans went, great, cookie, let's go that's a cookie.
So it's sort of an interesting blend because we had
a lot of Dutch people coming over. You know, you
think about the founding of America and the British, I
(04:41):
guess never got their Dutch invasion.
Speaker 1 (04:44):
Okay, So something that I've never heard of, and that's rocket.
Speaker 2 (04:50):
Yeah, it's it's very funny if you see especially expensive
restaurants like to write rocket like it's in the it's
a rocket salad.
Speaker 1 (04:58):
Rocket is just the French word for arugula.
Speaker 2 (05:01):
Arugula is an Italian word, rocket is the French word,
and so it's the exact same thing. But if you're
coming up on the holidays and you're looking for ways
to sound very fancy, it's the same thing. By the way,
with air covert, air covert literally means bean green, so
it's just green bean, that's all.
Speaker 1 (05:20):
It means. Air covert salad sounds a lot great or
entertaining and perhaps something I would try versus your being salad.
Speaker 2 (05:29):
And air covert and rocket salad is thirty dollars. Green
bean and arugula salad's like fourteen. Okay, I always see this.
I love shrimp and I'll love a prawn. What's the difference.
So technically they're the same thing. The British kind of
just use prawn for everything. They're all everything's a prawn, right.
(05:50):
Shrimp is a word that we use that's more common
over here in America now in American Canadian vernacular. The
what will happen a lot of times, especially in restaurants,
is if we use the word prawn, we're referring to
one that's generally larger. You know, we've gotten ones in
before that are eight ounces or more.
Speaker 1 (06:13):
So you think about it.
Speaker 2 (06:14):
I mean, these are big boys, like you put them
on the plate and they just shock people. And so
we kind of use the word pron to refer to
very very big shrimp. But technically they're the same thing.
The other thing that's funny about shrimp, Okay, I'm sure
you're a fan, like I feel everyone is of shrimp scampy. Right,
It's an amazing Italian pasta. Do you know what shrimp
scampy means? Scampy is just Italian for shrimp, right, It's
(06:38):
just shrimp shrimp. It's not a type of dish at all.
It's just a thing we've made up as shrimp pasta
is shrimp scampy, but it just shrimp shrimp.
Speaker 1 (06:46):
Another one that apparently has a bunch of names in
different places around the world is cotton candy. Cotton candy
is the perfect name for it.
Speaker 2 (06:53):
Yeah, cotton candy is a good name. But this, by
the way, it was invented by a dentist, which must
make a dentists everywhere miserable because I can't think of
a worse food than a food you run like, you
bite into it and you let it dissolve on your teeth.
It's sugar into your enamel. It's a dentist nightmare. But originally, yeah,
(07:13):
it's called cotton candy.
Speaker 1 (07:14):
Or fairy floss.
Speaker 2 (07:17):
Yeah, I think fairy floss is a good name, right,
I think it's a it's a cute name. I do
think the French name is horrible, which is daddy's beard.
What does that sound like in French though, Baba Papa? Okay, Yeah,
well it only sounds okay in French because we don't
speak French, so it like sounds it sounds cool. It
sounds foreign in Chic But like daddy's beard, that's not
(07:40):
a food I want my kids eating. It's just I'm
not gonna be like, hey, come over here from some
of daddy's beard. That's a very different thing in the
way I hear it.
Speaker 1 (07:48):
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try Babies First Baileies and Jello versus Jelly. I thought
one was just a brand name. Isn't that the case? Yeah?
Speaker 2 (08:30):
Yeah, Jello is a brand name, it's a band, it's
a brand name. But the same way that like band
aid or Kleenex has sort of become so ubiquitous, Jello
for a lot of people, refers to specifically that kind
of gelatin like product, whereas jelly, you know, is very different.
It can mean either sweets, it can mean jelly the
(08:53):
way that we think of it. It can mean jam.
By the way, jelly can actually be made with no
real fruit. It can just be basically this sort of thickened,
artificially flavored spread, whereas jams are actually made with real fruits. So,
just as an aside, I'm not a jelly person, but
(09:15):
I do love jams, and I highly recommend making that
choice while you're in the grocery store. Okay, an eggplant
versus what aubergine? So again, Aubergine's the French term. If
you go to England, they call them all aubergines, you know.
