Jason Carter has finally made his way out of the master’s shadow after being groomed for the last decade by Susur Lee, Toronto’s most internationally acclaimed chef. Did he settle for a small bistro and go all artsy to make a name for himself? Not a chance.
Carter has decided to tackle a beast of a restaurant head-on: Centro, the massive landmark Midtown restaurant that was formerly home to the city’s leading culinary heavyweights, including Marc Thuet, David Lee, Michael Bonacini, Chris MacDonald and many more. Is he ready? You better believe it.
“That was a big part of what swayed me,”says Carter, of his reasons for moving north to Centro. “It has been a culinary institution in the city for almost 25 years. Now it is in my power to revive it. I’m going to give it a shot. I’m definitely up to the challenge.”
Not satisfied with the hodgepodge menu direction that featured everything from a sushi bar to French cuisine, Carter has started to revamp Centro from the ground up, starting with the food.
“I think it was really unclear to people what kind of food was here. On the menu there was French, classic North American, Asian, a sushi bar and all this kind of thing,” says Carter.
“You could have whatever you wanted. It was like a buffet in Vegas sort of thing, you know.”
According to Carter, the Centro kitchen will be turning out Mediterranean cuisine, some Spanish, Portuguese, pastas, making local products the focus. But, with customers that want what they want when they want it, born and bred veal chop and rack of lamb lovers, is the former King Street hotshot’s haute cuisine too much for Midtown?
“The clientele, they’ve been eating here for years, and they are definitely the mainstays of the restaurant, so it is a bit of a give and take,” says Carter. “I need to get them to trust us a little bit. It has been — it is — a very slow process.… They are not used to my style, so I am going to keep it really simple, really good value.”
His vision: first up, lose the whole pretentiousness label that, accurately or not, has been weighting the pretty lady down as of late.
“Ya, I’d like to break that stigma, that pretentious stigma. We just love food here,” says Carter. “The service is going to be high quality, the food high quality, but this isn’t a snotty place. The younger diners I had down on King Street, the hipsters, might not be so keen to give it a try, but once you get in the room, it is a pretty chill place to be.”
Carter was plucked from his King West kitchen by owner Armando Mano, who has seen the best chefs in the city come and go over his 22 years at Centro.
Mano admits that there were a few “hiccups” over the first few weeks before describing Carter as a “one of a kind individual.”
“When the time came, and changes were going to be made, I had a window of time to find a new chef, and I always thought of Jason very highly,” says Mano. “His knowledge and passion about food got me very excited. But could a chef of his calibre adapt to the Centro beast?”
The answer seems to be yes.And that might be thanks, at least in part, to Carter’s upbringing in the blue-collar, border town of Windsor, Ont.
It was there that Carter got his start in the dish pit of a nursing home before graduating to the dish pit of an Italian restaurant opened by the nursing home staff.
“The women who were running it took me under their wings, and when they opened a restaurant, they shifted me over there.” he explains.
Carter continued to ply his trade part-time while attending the University of Windsor before dropping out to move to Toronto to pursue a career as a chef.
“There comes a point when you have a lot of time invested in this, and it would be silly to push it all away,” says Carter.
“I mean, I get to come in every day, people are always happy in a restaurant.… I don’t count beans, and I don’t swing a shovel, but there is a good mix of blue and white collar.”
Mano, for one, describes Carter’s work ethic as “mind boggling.”
“To see a chef like him come in at the time he does, early in the morning, go to the food terminal to buy his own produce and fruit, trim his own meat and then at 11:30 at night be scrubbing his own kitchen floor?” Mano laughs.
“I spend most of my time saying, ‘Jason go home.’”
When Carter arrived in Toronto, he worked down the street from Centro at North 44° for more than a year before his decade-long partnership with Susur Lee.
A collaboration that included opening Susur and Lee in Toronto as well as Shang in New York City, Zentan in Washington, D.C., and countless cooking gigs around the world that Lee would attend with his crew in tow. Not a bad learning experience for a young cook.
“I could never repay him for the things he taught me — as far as cooking goes — in a couple of lifetimes,” says Carter. “He’s been very supportive. It was more than a work relationship. I mean, I travelled around the world with him.”
His time with Lee meant, when the time came, Carter could pretty much pick and choose his exit.
But, perhaps not surprisingly, he chose the path of most resistance. “I really had to gear up. Lots of chefs leave to go to smaller places, a little more artisan, little more control, can dabble,” says Carter. “This is a much bigger lady for sure.”
