If you are the first IWFS Toronto member to go to this restaurant let us know.
The $680-a-head uptown restaurant everyone’s talking about has three giant egos in the kitchen and one very rich benefactor calling the shots. If they don’t self-destruct, they may well produce something spectacular. Inside the making of LSL
BY MARK PUPO| PHOTOGRAPHY BY ASHLEY VAN DER LAAN Toronto life
| JULY 23, 2024
Full story https://torontolife.com/deep-dives/inside-lsl-didier-leroy-christian-le-squer-masaki-saito/
It starts with a tomato. A tomato that’s perfectly round, perfectly plump, perfectly perfect. Of a glowing red that seems to break the colour spectrum. A tomato of rare pedigree, coddled and hand-picked in a secret greenhouse in southern Japan. A tomato of such pure sweetness its genetic code must take a chromosome or two from cotton candy.
In the three months since the uptown restaurant LSL opened, that little tomato has become its calling card. Here’s how they improve upon perfection: poach the tomato for a couple of seconds, peel off the skin, scoop out its innards and stuff it with a hash of bluefin tuna dressed with olive oil, tarragon, thyme, a zing of dried yuzu peel powder and, for a touch of heat, fermented chili. The LSL tomato sits primly in the middle of its plate in a coulis of more tomato and tarragon oil, wearing a cap of French caviar and a fleck of gold leaf. It looks vaguely ridiculous, so cute it begs to be photographed and posted. Those photos don’t capture the pleasure of slicing that perfect tomato in half and taking a bite that marries the fatty richness of the tuna with the salty extravagance of the creamy caviar and the tomato’s uncanny sweetness. The LSL tomato is both Japanese and French, fresh and complex, decadent and as simple as if it were freshly plucked from a vine. It’s new, strange, a thrill.
That tomato is why LSL is the first fine-dining restaurant in a long time to send a jolt through the city’s food scene. The fact that LSL even exists defies logic. Instead of one notable chef, it has three, the restaurant’s name an acronym of their surnames. They are Didier Leroy, the Frenchest of Toronto French chefs; Masaki Saito, of the exclusive six-seat Yorkville sushi restaurant that bears his name; and, for reasons that grow more curious by the day, Christian Le Squer, the head chef of Le Cinq, the poshest of the posh restaurants in Paris’s Four Seasons Hotel George