In over here we call them eggplants, But aubergine it
(09:36):
just means eggplant. What's really funny about it, though, my
understanding is the British didn't have this such tool. They
don't get it until the French introduce it to them.
By the time they're getting them, they're getting these big
purple what you think of when you get an eggplant,
and so they go, it's aubergine. It's called aubergine, okay, fine,
(09:56):
But in America we named it after what it looks
like when and it begins its life. So if you
ever see eggplant growing, you'll understand why. If you google
a picture of it, it looks like a little egg.
It comes out and it has this cute little top
like this little it looks like an egg that's wearing
a cute little hat. It's actually an adorable vegetable. When
you see it, or you see little baby ones, it's
(10:18):
so cute. But as it matures, then it grows and
it lengthens, it takes on that night shade purple, and
it becomes what we know as the eggplants are aubergine.
But if you've never grown eggplant, people are always surprised
when they see baby eggplant because they don't know what
it is. This next section we're calling you can't call
it that. This is about drinks foods that have legally
(10:41):
protected names. And you might not understand this. You might
think that these are catch all terms. But things like champagne.
Champagne is an amazing example. A lot of people think
champagne means sparkling wine. Champagne does mean sparkling wine, but
it means sparkling wine that comes from a specific place
in France. That place is called champagne. It means wine
(11:04):
that can only be made out of three grapes and
is generally a blend of those three grapes. It means
there's specific laws about how it's grown, and how it's aged,
and how it's bottled and sold into the market. So
what's funny is a lot of people think champagne and
restaurants do this too. By the way, a lot of restaurants.
(11:24):
There's one in Dallas where if you come you get
a free glass of champagne as you ride the elevator.
I went to this restaurant and it was cheap prosecco,
which is Italian sparkling wine.
Speaker 1 (11:35):
It isn't champagne.
Speaker 2 (11:37):
It's literally illegal for that prosecco company to call themselves champagne.
But we can get a little bit more into that.
I want to talk about why, because this is a
really cool thing. I think a lot of people don't understand.
I find myself explaining it to a lot of guests
at my restaurant. So you have to go back a few.
Speaker 1 (11:56):
Hundred years ago.
Speaker 2 (11:57):
And this is really when international trade picks up. That's
kind of when this story takes place, is you get
a lot of products. It's really the British that are
kind of driving this. Their navy's huge, they're moving stuff
from port to port, and seafaring areas have a lot
of ability to sell into the British market. For the
(12:18):
very first time, Bordeaux, which is a part of France
that's right on the coast, becomes really known for this.
They make fantastic wine in Bordeaux. They make some really
wonderful grapes, really full bodied, a very specific style of
wine in Bordeaux, and the British loved it. And since
Bordeaux is right on the coast, it was fairly affordable
(12:40):
for them to get their wines onto the boats and
get them up to England. So Bordeaux is making a
lot of money. It's growing, people are prospering. Things are
great in Bordeaux. Well, the people of Bordeaux come to
find out that people who are not following the rules
of Bordeaux that people who are not making wines that
are good quality are just writing Bordeaux on the bottle
(13:05):
and then selling it to the British, or even worse,
making really bad wine in England, not even from French grapes,
and where grapes come from really really matters, and they're
calling it Bordeaux. So Bordeaux goes to the French government
and says, this can't be, this is unjust. We the
(13:25):
region of Bordeaux are going to pass a bunch of
laws about what is Bordeaux, and we expect you to
enforce that in international trade because it's French interest. And
of course you can count on the French for not
a lot sometimes, but you can absolutely count on them
for pride in themselves and hatred of the British. So
(13:48):
the French government agrees and says we're absolutely going to
do this. And this AOP, you know, this appellation of
origin control a AOC, and French it is AOP and
other places basically gets established for Bordeaux. Champagne then picks
it up and now a ton of people have picked
it up across many, many different countries. And what's interesting
(14:10):
about this is if I were to start growing grapes
here in Texas and label them champagne. The French government,
because it has trade agreements with the United States, can
sue me and take my ability to do that away
and sue me for damages I've inflicted onto the champagne
market and its reputation.
