End of an Era: A Toronto Institution Bids Farewell to Its Chef

A decade ago, Le Select, a well-loved French bistro in Toronto, was at a crossroads.

Since its inception in 1977, the restaurant has served classic fare like duck confit and bubbling, oozy French onion soup to an adoring public in the city's bustling, beautiful Queen West neighbourhood. On January 19, 2006, the eve of it's 30th birthday, however, the restaurant and its estimated 12,000-bottle wine collection was uprooted and moved to a new venue in the not-too-distant fringes of the Garment District.

The new location at 432 Wellington, where the restaurant still resides today, was more spacious by comparison. The main dining room was, and remains, a sight to behold: Dim, enchanting light curiously illuminates an art nouveau façade, the walls punctuated by colorful posters from decades gone by.

On the bar sits a conspicuous display of hard-boiled eggs for hungry patrons.

The owners had brought on J.P. Challet, a chef originally from Lyon, France with a respectable reputation, and idiosyncratic facial hair, to help with the transition. Having emigrated to Canada in the 1980s, Challet was already known for his culinary expertise through his work at notable Toronto eateries such as Auberge du Pommier, The Fifth, and his own restaurant, Bouchon, which he had opened in 2002.

Yet, despite the allure of Le Select's dazzling new front-of-house, something was amiss. Whether it was morale, menu, or something altogether greater, Challet's kitchen was off.

"Wherefore art thou, J.P.?" a review by the Globe and Mail dated March 18, 2006 boldly asked, just a few months after the move. "Hiding in the basement? No, that's where the kitchen is, and we cannot for a New York minute imagine that you're really there, turning out this franco-dreck that's catching the fancy of hundreds of gullible eaters at the hottest bistro in town. Perhaps you're there in body, but where's your soul?"

VICE's own Matty Matheson, who worked at the original Le Select on Queen Street for two years beginning in 2004, said the situation was worrisome for much of the kitchen staff. He notes that while the restaurant maintained its popularity, and typically brisk business, the reopening was rough.

"The city was kind of oddly against them," he recalls.

Less than a year after the move, J.P. Challet was gone, having returned to his position as executive chef at The Fifth. At, Le Select, there remained a great deal of confusion as to who would run the kitchen.

A man by the name of John Corsi briefly took the helm, before parting ways with the restaurant in the summer of 2006.

That left Albert Ponzo, a 29-year-old Ontario native, who had been brought on as executive sous, to clean up the mess. Ponzo was promoted and became executive chef of Le Select by August of that year. With divisions between personnel, and an apparent power vacuum after the departure of Challet, the new responsibility did not come easily.

"For a lot of people who were there at the time, they just saw me as a sous, maybe, and not really as the chef," he tells MUNCHIES. "It took time to build a team I could call my own."

Ponzo, born to two Italian immigrant parents in 1977, may have seemed a bit of an odd choice to take over. Perhaps there was something more fitting about the semi-celebrity chef J.P. Challet at the head of one of Toronto's revered French bistros. Ponzo was still young in his career, and didn't have the same name recognition.

Nonetheless, he was, in Matheson's words, the man who "got everything back on the fucking rails."

The menu was his first challenge.

Choucroute garnie (a popular Alsatian recipe with sausages and salted meats served over sauerkraut) and cassoulet (a mixed meat dish with mutton, fowl, and Toulouse sausage simmered in fragrant haricots blancs) were cornerstones of the menu, but there was still tinkering that needed to happen to "get more flavor into the dishes—to elevate them," says Ponzo.

The new chef brought his Italian roots with him, as well as pieces of his childhood growing up in Alberta: a profound love of game, homemade sausages, and jerky. His father, a real outdoorsman, regularly brought home moose, deer, rabbit, and ducks.

"There's actually an old old video of my dad butchering a moose," says Ponzo, "and me with a plastic knife, trying to cut the meat. But obviously I wasn't cutting anything, I was just kind of mimicking."

