It’s opening night at Hardys: A Hogtown Brasserie, and owner John Hardy (the III, according to his business card) is cool as a cucumber, even if he’s in a bit of a pickle. His brand new barbecue joint is rammed; it’s bursting at the seams, and servers can barely keep up. Hardy doesn’t appear phased, even as local barbecue legend Darryl Koster gets a table.
Hardy, as it turns out, is new to the whole front-of-house thing. This is his first restaurant, and aside from a brief stint as a line cook at Little Italy’s erstwhile Langolino, his hands-on restaurant experience is virtually nil. But Hardy grew up with barbecue. Hailing from Washington, D.C., he has family roots that trace back further south (his grandmother lives in a pre-civil war era house in Virginia). Hardy recalls eating smoked wild turkey every Thanksgiving; Virginia hams were a family favourite.
Still, in the months it’s taken to get his St. Clair West restaurant up and running, Hardy’s starry-eyed confidence (some would say cockiness) has been tempered by the constraints of reality. Gone is the wood-burning smoker he wanted to use — the one he built himself out of oil drums — due to health code regulations. Instead, he’s using an old rotisserie retrofitted with a smoke generator, since not everyone can afford both a restaurant renovation and a top-of-the-line Southern Pride smoker like you’d see at Barque Smokehouse. Especially someone fresh out of university, as Hardy is.
Hardy admits he doesn’t exactly have a “purist’s” machine, like the wood-burning smoker at The Stockyards just down the street. On top of that, he wants to distill his own liquor for marinades (it’s in his blood; his great grandfather was a bootlegger during the prohibition era) but, again, red tape rears its head. And then there’s the issue of mitigating his own tastes with those of his customers: “Torontonians like their ribs to be fall-off-the-bone,” he says. “I think it should pull back a bit.”
If there’s anything the newly-minted restaurateur is lacking, though, it’s not keenness. The man is about as meticulous as they come. He lives a few doors down from the restaurant with his pit master and two cooks; they’re here at nearly all hours of the day.
“Smoking meat is a labour of love,” Hardy says. “I’m here at 4 a.m. pulling beef out and checking temperatures.” He’s glad to do it, but finding a head chef with similar zeal has been a problem: Hardy has gone through several of them.
Everything at Hardys — rubs, marinades, brines — is made from scratch, as it should be. Ingredients include organic Belted Galloway beef, as seen in the smoked burgers ($10). For the mac and cheese ($6), Hardys uses aged cheddar, cold smoked for 25 solid hours with a mixture of apple and cherry woods; the pasta is tossed with a jalapeno-based barbecue sauce. For an extra $3, it’s topped off with pork loin that’s house-cured for a week, then sliced, diced, deep-fried and caramalized in a whisky glaze. Speaking of whisky, the restaurant goes through a 60-ounce bottle of Jack Daniel’s every two days for its glazes.
Hardys brines its whisky-glazed chicken ($11 for a quarter) twice for juiciness; the pulled pork ($11 for a sandwich) is injected with an apple pilsner reduction that’s mixed with spices; it’s then smoked for 14-hours, during which time it’s hit with a mop sauce every few hours. It’s no wonder he’s here tweaking things at ungodly hours of the night: barbecue is tough business.
Then there’s the ribs. “Ribs are really difficult,” he admits. Currently, they’re marinaded overnight and smoked for seven hours. All of it is a work in progress. “Will it continue to mature? Of course,” Hardy says.
And, with The Stockyards, Barque and other restaurants barbecuing at the top of their game — not to mention the impending presence of Buster Rhino’s Southern BBQ downtown — progress is probably on everyone’s agenda.
Hardys: A Hogtown Brasserie, 992 St. Clair W., 416-901-4100
