Photos by Jennifer Roberts for The Globe and Mail. Read Chris Nuttall-Smith's full review of The Berlin here.
The chef
Jonathan Gushue, who is 45, has one of the best résumés in the business. He trained at Toronto’s Four Seasons Hotel, and then at a high-end resort outside Tokyo, before moving on to the two-star Michelin dining room at London’s Berkeley Hotel. Back in Canada, he was the chef at Truffles at the Four Seasons, at a time when it was one of the most important restaurants in Toronto. He stayed for three years before decamping to Langdon Hall, where his kitchen nudged itself onto the all-important World’s Best Restaurants list.
The room
A great old space in downtown Kitchener, near the offices of Google, Facebook and Square. It has 20-foot ceilings and a working kitchen and room for 120 customers, as well as space for 70 more upstairs. The price for that space was practically a song compared to similar ones in Toronto.
The food
Mr. Gushue’s cooking here is German, roughly, but lighter and more vegetable-forward than you might expect. It is executed a lot of the time with skill and judgment that are impossible to fake. And nearly every dish is in some way touched by his kitchen’s roaring grill, a two-grate number with crank-wheels for raising and lowering – almost every bite twigs campfire memories.
