Deana Lancaster Does Shrooms And Eats Horse at L’Altro Buca

by Deana Lancaster | It’s autumn. Curled and broken leaves layer the sidewalk like sodden paper mâché, and a cement sky is gray with rain. It’s my favourite season, but still, it weighs heavily. Time to pull the crock-pot from its hiding place behind the toaster and load it with browned meat, fistfuls of herbs, and wild mushrooms that taste of the forest they were found in.

Even better: to slip into the quiet, art deco elegance of L’Altro Buca in the West End to satisfy my craving for crispy-skinned meats and the lusty flavours of fungi at Andrey Durbach’s annual Game and Wild Mushroom Festival. The ingredients that Durbach sources – locally foraged morels, chanterelles, matsutake, porcini and field mushrooms – are more varied and pristine than what I can dig up (figuratively, if not literally), and his cooking is much more refined than I can accomplish (with crock-pot or not). Read more