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| Tibetan Food in Parkdale
My husband, Kerry, and I moved to Parkdale in 2001 and plan to never leave this great neighbourhood. Within walking distance from our house there’s a butcher, a produce market, liquor store, Beer store, library, health food store and loads of restaurants. It is the most perfect place to live in all of Toronto. I like to shop daily for whatever I plan to cook that night so I see my butchers, Ivon, Branco and Dragana, pretty much every day. Ivon started working at The Cattlemen’s in 1965 and when the owners retired in 1972 he bought the business. This is an Eastern European butcher shop so I was surprised to see a picture of the Dalai Lama on the wall and Gyuma, Tibetan blood sausage, in the case. One day I asked Ivon about it and he told me there was a Tibetan community in Parkdale and that they are his best customers. “They eat lots of beef. I made around four or five hundred pounds of beef jerky for their Tibetan New Year and I ran out.”
I always thought Tibetans were vegetarian, I guess because the Dalai Lama is.* I was disabused of this notion when I started to take notice of the quantity they buy when at the butcher shop. Sometimes I think the scale is going to give up the ghost under its burden of huge beef cuts. While all the other customers are spending an average of ten to twenty dollars the Tibetans are spending fifty to one hundred dollars. Tibet Kitchen is a new restaurant that opened in June of 2005 just down the street from my house. It’s run by Tenzin Valunbisitsang and his wife Dechen Dolma. I asked Tenzin about the crazy beef consumption and he explained that a vegetarian diet isn’t feasible when living in Tibet, there are not a lot of vegetable gardens around at the base of the Himalayas. “Part of the Tibetan philosophy can be explained like this, if you eat one shrimp it is not enough so you eat ten shrimp. That is ten sins, ten deaths. Whereas with one cow that is one death, one sin that feeds many people.” He went on to say that their diet is mostly confined to what they can get in that climate so lots of beef, yak, cheese, butter and barley flour. “Whatever I’ve learned of Tibetan food I learned from my parents. My father was a chef in Tibet and is now a very popular chef in India. He’s cooked for the Indian Prime Minister and His Holiness the Dalai Lama. He came to Toronto to help me open my restaurant and right now he’s in Boston helping my sister open a Tibetan restaurant there.”
Tibet Kitchen is much more than a restaurant to Tenzin, “opening a restaurant is not just about food itself, it’s about preserving a culture. We have to educate people about Tibetan culture.” Tenzin was born in exile in India and moved to Toronto in 1999, settling in Parkdale. The rent was cheap and there was easy access to the traditional Chinese and Indian ingredients so often used in Tibetan food. Their food is influenced by China and India and very similar to that of Nepal. Soon more immigrants moved here until this part of town started to turn into a Little Tibet. “I’d say there are roughly about five thousand Tibetans here” says Jampa Thardoe, president of Tibetan Cultural Preservation in Canada. “There’s a large Tibetan community in Parkdale and another one around Wellesley and Parliament. I don’t think there’s any specific reason they chose Parkdale, they just settled there and others settled around them.” In the 1970’s there was an influx of Tibetan refugees into Canada, some 350 of them settled in Ontario, starting communities in Toronto, Belleville and Lindsay. To ensure the preservation of their culture in this country they formed the Canadian Tibetan Association of Ontario in 1978. Ugyen Norbu at CTAO filled me in on some of the history that brought Tibetans to Canada. In 1959 there was a Tibetan uprising against the Chinese. The Dalai Lama and approximately 80,000 refugees fled to neighbouring countries while the Chinese People’s Liberation Army slaughtered tens of thousands. “The Canadian government granted refugee protection to the Tibetans who’d escaped. Around 1991 U.S. Congress initiated a program to resettle 1000 Tibetan refugees from India, Nepal and Butan so a lot of Tibetans moved to the U.S. but then opted to come to Canada because the Canadian immigration program is more accessible and less time-consuming. We have a growing number of Tibetans settling here because of Canada’s refugee protection.” I spoke with Losang Gyatso, service chief at Voice of America news radio, which runs Tibetan content daily. “We started the Tibetan content in 1992 or ’93 doing fifteen minutes a day, now we do four hours a day. The programs are primarily transmitted into Tibet where news and information is scarce. A lot of Tibetans around the world use this show as a source of information.” Back in Parkdale, Kerry and I started spending a lot of time sampling the menu on the leafy Tibet Kitchen patio and going to Shangri-La Produce for the braised curry chicken made by Tashi Dolkar and her husband Samten Tsering. Shangri-La Produce is a convenience store with a steam table of delicious food. The constant stream of customers ensures that the offerings are always fresh and hot. Samten told me that the chicken is actually an Indian curry with some Nepali influences, but he added his own Tibetan twist to it. Another Tibetan specialty, bhaley, is deep fried or grilled bread that is excellent, especially the deep-fried version. Bhaley and spicy braised chicken have become a problematic addiction for me. I’m going to get scurvy if I don’t eat a green thing soon.
