Fernando Garcia first earned my respect whilst wielding a raw octopus.
It was the summer of 2001 and the Madrileño chef had invited me, a Star reporter covering the burgeoning trend of Spanish foods, into his kitchen. I watched as he dipped a limp purple octopus into boiling water six times, “to prevent the muscles from tensing up all at once,” before simmering it 45 minutes. The precision of his method, and the butter-tender results it produced, were remarkable.
Garcia was at that time chef at Piatto, an Italian restaurant in Mississauga. But Garcia wanted to cook the food of his homeland. So he opened the Spanish restaurant La Vinia in 2012, on a stretch of Lake Shore Bl. with affordable rents.
La Vinia is a temple of tradition in quiet Mimico. This is where garlic, olive oil and pimentón de la Vera — Spain’s finest paprika, milled from smoke-dried peppers — lay the foundation for classic and generally well-executed tapas and rice dishes. It is quiet, formal and decidedly unflashy, just a 32-seat dining room (the former Café du Lac) with paprika-red walls framing images of flamenco dancers and matadors. It is the antithesis of showy competitors Patria and Bar Isabel.
Garcia, 63, has no desire to reinvent or reinterpret Spanish cuisine, although he counts innovator Juan Mari Arzak as a mentor. He is proudly, resolutely, of the old school. His family ran a restaurant in Madrid for three generations; son Jaime is the fourth, serving La Vinia diners with a cloth napkin over his arm.
Garcia senior hasn’t lost his touch with the octopus ($13.75), which puts up the same resistance as Kim Kardashian to publicity: that is, zero. La Vinia (Spanish for “the vine”) isn’t cheap but it’s real. The wines come from Spanish vineyards Garcia has invested in, like the masculine red Bajondillo Jiménez-Landi from Méntrida with an endless finish at $15 a glass. I’ve paid prices like this on Spain’s Mediterranean coast, except in euros. The currency is more favourable here, even if the frozen Lake Ontario shoreline is no substitute for the sunny Costa Brava.
Love garlic? Let me count the ways La Vinia features the stinking rose. Garlic bulks up the beer used to steam mussels ($11.75). It perfumes the dressing on caesar salad ($8.75) with crisp serrano ham instead of bacon, and underscores the rich tomato sauce in which meatballs loll ($11.95). It infuses the mayonnaise served with a robust tortilla ($10.75). Does the potato-chorizo omelette need the help? No, but the combination tastes wonderful.
Then there’s the garlic soup ($7.75), a deeply flavoured broth served in a white bowl about the size of a baptismal font. It is a meal that originates in poverty, Garcia acknowledges, from ingredients found in even the simplest larder: olive oil, paprika, garlic, water, beaten eggs and stale bread. Think egg-drop soup by way of La Mancha. To heck with Don Quixote’s advice: “Don’t eat garlic or onions, for their smell will reveal you are a peasant.”
La Vinia is where business dinners unfold over shared tapas and a bottle of private import Rioja ($48) and where families celebrate birthdays. Garcia comes out of the kitchen to greet everyone, refilling glasses and gently urging children to finish their dinner with the promise of a special treat. (“He’s like a Spanish Santa Claus,” says the waiter, a Zaragoza native.)
Forget the pastas swimming in sauce. The thing to get is paella, served here in a traditional two-handled metal pan. A single serving is cooked in a foot-wide pan; each is made to order, a 15-minute process, and brought to the table on a cart. After it is shown to the diner, it is portioned out tableside.
Valencian paella ($24.75) disappoints one night, the chicken dry and the bomba rice hard and tasting mainly of green bell peppers. The seafood version ($26.75) is better. The rice is swollen with fish stock, slippery with olive oil and infused with saffron. Add to this tender calamari rings, firm chunks of lobster-like monkfish, tight peeled shrimp, fresh clams and mussels. It makes every homemaker-magazine version you’ve had instantly irrelevant. Don’t force yourself to finish the enormous portions; Garcia says leftovers, when splashed with water and heated five minutes in a 350F oven, are even better.
Still, it doesn’t leave much room for desserts ($9) such as chocolate-infused crème caramel. Or leche frita, freezer- and flour-firmed batons of sweetened milk breaded in panko and fried. With cinnamon sugar and honey to finish, you get why it’s a childhood favourite in Spain.
Speaking with Garcia on the phone for this review, my respect rises even higher. In his rumbling baritone, he repeatedly quotes the cardinal rule of hospitality: “You need to give the customers respect and love.”
I’ve seen this in action at La Vinia, watching Garcia offer complimentary desserts or glasses of Port. (If he recognized me after 13 years, he treated me no differently than other diners.)
Listening to him articulate his guiding principles as a restaurateur — always be on hand; be clean, knowledgeable and consistent; remember that customers aren’t numbers — is a balm after hearing so many chef/owners talk only of food in interviews.
“We have to service the customers. Sometimes, we chefs have too much ego,” Garcia says.