Speaker 1 (14:31):
All right, But the same thing, in turnabout would be
the case if somebody in France started producing bourbon. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (14:38):
So Bourbon's a perfect example, right. The French really started
this with wine, but other countries as they come online
and as they get known for things, Bourbon being the
perfect example. Bourbon has to be made in the United States,
it has to be fifty one percent corn, it has
to be aged in new American oak barrels, only American
oak barrels, by the way, And so they they say, well,
(15:01):
we're doing all of this, we want that. So it's
sort of part of the reason these trade agreements get
made is because America says, fine, will keep champagne Champagne,
but you better keep bourbon. Bourbon and whiskeys are big
with this. Scotch is another one. Scotch has to come
from Scotland and it has to be made a very
(15:23):
specific way. It's actually made out of barley, it's not
made out of corn, and it has to be aged
for at least three years. And there's all these types
of rules. We don't have to get into all of them.
But I think a lot of people don't necessarily think,
you know, I'm buying scotch, that's what scotch means.
Speaker 1 (15:39):
Or tequila.
Speaker 2 (15:39):
Another example, we've talked about tequila on this show. Tequila
has to come from Mexico. There are people, it's very
funny they here in Texas. They will say this is
Texas tequila.
Speaker 1 (15:52):
No, it isn't.
Speaker 2 (15:53):
The Only way you can have Texas tequila is you
a bought tequila and Mexico and then slap the Texas
logo like slap the state on front and said, oh
it's from Texas. It isn't if it has the word
tequila on it. Or what you did is you took
a gave and you made what is tequila, but you
(16:13):
have legally have to call it a gave spirit. Or
there's a brand here in Texas that makes vodka, so
they call it a Gave vodka even though it's actually tequila.
Speaker 1 (16:23):
Oh MI. Understanding two on bourbon, is it's not just
in the US. It's in the continental US. You can't
make it in Hawaii or Alaska.
Speaker 2 (16:30):
No, that's no longer the rule. You can make it
in Hawaii and Hawaii in Alaska.
Speaker 1 (16:34):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (16:34):
I used to think that too, and I found out
that wasn't the case when one of my servers corrected
me in front of my whole staff.
Speaker 1 (16:44):
So at least you're hiring smart people.
Speaker 2 (16:46):
Yes, I've got smart and bold people on my team.
That's always a good thing.
Speaker 1 (16:51):
Let's talk about feta and roquefort. Put those two together.
Speaker 2 (16:55):
Yeah, so feta is a Greeks cheese. You know, it's
that kind of crumbly white cheese. You get it when
you get hero raps or at every Greek restaurant. I
actually didn't know this while we were looking things up.
I didn't know feedo was a protected word. Rockefert is
like that blue cheese that comes from It's kvah blue cheese.
That's a protected one. Parmisano reggiano is also a protected cheese.
(17:18):
So you can have parmesan. But if you think, like
you know, like that pizza parmesan that like powder that
people will do. Yeah, so that is not parmisano reggiano,
and if it has that whole long name that means
it comes from Alia Amelia, Romaanna. It's made this very
specific way. So parmesan is one of those ones that
(17:39):
I think, you know, if you're a member of the public.
One of the reasons people think they should do this,
why the governments were doing it, was to say you
the public should also get to know what you're buying.
And this is a perfect example where I think it
is right. Are there lots of amazing sparkling wines that
aren't champagne. Yes, and we've talked about it on the show,
But Parmisano reggiano is very different than shelf stable pizza cheese,
(18:04):
and I want to know that I'm getting the good stuff.
Speaker 1 (18:06):
All right. Well, let's talk about one that has is
probably newer to us, certainly in North America at least,
and that's kolbe beef.
Speaker 2 (18:14):
Yeah, so Kobe is Japanese. Right, people have talked about Kobe,
They've talked about Wagu. That's one which is really protected.
It is a specific herd of cows. They're treated in
a specific way. You know, I don't know exactly how
they're done, and they don't put out that information because
they don't want people replicating it. But I have heard
(18:36):
some wild stories, including raised exclusively by monks with regular
massages and specialty diets. Basically, they try to have the
beef have the like laziest, most comfortable life ever. And
if you've ever bought really high grade wagu, a five
is the top rating. It has this amazing marbling. It's
(18:58):
almost more white then read that's what you buy it for.
