Sash Restaurant and Wine Bar, now open at Yonge and Summerhill, is the new home base of chef Sash Simpson, formerly of Mark McEwan’s North 44 and Bymark. “I wanted my clients to have somewhere where they could see me every day,” Simpson says, and he means it. When he’s not cooking and plating in the open kitchen at the end of the dining room, he often comes out to greet patrons during service. The restaurant’s name isn’t just branding: when you pay a visit to Sash, you really are paying a visit to Sash.

Simpson has long dreamed of a place of his own. “I think 6 years ago it hit me,” he says. “I knew the time would come, and it had to be the right time.” With the closing of North 44 last summer, the right time finally came. Over the next year, he and his team built Sash from the bottom up, kitchen and all.

He chose a black and gold colour scheme for the interior, which Studio A/C developed into a minimalist luxe dining room with a gradient concept that mimics the way light comes in from the room’s big street-facing windows. Even the location seems chosen by fate: “I grew up in Forest Hill, and I've known the Forest Hill and Rosedale area since I was 7 years old,” he says. “The fact that I grew up in this area just makes it more of a story for me.”

Story is what drives every aspect of Sash, including the menu. The global reach of Simpson’s food comes from his global roots and growing up in a diverse family in a multicultural city, and he takes inspiration from French, Indian, Japanese, and North American cuisines, among others.

The lunch menu, designed with the neighbourhood’s ladies who lunch in mind, is stacked with classic American fare like Cobb salad ($27) and lobster roll ($28). Dishes are elegant and unfussy: the foie gras torchon ($26) comes plated like a Bauhaus construction, but all the elements (tart pickled rhubarb, a sweet sesame tuile) fold together on a single triangle of brioche.

Dinner is a more robust affair, with elements from the lunch card (foie gras and rhubarb, ahi tuna) reworked into more substantial dishes. A highlight is the squab leg confit, paired with morels and two subtly minted pea ravioli ($48). It’s the menu’s thesis statement: a meat that’s unfamiliar to many North American diners, prepared deliciously. “We want to teach people about food. When I have it on the menu, you keep seeing the squab, and eventually you try it.” The curious (or simply savvy) are rewarded with firm, succulent flesh and a hankering the next time they return.

The cocktail menu aspires to play on the same level as Simpson’s food. The menu’s experiments can be fun (Soho Lychee-infused watermelon) or intellectual (an homage to Thelonious Monk involving tequila, chartreuse, and spherical ice), but all of them are meant to tickle your brain, and make you think twice about what you’re sipping on.

 

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Posted on: June 24, 2019 By: Madeleine Lee