The thing to remember when you first try Tibetan food is that it is very simple, no heavy seasoning; some dishes are spicy but nothing over the top. The simplicity of it takes some getting used to after our palates have been spoiled by other Asian and Indian foods like Chicken Balls in Shiny Red MSG Sauce, Tandoori Chicken and Lamb Vindaloo. This is food that’s heavily influenced by religion; a lot of the most popular dishes are what a family would traditionally offer monks in exchange for prayers. One such dish, phingsha, is a very light ginger scented broth with dried wood ear mushroom, rice stick, beef and potato. We tried the version at Tibet Kitchen along with another popular dish, momos. Every Asian culture has some kind of dumpling in their repertoire, Tibet’s is the momo and it’s traditionally packed with yak, but here in Parkdale it’s made with beef and onions. Tenzin tells me that dumplings are always served at dinner unless someone at the dinner is moving away, then noodles are served. “The length of the noodles symbolizes a link between you and the person leaving.” For noodles, I tried the Thenthuk at Shangri-La Café, not to be confused with Shangri-La Produce. Chef Sonam Choehdhen makes a light broth then adds hand cut pasta, thin-sliced beef, daikon and scallions. Sip this while sitting on an oriental rug at one of the low tables in the back of the restaurant; it takes you far away from Parkdale. I hit the Rex patio on Queen and University one day to meet with Tshetan, a nomadic yak-herder from Tibet who has lived in Toronto since 2005. Tshetan is one of the few Tibetans I’ve met who wasn’t born in exile and actually grew up in Tibet. “The male is the yak, the female is the dee and she is used only for milk to make butter and cheese. My grandfather would always butcher the yaks in the winter to make jerky. It tastes better in the winter than it does if made in the summer”
His sister used to own a restaurant in Oregon serving yak meat momos. She ordered her yak meat from a distributor in California. I checked online and found the International Yak Association. It’s a pretty wacky website with recipes like Chipotle Yak Chili, or Herb Crusted Yak Tenderloin, it also has the Ode to a Yak Poetry Page that is certainly worth checking out. “The taste of yak is a totally different taste than beef.” Says Tshetan before he goes into a description of a typical nomadic meal where everyone sits around a large roast of yak, carving off slices of meat and dipping them in a chili sauce, while eating this crazy cereal called tsampa, which is made from barley roasted in heated sand. The cooked grain is then ground into flour, then the flour is mixed with water and yak butter to form a thick cereal. Because the grain is roasted prior to grinding the end product is already cooked and can be eaten right out of the grinder. To eat tsampa you want to work it with water to get a play dough-like consistency. Think of it like working clay on a pottery wheel. You want it not too wet, not too dry until it becomes something you can hold in your hand to bite from as you gorge on roast yak. “I grew up eating tsampa and yak jerky; they are very authentic Tibetan foods.” He tells me.
His friend Migmar Tsering elaborates, “In India people eat rice, but for Tibetans tsampa is the main food. Of course that changes a bit in exile, they eat tsampa less. The older people still eat it but the younger people eat more Western food.” Samten sells tsampa at his store, “We buy it from a Tibetan family who roast and grind the barley themselves.” I take a tentative taste, dry flour on a spoon but in my mouth it’s got a very nutty, toasted flavour. He tells me it is eaten with milk for breakfast, kind of like Cream of Wheat but way more finely ground and with no cooking required. I’ve contacted the people at the International Yak Association about getting some yak meat and yak butter. If I get my hands on some then one cold night I’ll gather some friends around a roaring campfire for a moonlit picnic of roast yak, a hearty Niagara wine, bhaley and momos and maybe some sugar pie for dessert. I asked my favourite wine experts what they would choose for a dinner like this. Zoltan Szabo feels a 2005 Château des Charmes St. David’s Bench Merlot or a 2004 Wild Ass Bordeaux blend would go very well with the meat. John Szabo (no relation) recommends Clos Jordanne “Le Grand Clos” Pinot Noir and warns not to overcook the yak. A meal of traditional Tibetan foods with Niagara wines and an Acadian dessert eaten in the great outdoors, what’s more Canadian than that? *Actually the Dalai Lama isn't a vegetarian at all: a reader emailed me right after this story to say he ate lots of red meant when he was in Toronto in the late 90s. But I thought he was a vegetarian at the time. Read All of Ivy's Gremolata articles here. |  |