I mean, I can only eat about three or four
ounces before it's just too much. And I'm a professional eater,
you know. But so it's really wonderful. There is something
funny though. The Japanese were concerned about what if a
natural disaster happens and we lose our cows, So they
(19:19):
actually sent a bunch of cows to Texas to live,
and then they had a natural disaster and they actually
had to come to Texas and bring some of their
cows back. So you could be eating Japanese wagou with
a little bit of Texas in there.
Speaker 1 (19:36):
And we've been talking about the words that attached to
all kinds of foods because this show is about food
and drink, and this segment is called rebranding. Dinner. This
has to do in some cases standard with words that
have fallen out of favor, so to speak.
Speaker 2 (19:51):
Yeah, absolutely, I think, you know, sort of. Maybe the easiest,
clearest example of that is rape seed. And when you
grew up, rape seed was everywhere.
Speaker 1 (20:00):
Yeah, all around me. Gilbert Plain's, Manitoba's where I grew up,
a farming country, and I remember people growing rape seed.
And then all of a sudden, it wasn't that anymore.
It was canola. Well, I could see where that's more approachable.
Speaker 2 (20:14):
Yeah, So rape seed oil had two problems, the first
of which was I think obvious it wasn't It was
sort of a tough sell to women who were doing
a lot of the grocery shopping. Two, it was kind
of high acidity, and so even though it was affordable,
it wasn't always people's favorite option. And the Canadian government
(20:38):
actually got involved with a lot of researchers and said,
this grows so well here, this should be such a
pillar of our agricultural community. How we're going to fix
this issue. So they started breeding. They started breeding it
and trying to create options that had lower acid so
that they would taste better, they taste more neutral, basically,
how do we make it taste sort of like nothing
(20:59):
so that it can be the affordable, tasteless option for everyone.
So what's really funny is Canadian oil low acid is
can olaugh.
Speaker 1 (21:11):
Okay, well, and it is a very important crop on
the prairies in Canada. The name part is the need
for a change was, as you said, obvious, Chilean sea bass. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (21:23):
So the Chilean sea bass. If you've seen it before,
you probably saw it at a nice restaurant. You probably
saw that a commands premium. And it's really funny because
this is a pretty ugly fish if you look it up,
it doesn't have that much sex appeal. Its original name
was Patagonian toothfish, which also made it super difficult to sell. Meanwhile,
(21:44):
sea bass was really rising in popularity, and so basically
fisheries said, sea bass is popular. It's a lot like
sea bass, even if it isn't. So if we tell
people it's Chilean sea bass, we can basically ride the
tail of the sea bass and make it something that
(22:06):
will be really popular and that'll be great for the economy,
you know, here in Chile. And that's exactly what happened.
I mean, Chilean sea bass sort of like the next
fish I want to talk about, was really facing like
an overfishing problem because with the rebranding meant that they
could sell it at a certain price point. And one
thing that drives a lot of this, by the way,
as and aside, is restaurant tours. People like me are
(22:28):
kind of the problem. I'm always looking for what's affordable
that I can make look really great, that I can
get my good margin on that I need because I'll
talk all about the how happy the restaurant makes me,
and however it's great, and all those things are true.
I love to cook, I love making people happy. But
it is a business, and it's a business with not
a lot of corporate backing, and so I need to
(22:51):
have I need to manage my margins really well. So
had I been there at this time, I would have gone,
taste like sea bass, taste great. You're gonna sell it
to me at what price? While that's so low, I'm
gonna put that on my men. You make a killing.
So many restaurants start doing that, the Chilean sea bass
starts getting overfished, and they then now it's not cheap
(23:12):
anymore because it's become so popular. The exact same thing
happened to the Orange Ruffy. The Orange Ruffy, which isn't
as popular as Chilean sea bass, it's still a really
great fish. Its original name is slime head.
Speaker 1 (23:25):
Yeah, that's what I want to order, right.
Speaker 2 (23:28):
Can you imagine, Like, honey, it's our anniversary. I made
this reservation. Please come out to this fancy restaurant for
slime head dinner.
Speaker 1 (23:37):
They make a great slime head dinner.
Speaker 2 (23:39):
I'm telling you, Yeah, they have the best slime head.
That sounds like the place you take your wife when
you forgot it was your anniversary. It's the only place
you can get into is the old slime head.
Speaker 1 (23:51):
Let's talk about another fish, and that's a monk fish.
