Thirty in Twenty | Toni Harting at The Department

Vol. 1, No. 5 | Toronto, Ontario | News & features from the good food revolution

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Thirty in Twenty: Toni and Ria's Grand Voyage Gastronomique
by Malcolm Jolley

Ria Harting at lunch at l’Oasis in La Napoule, September 1973. Photo: A. Harting.

As a Dutch teenager during the Second World War, Toni Harting survived the horrors of the concentration camps of Japanese occupied Indonesia. Out of that nightmare he developed a love of freedom and as a young man he travelled Europe and eked out a living as a troubadour (or busker) and hired guitar player. During this time, he acquainted himself with some of the better restaurants of the South of France, where he would earn money by strumming his guitar for the pleasure of their well to do clientele. By the time he was in his mid-forties in 1973, he had settled in Toronto, had married Ria, some 15 years younger than he, and come into a small inheritance left by his mother.

"She would have wanted us to enjoy the money," he explains 36 years later," rather than invest it, or something like that. So we did." In fact, what he and Ria did was to fly to their native Holland to see friends and rent a VW camper van. Then, they drove the van around France towards the Cote d'Azure, dining at ten three-star Michelin Guide Rouge restaurants in 20 days. While they ate like royalty, they lived frugally in the camper. They documented the trip in black and white with a small 35mm camera and saved each menu, wine label and memento in a meticulously kept scrapbook.

All of this would have remained a private memory of a spectacular vacation if Toni Harting had not been planning another exhibition of photographs from his younger days in the South of France at The Department, a gallery and "cultural marketing resource agency" owned and operated by the thirty-something couple Johanna "Joey" Reynolds and Zach Kellum. As Reynolds and Harting planned the show, Harting mentioned the 1973 trip. And when he told Reynolds that he not only had photographs, but he had also kept the menus from each stop, she knew she had to mount another show and decided to involve the Toronto culinary community, enlisting fine food shop Pantry owner Greg Bolton, who then brought on Slow Food Toronto Co-Leader, Hart House Catering Director and uber-event-planner Arlene Stein and JK Kitchens' sommelier Jamie Drummond to organise a series of tastings at the exhibition, which opens to the public on September 4. [Full disclosure: your humble reporter joined the ad hoc group of volunteers as soon as he found out about it.]

Châteaubriand at La Pyramide in Vienne. Photo: A. Harting

Chef Jamie Kennedy, who's signed on to interpret the cooking of the era for the show, was one of the first to recognise the value of Harting's photographs and archive. He notes the trip coincided with a golden age of French gastronomy at the peak of the Trente Glorieuses, with the glamour of Concorde and the arrival of Nouvelle Cuisine. Not that the Hartings were eating anything other than old school, Escoffier and Pointe influenced classics. "No, no there was no Nouvelle Cuisine on the trip," Harting explains, "even Bocuse was very traditional." The couple began their odyssey at Maxim's in Paris and visited iconic restaurants like the Tour d'Argent, Les Freres Troisgros, La Pyramide, Paul Bocuse and La Mere Charles.

Kennedy's enthusiasm for the show is matched by participating chefs Donna Dooher, Eric Walker, Bertrand Alépée, Jason Inniss, Tawfik Shehata and John Lee. A roster of which chef will cook from which menu on which evening this September is posted at thedepartment.ca. And at the time of press, at least one other top Toronto toque may cook a full sit-down dinner based on one of the legendary restaurants.

Next week: Good Food Revelation will report on how the how the Hartings lived and ate on their trip and contemporary chefs plan to approach the menus from 36 years ago.

Malcolm Jolley is the editor of Good Food Revelation.

What To Wear to La Pyramide (If You Live in a Camper Van): Notes on Dressing for Dinner in a Volkswagen Camper Van by Toni Harting.

– The long, pink evening dress was handmade in Toronto by Ria herself from Vogue pattern using material bought at Stitsky’s. Ria also had one short black dress she had made herself. In our hotel in Amsterdam all our evening/restaurant clothes were dry-cleaned or ironed (they had suffered from the flight from Canada) . We then hung them carefully in the Volkswagen Camper so they would stay clean and not wrinkle. During the trip we had Ria’s dresses and my shirts and trousers cleaned and pressed several times during lay-over days in some town or village.

– We cleaned and polished our shoes in the Camper (easy to take all the necessary equipment with you in such a big car); washed socks and underclothes in les campings where we stayed.

– It was quite a production to prepare for the evening’s restaurant visit. We had no full mirrors and did most of the dressing outside the van, which was quite cramped. Fortunately it didn’t rain. In the evening, Ria applied her make-up by the light of a flashlight because the light in the van was quite dim.

– During the day we ate as little as possible so we were nice and empty-bellied when the evening’s gastronomical feast was going to take place.