There are good chefs, there are great chefs—and there is famed Toronto chef George Washington.
While other wannabe cooks were fumbling, burning and overcooking in fast food kitchens, learning to cook by trial and error, Washington was a wunderkind, working alongside his mother as soon as he could walk to help create meals for friends and family gatherings. When guests tasted what he had made, they would praise the precocious cook.
“Wow, this is good,” Washington recalled them saying.
A natural aptitude for cooking got him noticed by the Sheraton Hotel during a high school food course. The hotel restaurant took him on as a chef’s apprentice and began schooling him in French cuisine. By 16, Washington had graduated to a managerial position at Le Papillon, an upscale French restaurant in his hometown of Toronto, Canada. One year later, the owner of Red Tomato, a quadruple set of high-end restaurants in the city, was calling on Washington to run his kitchens. At an age when most kids would be going on their first dates or applying to college, Washington had accomplished what many chefs never do in a lifetime. To Washington, however, the position was merely the next logical step in his career.
“I started early,” says Washington. “I got involved. I got to build a good name for myself.”
A talent like his couldn’t be confined to someone else’s kitchen for long and soon Washington was considering his own restaurant venture. He was nervous, but his wife reminded him of one very important thing. “This is your dream,” she said to him.
With that little nudge, Washington began digging into funds from his own subcontracting small business to finance a restaurant start-up. But, success didn’t happen overnight. “I had to be very patient,” Washington says. “Money is not something that is given to you.”
Over time, the Jamaica native scraped together enough dough to open the doors of Room Service, a West Indian and French-fused restaurant that is a classy, quiet alternative to typical colorful, cymbal-clanging Caribbean restaurants. The restaurant’s interior is muted and seductive, allowing the food to take center stage.
The fusion dishes, created by Washington himself, are Jamaican enough to honor his island roots, such as the truffle dish made out of fried plantain and coated in a coconut, raisin and rum sauce, yet French enough to satisfy the elite taste buds of the haute hungry, as in the case of his chicken breast stuffed with callaloo, bacon, zucchini, mushrooms, bell peppers and onions and finished off with a white wine reduction that will have the epicurean, according to Washington, licking the plate. The food must be good; after only two years, Room Service has earned a 4.5 out of 5 rating with tripadvisor.com and a #12 ranking out of 3,170 other restaurants in the city.
Room Service’s cuisine is so darn plate-licking, finger-cleaning, pant-loosening good, in fact, that it has the ability to bring folks to tears, such as the time when a respected chef, eating an anniversary dinner with his wife, became wet-eyed and speechless after tasting Washington’s oxtail dumplings. “I don’t know what you’ve done, but my husband don’t react like that,” Washington remembered the chef’s wife saying to him.
Washington is to food what Justin Bieber is to a legion of female fans. Like Bieber, he is only getting bigger with plans to open two more locations in Toronto and continue wowing audiences with the best French-Caribbean food in the country.
“My food is very unique,” says Washington “It cannot be placed in a box.”
For more information about Room Service, visit www.roomservicetoronto.com or call 416-654-7666. You can also find the restaurant on Facebook.