Speaker 2 (23:55):
I don't know why it's so many fish that this
has happened to. Maybe you know, as land based animals,
we are more comfortable with some of the funny names
we have. But munkfish, Okay, I love monkfish. I think
monkfish is absolutely great. I think the flavor is incredible.
I mean even the liver, like monkfish liver is fantastic.
But if you see a monkfish, it's kind of funny.
(24:17):
This has happened to me, both with Grace and with
a friend of mine. They didn't know what a monkfish was.
I take them to the store. The thing has a
mouth as wide as your head, and it's just nothing
but teeth, and it's this big, fat mouth on this
flat head. The thing is so ugly and so scary.
I would never show it to a child. So it's
(24:37):
this hideous, toothy, scary looking you know those videos you
see of like those deep sea fish that are just
really it looks like one of those. It's so ugly.
So it was sort of a bycatch. It was one
of those fish. A bycatch means things you caught on
accident while you're fishing for something else, and people would
throw it away or fishermen would eat it because hey,
(24:59):
it's it's free, it's pretty fresh. And what they realized was, man,
it has a texture a lot like a lobster, and
it has a really great flavor. So it sort of
got this nickname as the poor man's lobster, which, going
back exactly what we talked to. Enterprising chefs said, Oh,
it's like lobster, huh, but it doesn't cost anything, huh.
(25:23):
Great can I please get some of that? So they
renamed what was called the goosefish at one time because
it has sort of teeth that are kind of like
a goose if you've ever seen one with its mouth open,
changes saying to the monkfish, and it became the poor
man's lobster, which, by the way, lobster also used to
be trash. Lobster literally was fed two prisoners because it
(25:43):
was garbage. And what's hilarious about the history of food
is fine dining is pretty much just old poor people food.
If you think about whatever poor people used to eat,
chefs have then dressed it up and gotten their margin.
Speaker 1 (25:58):
And that's exactly what happened among fish.
Speaker 2 (26:00):
That's exactly what happened to every single thing that we're
talking about now, including lobster.
Speaker 1 (26:04):
We're going to get to a couple of vegetables in
a minute, but like you said, a lot of this
of renaming has happened with fish.
Speaker 2 (26:10):
So Mahi mahi, yeah, so originally called dolphin, and that
created a lot of confusion. This actually happened over my lifetime.
I remember being a kid, and nothing is more of
a come down from your trip to Sea World than
sitting down at a restaurant across the street and being
asked if you want dolphin tacos. Yeah, yeah, they're so cute.
(26:30):
I just saw them play with the ball. The mah
mahi mahi is the Hawaiian term. It was already called that,
So some of these were just a marketing game. Mahi
mahi was just the public saying, yeah, we got to
stop calling this stuff dolphin. Is there any other name
we can use? And mahi mahi stuck. Yes, but a
dolphin is not a porpoise. But people were making those connections.
(26:52):
So let's talk about a couple of vegetables, the Chinese gooseberry. Yeah,
the Chinese gooseberry. So there's a little tiny nation called
New Zealand and that's where they come from.
Speaker 1 (27:04):
They grow there.
Speaker 2 (27:05):
It's a delicious little fruit. We don't eat a lot
of them in my house because actually, Grace is allergic
to kiwi. She's the only person I've ever met with
a kiwi allergy. But so the people in New Zealand,
they have this fruit. During the Cold War, they want
to start exporting it, but they're concerned that Americans won't
buy Chinese fruit because of anti communist sentiment. So they
(27:27):
look around, they take their little beautiful bird and they say,
let's just call this a kiwied and put it into markets.
And obviously it's been incredibly successful since.
Speaker 1 (27:36):
Well, because it's a cute name. Kiwi great.
Speaker 2 (27:39):
And that's the thing that's funny about all of this, right,
is the branding of these things are almost become more
important than the thing itself. Right, Kalamari sounds so much
better than squid, and so therefore people want to eat
We're having katalamari.
Speaker 1 (27:57):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (27:58):
Actually I don't eat kalamari anymore because of how difficult
Mark McEwan made it to cook it every single day
up to his expectation. I'm actually really excited to talk
to him, just to connect with my old boss. This
will actually be the very first time we've sat down
in a professional setting, and I can't get in trouble
with him. One of Canada's most celebrated chefs and restaurant tours.
