“WE COULD ALL be eating like kings,” says Brad Long, the gregarious Toronto celebrity chef and renaissance restaurateur. “We should be able to wallow in a great banquet of things.”
Long isn’t making a bold proclamation advocating gluttony. Quite the opposite.He’s referring to the abundance of local, organic and sustainable foods available in Ontario. “We’re in an excellent situation to be eating better than most people.”
Long is chef and owner of Veritas, on King Street East, north of the Esplanade, which he runs with his wife, Sheryl Brooks, who’s also an experienced chef. He was also the co-host of the hit Food Network series Restaurant Makeover, which gave area eateries a fashionably fresh look.
He’s cooked for captains of industry and heads of state, for NBA and NHL stars, for Andrea Bocelli and Avril Lavigne.
Now, he’s in the process of making local, organic and sustainable — the Big 3, as he calls them — the cornerstone of his boldest venture yet. As part of the Evergreen Brick Works’ ongoing multi-million-dollar envirofriendly revitalization project, his Belong Café will open its doors at the end of November.
The café, which will include a take-away counter for “quick snacks on the run,”he says, will rely exclusively on local farms, including his own 10- acre farm north of Stouffville, for all of the ingredients.That means Long will have to be remarkably flexible with his menu. “Instead of me making a menu and then going out and finding the ingredients, I will go out and find the ingredients and then create a menu around them,” he explains.
The Brick Works site will also include Belong Catering as well as a small retail grocery. “We will be bringing in whole animals and sides of beef where there are lots of little bits left over that I can make into a million things. When you break a cow, you get sirloins and tenderloins and also flank steaks, flatirons, hangers, skirt steaks, briskets, and we grind the rest and make meatballs and hamburgers, and people will be able to pick that up to cook at home.”
Long is no stranger to start-up projects. In the mid-’90s, he revamped 360, the revolving restaurant atop the CN Tower.
Then he spent a decade as executive chef with Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment where he was responsible for feeding more than 20 million fans at the Air Canada Centre and BMO Field as well as the Platinum Club. But that doesn’t mean that the mu s i c i a n – t u r n e d – c u l i n a r y cognoscenti was a shoo-in to establish the Evergreen Brick Works’ cuisine.
“I honestly thought they’d never give it to me, not in a million years,” he says.
Nestled into the marshy wetlands of the Don River Valley, the Brick Works was once one of North America’s biggest brickyards, producing more than 43 million bricks a year at its peak, which were used to construct such buildings as Massey Hall and Old City Hall.
Abandoned and in disrepair, the site was turned over to Evergreen, an environmental non-profit, in the late ’90s, which set about the painstaking process of transforming the historic collection of factory buildings, industrial sheds and kilns into a community environmental centre with programs that celebrate the site’s unique geological, industrial and natural heritage.
In 2010, National Geographic named Evergreen Brick Works one of the world’s top 10 geotourism destinations. So there was stiff competition among restaurateurs and catering companies when it came time to accept proposals for the restaurant and catering services. It had to be just the right fit for such an ecoaware organization.
According to a Toronto Life story on the Brick Works, Jamie Kennedy was expected to run the operation until looming bankruptcy threw those plans into disarray (Long says he wasn’t privy as to why Kennedy was not enlisted by Evergreen). Still, it was Evergreen that sought Long out.
“I got a phone call last October or November asking if I’d be interested. I was overwhelmed with so many things at the time I actually said no,” he says, as if he can’t believe his own story.
“I got a call back asking if I was sure. No one ever calls back, so I thought I better do it or I’d regret it.”
Long put together a proposal that included the Belong Café, the catering company and the small grocery, unsure if Evergreen was looking to divide things up among several proprietors or not.
“I love the whole vertical integration, from quick-service windows or counters to the restaurant to catering. It’s like a cow — you can use more ingredients if you are in charge of the whole operation. They wanted everything from a food court to a quirky, beautiful restaurant to a caterer, and I swallowed the blue pill.”
He even swallowed the idea of the name of the restaurant, Belong Café, being a play on his own name, something he’d resisted in the past because of the “hokey marketing” connotations behind it.
It seems Long has gotten used to putting his name on things. He’s currently in post-production on a documentary he’s made tentatively called The Long Way Around. It’s about what it means to be local, organic and sustainable.
And as if there weren’t already enough on Long’s plate, he’s also an associate producer on a rom-com mockumentary called The Untitled Work of Paul Shepard.
Oh, and he’s also learning how to be a farmer. He and his wife and their five kids spend a lot of time taking care of the ducks, geese, chickens, turkeys and laying hens and tending the market garden on their farm.
“It’s not about becoming a farmer but about learning the pieces and processes of being a farmer so I can be a better chef,” he says. “And maybe next year we’ll get a small herd of sheep.”
