Jan. 18, 2003. 11:31 AM
From waiters' lips to diners' hips
City misses mark with Eat Smart
AMY PATAKI
RESTAURANT CRITIC DINING OUT
The road to health is paved with good intentions.
Take New Year's resolutions. We talk about eating better and exercising more. Following through is a different story.
The City of Toronto also has the best intentions in promoting a healthy restaurant program called Eat Smart. You may have noticed the red apple/heart logo on the walls or in the windows of some of the 137 member dining establishments. The logo designates restaurants that guarantee total smoke-free dining, safe food handling and healthy menu choices.
When it comes to healthy fare, however, the Eat Smart program fails like so many post-holiday diets. At the restaurants I visited looking for a healthy meal, I encountered blank looks and unsound advice from servers on what to eat or avoid.
"It's hard to come to a place like this and eat light" is not the sort of thing you want to hear from your waitress when you're out on a diet.The best most restaurants could offer was to bring my salad dressing on the side.
Eat Smart is a province-wide program endorsed by the Canadian Cancer Society and the Heart & Stroke Foundation of Ontario. In Toronto, restaurant inspectors and two part-time dietitians make the assessments. It's free for restaurants; the city absorbs the cost of menu consultations and promotion.
Restaurants must have at least 12 months of excellent inspection reports and at least one full-time kitchen employee who has taken a three-hour food-handling course.
Nutrition training isn't required. As long as there are a variety of healthy foods, either on the menu or by request, any type of restaurant can make the cut, such as four of the city's Manchu Wok locations.
"It doesn't mean the restaurant is completely healthy. The restaurant provides choices and it's up to the consumer to make those choices," says Joanne Figliano, a public health nurse and Toronto Eat Smart co-ordinator.
But how do you make the right choices when wait staff are clueless? I, too, had only good intentions in planning this story, intended to be a review of healthy meals in the city. I wanted to endorse Eat Smart. Then I started eating and realized that, on the front lines, Eat Smart is losing the battle of the bulge.
Waiters steered me toward fatty duck, heavily buttered mashed potatoes and cheese-covered salad greens as healthy options. It was good food, mostly, just not good for me.
"You can't expect wait staff to make nutritional recommendations. They may be on their own crazy diet," says Liz Pearson, a registered dietitian in Toronto and co-author of The Ultimate Healthy Eating Plan (That Still Leaves Room for Chocolate). Pearson agreed to review three of the menus and comment on their healthiness (for her dining suggestions, see sidebar).
"It's something public health is working at," acknowledges Figliano. "`How can we better prepare staff to educate consumers?'"
They can start with the Rosedale Diner (1164 Yonge St., 416-923-3122), a neighbourhood favourite where the Eat Smart logo beckons from the steamy front window.
A perusal of the Mediterranean-leaning menu one night shows rivers of butterfat and oceans of frying oil. I nod toward the Eat Smart certificate posted prominently on the wall and ask the harried waiter which appetizers are healthy.
He waves his hand over the menu like a conjurer performing an illusion. "All our appetizers are good for you," he intones.
Like what, Mr. Nutrition? Fried calamari? Fatty ribs? Frites with garlic mayonnaise?
The sleight of hand fails. He then recommends the caesar salad — traditionally dressed with heart-clogging egg yolks, olive oil and grated parmesan — since the restaurant doesn't use egg yolks. That still leaves the oil and cheese. Instead, I ask for the house salad ($6), a ho-hum toss of organic baby greens with cassis vinaigrette on the side.
Even the waiter is forced to acknowledge that main courses are problematic.
"They all have cream and butter," he admits.
"I could get the kitchen to make you a steak without butter and substitute grilled vegetables for the mashed potatoes."
Then he recommends a crisp-skinned duck confit with Moroccan vegetables and couscous ($21) as the healthiest choice, warts and all. Let me repeat: Crisp-skinned. Confit. Confit is meat cooked slowly in its own fat. It's delicious, no question. I pick the skin off the tender flesh, quite sure the Heart & Stroke Foundation has no idea what's been perpetrated in its name.
"Duck tends to be very fatty," says Pearson. "There are a lot of unhealthy fats on the menu, lots of cheese and cream."
Rosedale Diner owner Dubi Filar says 40 per cent of his customers are on the Atkins Diet, the controversial protein-heavy regimen that he says helped him lose 30 pounds in a year. He says his staff knows which dishes are Eat Smart.
Why not just print healthy options on the menu?
"It would take up too much space," Filar says.
ADDED HEALTH BENEFIT: Struggling to open the heavy door should burn off a few calories.
At least at midtown bistro Quartier Restaurant (2112 Yonge St., 416-545-0505), the waitress doesn't try and pull the whipped cream over my eyes.
"It's hard to come to a place like this and eat light," she commiserates. "This menu is difficult."
By asking herself the age-old question, "What would I eat here if I were on a diet?" the slender waitress recommends starting with a green salad, dressing on the side. For mains, the vegetarian plate ($17), "which may have some risotto, but you can ignore that and eat all of the healthy vegetables."