(28:19):
From founding the mckewan Group and creating iconic spots like
North forty four Buy Mark One Restaurant, to judging on
Top Chef Canada and mentoring generations of chefs, he's helped
to find modern Canadian dining. He also happens to be
a longtime friend of Jerry's and, fun fact, my former boss.
Speaker 1 (28:36):
Speaking of which, this is a good idea to hire
your friend's son.
Speaker 3 (28:40):
Always a good idea when it works out, and when
it doesn't, you don't talk about it.
Speaker 2 (28:44):
Right, we wouldn't be having you on the show today
if it hadn't worked out, if you had to fire me,
that would have been a bummer.
Speaker 3 (28:49):
Indeed, I've hired many friends' kids. Oftentimes it doesn't.
Speaker 1 (28:52):
Work out, right, absolutely.
Speaker 2 (28:54):
You know, people will ask me too that my son
wants to be a chef, and I'm like, does your
son know how to cook?
Speaker 1 (28:59):
Does he know any thing?
Speaker 2 (29:00):
Or does he just want to watch TV and pretend
he's going to be a TV chef someday.
Speaker 3 (29:05):
Well, that's a symptom of the Food Network, right, So
young people get very very addicted to it. They don't
understand the game, and they try it and then they
burn out once they realize the life of a chef
it's not all that glamorous. It's very physical job, isn't
it incredibly physical? And yeah, you have to be a
certain animal to survive the rigors of the restaurant business.
(29:27):
And I look back on my career and that was
twenty five years where I did nothing but work. I
literally can barely recall the television programs from those days
or the music.
Speaker 2 (29:39):
What I want to know is you've stayed in business.
You've been relevant for decades, profitable, People love your restaurants,
You've expanded. I'm at year seven. I am tired all
the time. How have you held up to this? How
have you been able to pull this off?
Speaker 3 (29:56):
Well? You have to stay in shape, you have to
listen to your body right, and you can't indulge in
all the things that you create every day, especially the
alcohol and beverage side, and certainly the drug side. Like
that is a kind of a symptom of the industry.
Late at night relax kicked back, and I never did
any of that. I've always enjoyed the industry, and the
(30:17):
one thing I love about it is that it's so
tactile and so full of color and texture and taste
and interesting things that everybody looks too for conversation, and
so many people pay so much attention to your industry
that that helps fuel you as well. You're working in
this very cool environment when it's successful. That is a
(30:39):
bit addictive. So yeah, I've been at it for fifty
years now. I've always told that story that the really
most interesting day that I have when when I open
a business is when the business actually develops legs and
I can walk back and sit on a park bench
across the street and watch it. It's very cool because
(31:01):
you've created this ecosystem. People are working, people are making
a living, Customers are coming in and having a great time,
and it has an energy like it has an energy
that perpetuates itself.
Speaker 1 (31:14):
Why is it that it's considered a bad investment?
Speaker 3 (31:16):
Do we?
Speaker 1 (31:17):
In many cases, the wrong people open the restaurant, the
guy who thinks that being a chef is going to
be fun like it appears to be on Food Channel.
What's the problem?
Speaker 3 (31:27):
Banks are not really receptive to most restauranteurs. So what
people do is they go out and they land up
having four partners. And as soon as you have five
or six people calling you and oh, I'm coming in
for six guys tonight, and you know, my daughter's coming
in with their girlfriends. And then the other category is
that people think, well, I have a lot of money,
(31:47):
this will be fun. I'll have a place to hang out.
You know, you're an accountant or a lawyer or a
doctor by trade and you want to own a restaurant. Well,
God bless you, you probably made the wrong choice.
Speaker 1 (31:58):
I want to ask you something about the competition shows.
You've been the judge for many years of Top Chef Canada.
You're into a new season. You told a contestant I
wouldn't serve this to prisoners. I thought, wow, I asked
you about it and you said, well, no, I wouldn't
And I said, well, I thought they could cook, and
you said it's the clock.
Speaker 3 (32:14):
Well, the problem is the competitions are very real and
they're very raw. Because they're so difficult, they don't know
what they're getting into. They really have no way of
preparing themselves. Then you throw them into this situation. Maybe
they don't have any ideas, maybe they didn't sleep well
the night before. So I try to be very nice.
(32:34):
Having said that to that particular chef, they must have
disappointed me in a bunch of other ways for me
to be that generous with my commentary.
