After a weekend of great eating, including a perfect Arctic char, grilled at home, I’m borrowing from author Calvin Tompkins and reflecting, once again, that eating well is the best revenge.

On Friday, a friend who works in Toronto’s King-Parliament area, or “Corktown” as it’s being re-christened, invited me to sample the wares at Jamie Kennedy’s new eatery, Gilead Café (4 Gilead Place; 647-288-0680).  It’s an industrial space – nothing fancy, just the anteroom to Kennedy’s new catering kitchen – but the place was really hopping.  And why wouldn’t it be? The area is a gastronomic abyss and Kennedy’s arrival is an exciting event for those who would like to become accustomed to running out for exquisite nibbles on a whim.

At the outset, I should probably confess to a bias: I’ve always been in love with the idea of eating first- rate food in less-than- auspicious surroundings. To me it firmly establishes excellent food as a non-negotiable pleasure, one that doesn’t require pretentious accessories in order to be enjoyed. One of my favorite restaurants in the world is Fishy Fishy, located in the town of Kinsale on Ireland’s south coast, near Cork.  When I visited, it served fabulous fish in a setting not entirely unlike Gilead. Industrial tables and chairs were jammed in around the take-out and fresh fish counter. (The restaurant component has since moved to a more auspicious location.) People started lining up for lunch 45 minutes before the doors opened and, as line-averse as I am, I was happy to be among them.

At Gilead Café, the lines are still inside but the sense of workaday chic prevails. There is a blackboard menu, listing soups, sandwiches, salads and Kennedy’s iconic fries with mayo.  Somewhat reluctantly, we gave the fries a pass and savored a potato and whitefish salad, a wild leek tart and a selection of sheep’s milk cheeses from Montforte Dairy. While all hit the spot, the tour de force was dessert: A panna cotta made with sheep milk’s yogurt and seasoned with cardamom. It was a perfect combination of texture and flavor, rich luscious sheep’s milk balanced with acid and sweetly pungent cardamom.  I could eat one now.

Sunday morning we headed up north to enjoy Eigensinn Farm’s annual Maple Syrup and Wild Leek Festival, staged by Michael Stadtlander and a panoply of his chef friends, including Jeff Crump of the Ancaster Old Mill, Adam Colquhoun of Oyster Boy, Mark Cutrara of Cowbell, and none other than Jamie Kennedy, who played short-order cook in the forest, serving up scrumptious farm fresh eggs on a bad of rosti, topped with wild leeks.

It was a gorgeous day, sunny but not too hot and except for the traffic jam on the 400, a perfect excursion.  After the traffic stress and the short hike to the farm’s back 40, where the plethora of smoking grills under the forest canopy kept bugs at bay, ice cold oysters from PEI”s Colville Bay really hit the spot. No matter what anyone says, when it comes to oysters, I don’t think you can beat a good Canadian Malpeque and these are, quite simply, the best. In addition to the eggs with rosti, there was an abundance of succulent pork served in a variety of ways: spit roasted with mouthwatering cracklin, wrapped in tortillas with a wild leek sauce or as sausage on a bed of red cabbage. (I didn’t ask because to be frank, I’m still a bit squeamish about such matters, but assumed the pork was sourced from Michael’s Red Wattle Pigs, some of which were busy foraging up the road.) Elk in a cone of mashed potatoes with a red wine and maple syrup sauce was a great hit, as were the morels in cream sauce. For dessert, we enjoyed beignet with maple sugar and a kind of rhubarb coulis, although I don’t know what Michael actually called it.  It was a perfect way to pass the day and even the traffic was kind on the way home.

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