Voted Toronto’s most exciting culinary duo by a panel of their peers, Black Hoof’s Jen Agg and Grant van Gameren have changed—and keep on changing—how we dine
Do you know what it’s like to go out in the woods, get down in the dirt, and collect your own mushrooms?,” says Grant van Gameren, chef and co-owner of The Black Hoof. “It’s like an orgasm.”
“An orgasm?” says his business partner, Jen Agg, rolling her eyes. “No, please don’t say that.” Realizing she’s treating van Gameren like a kid brother, which she admits to doing frequently, she laughs. “You start to develop your own language,” Agg says, reflecting on their partnership. “I can’t talk to my husband about food the way I can with Grant. When you find your food family, it lights your life with joy.”
Over the past two and a half years, The Black Hoof, the Dundas West bistro that launched a thousand charcuterie boards, has established itself as one of the most respected restaurants in town. Agg, 35, the fast-talking, intensely opinionated and animated front of house/cocktail wizard, and van Gameren, 29, the fast-talking, intensely opinionated and introverted young carnivore chef, have developed an almost religious following—so much so, that in 2009, they were compelled to open a brunch-focused outpost, Hoof Café, across the street. But as dementedly popular as the second location was, they shuttered it in late February to make way for a new venture. Later this month, when they open The Black Hoof and Company—an intimate, exclusive, chef’s-table restaurant in the old Hoof Café space—the duo will smack the city’s dining scene across the face with their outsized, ballsy ambitions (and prices to match). It’s a big fat roll of the dice, which shouldn’t surprise anyone who knows the Black Hoof story.
Agg and van Gameren come from similar suburban backgrounds. She’s from a loving Scarborough family who were “terrible cooks;” he grew up in Mississauga with a single father (his mother died when he was 11). Agg got into restaurants at 18, as a waitress and then a bartender at Toby’s pub. She later moved on to Souz Dal, then a popular cocktail lounge on College Street, before opening a bar called Cobalt nearby with her ex-husband, when she was 22. Van Gameren got into kitchens in his teens, first at Pizza Pizza and Yogen Früz, then in neighbourhood Italian joints like Sette Mezzo and Il Fornello, before his high school friend Craig Harding (now chef/owner of Campagnolo on Dundas West) got van Gameren a job at the swanky Bay Street haunt Canoe.
A self-taught line cook in a kitchen full of culinary-school graduates, the notoriously shy van Gameren became an obsessive student of fine dining, learning everything he could about technique and ingredients. Within a few months, he left with his colleague Scot Woods to become his sous-chef. After a brief stint at Habitat on Queen West, they installed themselves at Lucien, where Woods earned kudos as an innovator of modernist/molecular cuisine, and encouraged van Gameren’s growth in the kitchen. “Grant has a pure vision, and takes command,” says Woods, “but he’s very natural in the way he handles himself in the kitchen. There’s no chest puffing and ego. He’s not trying to force anything.”
By 2006, Agg’s marriage had ended along with Cobalt, and she spent her time largely at home, supported by her boyfriend (now husband, artist Roland Jean), living what she calls a “glorious housewife’s life” of cooking and entertaining. Agg began to envision opening a place that would capture the informal gatherings she was regularly hosting, centred around a meat and cheese board, good wines and great cocktails. So she put an ad on Craigslist asking for a charcutier, an expert in cured meats.
Van Gameren had been devoting increasing amounts of his time to charcuterie at Lucien. “After working with exact, scientific things in Scot’s modern cooking, this was exactly the opposite,” recalls van Gameren. A sausage takes months to cure. It’s made from tradition and instinct and feel, using flesh that would have been destined for the trash. It’s the opposite of foam and flash freezing. “Hello,” he wrote in response to Agg’s ad, “Charcuterie is the only thing that excites me these days,” and then listed 20 or so meats he’d already been making, with the promise of more. She didn’t write back to anyone else.
They met for breakfast and formed the rough structure for the business: a laid-back, food-first restaurant that would focus on charcuterie and change the way Toronto ate. Their families and friends thought they were both nuts for plunging into a partnership without so much as a contract (they still don’t have one). But in the fall of 2008, on a quiet stretch of Dundas West still dominated by dusty Portuguese shops, Agg and van Gameren opened The Black Hoof with a four-burner electric stove, a hastily assembled hood vent, $60,000 in credit-card debt and a ton of elbow grease.