Speaker 2 (32:44):
You know, if you did get to sit them down
and say you're going to be on TV against other
great chefs, here's what you need to keep in mind
if you're going.
Speaker 3 (32:52):
To win, and end of the day, it's always produced
a dish that is really flavorful, right, number one? Number one?
All right, So it's this balancing act. I always try
to put them in. I say, stay in your comfort
zone where you know you can produce a good dish.
If I tell them, I said, you know, you spend
all your time making twels and little fancy garnishes for
(33:15):
your plate. And I hated eating it. I hated it.
You know, you know, our industry is all about, oh,
what's new, what's new? Have you gone through this new restaurant.
It's always about what's new, and it's become a bit disposable.
So the thing the real game for me is to
stay relevant and to stay in the game and still
(33:38):
have a super strong business.
Speaker 2 (33:40):
So how do you stay relevant without chasing what's always new?
Speaker 3 (33:44):
I ignore it and I focus on the clients. What
I'm seeing now is a lot of restaurants are opening,
but man, oh man, when you look at the prices
in these restaurants, they're just gargantuan. Everybody's gone uber uber
crazy with pricing. So I'm I'm staying in the other direction,
I want to try to keep our menu prices in
(34:06):
a reasonable range so that people can afford to be out,
because I think Canada's already in recession, and I think
we're going to have that for the next couple of
years in Canada, so I'm going to be very careful.
Speaker 2 (34:16):
We feel the same thing about the Dallas market because
there's literally a restaurant in Dallas they spent twenty million
dollars to open. Absolute insanity. I think a lot of
these restaurants you become so expensive you can only visit
them one time I went there, I.
Speaker 1 (34:30):
Checked it off the list in one percent.
Speaker 2 (34:33):
You know, then I, as a restaurant tour don't have
the opportunity to develop the relationship.
Speaker 3 (34:38):
No, and there's there's a raft of those restaurants in Toronto,
and I won't name names, but I haven't heard of
one of the new restaurants being opened for under sixteen
million dollars and as high as twenty two million dollars.
How do you rationalize that cost? I certainly can't.
Speaker 2 (34:54):
It's really funny because our first restaurant we did for
one hundred and twenty thousand dollars.
Speaker 3 (34:58):
That's great.
Speaker 1 (35:00):
It was not enough.
Speaker 2 (35:00):
As we discovered that caused plenty of other problems.
Speaker 3 (35:04):
Well, I think you can capitalize on misadventure. Other people
go out and they build these facilities and they fail.
They spend all the money on the makeup air and
the plumbing, the electrical, the kitchen. All you have to
do is reskin it and open the restaurant properly again,
with good food and proper service. I think the core
(35:26):
becomes irrelevant. You can have a very downscale restaurant that
serves great food and has extraordinarily good service. Nobody cares
what the chair is, nobody cares that the washroom is
all granite or some expensive material. All they really focus
on is the service and the food. You can build
(35:47):
that twenty million dollar restaurant and have cold, mediocre service
and average food that is overpriced, and you will piss
everybody off. And that's exactly how that will go. So
for me, I'd rather have the underdog restaurant and focus
on the client experience and genuinely good food and a
(36:09):
perception of value. And I think there you win ninety
percent of your clients. You know, and if some fashionista
has to have the newest restaurant and the coolest decor
for them to feel whole. Well, let them go someplace else.
Don't need them, don't need them. Restauranteurs have an uncanny
(36:31):
knack of kind of being nasty because they all think
they're better than everybody else when they're cooking the same
damn short rib right, like, oh my, most potatoes are
creamier like the level of arrogance among restauranteurs is hard
to imagine. I've always chuckled about it.
Speaker 1 (36:48):
Restaurant tour chef and TV personality Mark McEwan, thanks for
doing this, Luedge.
Speaker 3 (36:54):
You guys ten are nice to chat with you, and
I'm very happy to see her. You're being so successful
down there.
Speaker 1 (37:00):
Thank you, chef. I appreciate it.
Speaker 3 (37:01):
Well, all that hair you got is does it go
in a ponytail or a bun? During service?
Speaker 1 (37:06):
It's got to go in a bunt.
Speaker 2 (37:07):
My nightmare is a guest pulling a long, brown, curly
hair out of their food and saying, do you think
this is if they're going to find a hair in
their food, it's going to be at the restaurant next door.