In addition to hunting wild game, his family regularly cultivated a garden of fresh fruits and vegetables, often used for pickles, fruit jams, and sott'olio—a traditional Italian method of preserving vegetables in oil—to last through the harsh winters.

The influence of those humble foods became a staple at Le Select, where Ponzo introduced a charcuterie program, and his team began to prepare a sumptuous assortment of sausages, terrines, and pates in-house.

Today, the phrase farm-to-table is all too common, but in the mid-2000s, the practice was certainly not as deeply entrenched. Ponzo was a proponent of the movement, and helped Le Select transition to using seasonal, local ingredients in many of their dishes. He found the owners sympathetic: "They understood that it could hurt the bottom line a little bit," he says, "but it's better for diet and health, and to make people aware of where supplies were coming from was important for everyone."

To this day, those who know him best say Ponzo's profound strength is in his attention to good ingredients, and his ability to build relationships with local producers. He insists on "buying ingredients that are sustainable in the sense that they bolster the economy and the environment."

One of his first additions to the menu, which you can still find there today, was a crispy pig ear salad. The dish is a playful experiment in textures: the fried oreille de cochon contrasts with the softness of red pepper and the delicate crunch of watercress, served over lentils.

Taking on recipes and ingredients at Le Select was only part of the solution to the restaurant's problems, however. The kitchen's output was prolific, which made consistency problematic. The large staff, and their varying skill levels, created a difficult atmosphere for a restaurant producing such an immense volume of food. To this day, the restaurant will regularly do around 300 covers for busy brunch services.

"One day the ducks would be overcooked and one day they'd be undercooked, depending on who was cooking it," Ponzo laments.

He soon convinced one of the owners to put up the money for their first immersion circulator to cook some of the menu items sous vide. Ponzo remembers showing off a duck leg from the circulator for the first time, saying, "Look at the duck. Look when we cook the duck this way. Look how consistent it is. Look how moist it is. It will be like this all the time."

Of course, all of these changes didn't happen at once. It has been a slow and steady build to recreate the magic of the original Queen Street location. Today, the restaurant's place in Toronto's food landscape is inescapable.

Matheson himself, one of the city's most exuberant culinary exports, admits his bias, but enthusiastically calls Le Select the best French restaurant in Toronto. Others seem to agree; the restaurant has been selected as the people's choice winner for French restaurant for the past two years running.

Now, after more than ten years, chef Ponzo is leaving Le Select. His name may still be unfamiliar to many diners, but chefs know his name. It just so happens that certain kitchens are crueler mistresses than others.

"Either the restaurant is known or the chef is known," says Matheson.

In the world of celebrity chefs, it's not uncommon for their names to come before the food. With Le Select, it is the opposite. The 40-year-old bistro is an institution, a monolith that casts a long shadow. The kitchen is in the basement, actually and metaphorically, where the chef's name always comes secondary to the restaurant itself. When people say Le Select, they think of Le Select and not its chef, or the entire mad house of cooks dutifully running around at the base of the wide stairs, around the corner from the restrooms.

"Le Select is a massive thing and Albert, every time I'm there, he's fucking in the kitchen," says Matheson. "Whatever the description of a chef is in the fucking encyclopedia, that's Albert. He's in there, he's cooking, he's cleaning, he's teaching kids how to cook."

Chef Ponzo now has an upcoming project in Prince Edward County to the northeast of Toronto, where a 28-room boutique hotel is being planned with an attached restaurant. The opportunity to get out of the city and back into the country was irresistible. The menu has not yet been set, but it will undoubtedly contain the French and Italian elements of European cooking that he knows best. It will also push his farm-to-table philosophy to its natural conclusion, using the local suppliers from the region's deep-running farming community, and an attached 650-acre property with cattle and vegetables.

He's hoping to buy a hobby farm, do some beekeeping, and maybe eventually get some horses. In the meanwhile, for the first time in over a decade, chef Ponzo will step out of the Le Select basement, take a breath of fresh air, and, perhaps, think about putting his own name on something.