The Anti-Restaurant

A friend recently informed me about a local underground phenomenon called Charlie's Burgers. You can go ahead and click the link, but the website reveals nothing. What little the public knows is unreliable and unverifiable.

In a nutshell, Charlie's Burgers is the name for Toronto's latest anti-restaurant -- a gourmet dining experience that eschews the rigidity and commercialism of a fixed format and venue. Dinners take place at secret locations. The one-off menus are eclectic and adventurous. Guests get to sit at the dining table by invitation only. And reportedly, the roster of chefs include the city's finest talent.

As novel as this sounds, the idea of the anti-restaurant has been around for some time. While I am sure there are examples of this globally, I am speaking specifically of the speakeasies or private kitchens of Hong Kong. The high cost of renting restaurant space and complying with regulatory requirements have driven modest cooks to set up shop, usually at home, serving food without a license.

I first became acquainted with HK's private kitchens upon seeing the "Hidden Hong Kong" episode of Gourmet magazine's Diary of a Foodie. It features Margaret Xu Yuan, a retired advertising executive turned amateur chef. This self-taught torch-bearer of authentic Hong Kong cuisine uses traditional, lo-tech cooking techniques such as manually grinding grains in a stone mill and pressing soy milk curds to make tofu from scratch. [Note: Yuan's recipe for Yellow Earth Chicken is available online. You can also see the Flickr photo album of her private kitchen, Cuisine X (since renamed Yin Yang, I believe).]

Back in Toronto, the mythical "Charlie" requires interested parties to fill out a survey. If the answers satisfy, you get a chance to be considered for a place at the next dinner table. Being a security professional, it's not in my nature to take leaps of faith like this without arming myself with information, but I answered the survey anyway. One question asked me to describe myself without stating the obvious ("I like food" or "I like to cook"). So I told "Charlie" about my cookbook (didn't mention the blog, though). Apparently, that was good enough because my response was accepted. And now we wait to see if I get the luck of the draw. I might not be allowed to talk about it if I do get chosen, but I think you'll be able to tell by watching this blog.