But the salad ($6.50) comes tossed with olive and vegetable oils, red wine vinegar and shallots. It's perfect, as well-dressed as a chic Parisienne. Just as delicious are the buttery mashed potatoes sculpted like waves that come with the main course. The plate also holds buttery phyllo pastry tubes filled with minced mushrooms (sautéed in vegetable oil), gratinéed tomatoes, a crispy risotto cake (not really vegetarian since it's made with chicken stock), tender flageolet beans "for protein," garlicky wilted greens and mushy batons of lightly buttered salsify, carrots and green beans.
It's tasty, all right, but is it healthy?
"The type of fats used [should be] heart-healthy fats, like extra-virgin olive oil or canola oil," says Pearson, who commends the bean component. "Many restaurants offer vegetarian plates that simply don't contain meat and in some cases are high in unhealthy fats, such as many vegetarian lasagnas."
Better still is the moist grilled salmon fillet ($19), recommended by both the waitress and Pearson. The waitress brings the soy-based sauce on the side, "in case sodium is an issue," along with blanched vegetables and steamed potatoes.
Hardly anyone orders these dishes for their health benefits, says Quartier owner Marcel Rethoré.
"Most people ask for french fries," he says.
He says he joined Eat Smart for extra exposure. "It's the same as looking for the green, yellow or red [restaurant inspection cards]. Some people will check for it," says Rethoré.
ADDED HEALTH BENEFIT: Stale bread in breadbasket makes it easy to skip extra calories.
I first saw the Eat Smart logo five years ago at Bacchus Roti (1376 Queen St. W., 416-532-8191), a Parkdale storefront as proud of its Guyanese roti as its many Lifestyle Awards for nutrition from the Toronto Public Health Department.
Roti is a thin shell folded around curried filling.
"All our food is healthy," says the counter clerk. "We use canola oil, our roti shells are whole-wheat and our meat is trimmed of fat."
Sounds good. We order then sit down under paper pineapples to await the food.
It's not long in coming. A bowl of creamy yellow dal ($1.50), the lentil soup holding melting cubes of potato, is well flavoured by cumin and free of grease.
Fat rotis, the pliant shells flecked with wheat bran, are the size of pillows. Chickpea-potato filling ($4.75) is bland. It's clearly more virtuous than the peppery special ($8.50) of shrimp, sautéed spinach, gooey cheddar and mashed squash because the special tastes much better.
For all its virtues, though, the restaurant falls down when the smell of cigarette smoke wafts out of the men's washroom.
"Someone's been smoking in the boys' room," my lunch date says, jokingly.
ADDED HEALTH BENEFIT: Save the fat grams and avoid the deep-fried bready fritters.
One Eat Smart restaurant I can't recommend for its advice or its taste merits is Ferro (769 St. Clair Ave. W., 416-654-9119), a popular pizza-and-pasta place on the fringes of Corso Italia.
Ironically, Ferro has the most healthy options of any of the restaurants I visit, says Pearson. It just can't get the message out.
When I ask the waiter for healthy food, he asks me "to be more specific." He has never heard of Eat Smart, to which Ferro has belonged for eight years. But that doesn't stop him from recommending lean fare. His qualifications?
"I eat here every day," says the waiter, gesturing toward his boyish hips.
He steers me toward linguine with garlic and olive oil and any of the salads. Of course, I order the dressing on the side.
The vinaigrette is the least of my problems. A layer of asiago as deep as a snowdrift blankets the Ferro salad ($8.25), covering tasteless tomatoes, acrid red onion slices, arugula and bitter roasted red peppers.
Linguine contadina ($12.95) is al dente pasta awash in garlicky oil; wilted spinach and mushrooms add colour. Each forkful drips golden oil, which coats my lips as thickly as the gloss shellacking the pouts of fellow diners. Halfway through, I tilt the bowl to collect the oil, spooning 3 tablespoons worth on to a bread plate. Good thing, too.
"It's not that olive oil isn't heart-healthy, it's just a concentrated source of fat and calories," explains Pearson. "You can get away with more olive oil if you're maintaining your weight, but not everybody can do that."
Not that I'm missing anything by ordering light at Ferro. Grilled calamari ($13.95) is so chewy you need a steak knife to cut it. Bits of shell lurk under the cheese atop a seafood pizza ($13.95), waiting to break a tooth. Gummy veal piccata ($18.95) is partnered by a mound of mashed potatoes stained blotchy red with sun-dried tomatoes; one sweet-salty bite is enough to kill the appetite of even the hungriest dieter.
"The majority of our customers come in here because we offer a more light-hearted menu," says kitchen manager Marisa Pronesti.
"Absolutely the staff knows which items are healthy. They eat it every day."
ADDED HEALTH BENEFIT: Get exercise weaving through the crowd on your way to the bathroom.
To make Eat Smart really work, restaurant staff need to understand what healthy eating is. There are too many misconceptions out there, as my experiences show. Make mandatory nutrition training part of the program — in the form of a three-hour seminar — and everyone benefits. Anything beats the current system of expecting restaurants to educate staff.
"We send the restaurants pamphlets so staff are knowledgeable and can help consumers with their choices, but it's up to the restaurant to take the initiative," says Eat Smart's Figliano.
If only the healthier items were marked by hearts or asterisks, but that's "not actually legal unless it has gone through the proper nutritional analysis," she explains.
So, break the law and live a little. A little longer.
Additional articles by Amy Pataki
TheStar
Promoting and regulating unhealthy EatSmart meals at restaurants - Toronto
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