Speaker 3 (37:17):
Well, I've got the image in my mind, though. There
you go with a lot of fun talking guys.
Speaker 1 (37:21):
Thanks Mark, I'm Chierry Aegar and I hope you join
me and Tanner and his hair again next week for
Flavor Files
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The Burden
The Burden is a documentary series that takes listeners into the hidden places where justice is done (and undone). It dives deep into the lives of heroes and villains. And it focuses a spotlight on those who triumph even when the odds are against them. Season 5 - The Burden: Death & Deceit in Alliance On April Fools Day 1999, 26-year-old Yvonne Layne was found murdered in her Alliance, Ohio home. David Thorne, her ex-boyfriend and father of one of her children, was instantly a suspect. Another young man admitted to the murder, and David breathed a sigh of relief, until the confessed murderer fingered David; “He paid me to do it.” David was sentenced to life without parole. Two decades later, Pulitzer winner and podcast host, Maggie Freleng (Bone Valley Season 3: Graves County, Wrongful Conviction, Suave) launched a “live” investigation into David's conviction alongside Jason Baldwin (himself wrongfully convicted as a member of the West Memphis Three). Maggie had come to believe that the entire investigation of David was botched by the tiny local police department, or worse, covered up the real killer. Was Maggie correct? Was David’s claim of innocence credible? In Death and Deceit in Alliance, Maggie recounts the case that launched her career, and ultimately, “broke” her.” The results will shock the listener and reduce Maggie to tears and self-doubt. This is not your typical wrongful conviction story. In fact, it turns the genre on its head. It asks the question: What if our champions are foolish? Season 4 - The Burden: Get the Money and Run “Trying to murder my father, this was the thing that put me on the path.” That’s Joe Loya and that path was bank robbery. Bank, bank, bank, bank, bank. In season 4 of The Burden: Get the Money and Run, we hear from Joe who was once the most prolific bank robber in Southern California, and beyond. He used disguises, body doubles, proxies. He leaped over counters, grabbed the money and ran. Even as the FBI was closing in. It was a showdown between a daring bank robber, and a patient FBI agent. Joe was no ordinary bank robber. He was bright, articulate, charismatic, and driven by a dark rage that he summoned up at will. In seven episodes, Joe tells all: the what, the how… and the why. Including why he tried to murder his father. Season 3 - The Burden: Avenger Miriam Lewin is one of Argentina’s leading journalists today. At 19 years old, she was kidnapped off the streets of Buenos Aires for her political activism and thrown into a concentration camp. Thousands of her fellow inmates were executed, tossed alive from a cargo plane into the ocean. Miriam, along with a handful of others, will survive the camp. Then as a journalist, she will wage a decades long campaign to bring her tormentors to justice. Avenger is about one woman’s triumphant battle against unbelievable odds to survive torture, claim justice for the crimes done against her and others like her, and change the future of her country. Season 2 - The Burden: Empire on Blood Empire on Blood is set in the Bronx, NY, in the early 90s, when two young drug dealers ruled an intersection known as “The Corner on Blood.” The boss, Calvin Buari, lived large. He and a protege swore they would build an empire on blood. Then the relationship frayed and the protege accused Calvin of a double homicide which he claimed he didn’t do. But did he? Award-winning journalist Steve Fishman spent seven years to answer that question. This is the story of one man’s last chance to overturn his life sentence. He may prevail, but someone’s gotta pay. The Burden: Empire on Blood is the director’s cut of the true crime classic which reached #1 on the charts when it was first released half a dozen years ago. Season 1 - The Burden In the 1990s, Detective Louis N. Scarcella was legendary. In a city overrun by violent crime, he cracked the toughest cases and put away the worst criminals. “The Hulk” was his nickname. Then the story changed. Scarcella ran into a group of convicted murderers who all say they are innocent. They turned themselves into jailhouse-lawyers and in prison founded a lway firm. When they realized Scarcella helped put many of them away, they set their sights on taking him down. And with the help of a NY Times reporter they have a chance. For years, Scarcella insisted he did nothing wrong. But that’s all he’d say. Until we tracked Scarcella to a sauna in a Russian bathhouse, where he started to talk..and talk and talk. “The guilty have gone free,” he whispered. And then agreed to take us into the belly of the beast. Welcome to The Burden.