By: Laua Pratt
“[dropcap size=big]G[/dropcap]ood common sense, a good mother and a good grandmother” — and not eccentric and esoteric nutritional training — provided the foundation for brothers Lucas and Jacob Sharkey Pearce’s unique restaurant, Ursa. The eatery, which has operated from digs on Toronto’s hip Queen West since early 2012, is celebrated for its experimental cuisine, which has been hailed on best-of lists in EnRoute and Toronto Life magazines, among others.
The concept, says Jacob, came about in response to questions that were plaguing the siblings with regard to food systems and restaurants. “We didn’t like that you couldn’t go to a restaurant and have someone explain the real purposes behind the choices they’d made and the function and nutrition of the food they served,” he said.
And so, drawing deeply from a stint designing raw-food diets for pro athletes, the brothers Sharkey Pearce opened a restaurant that spotlights the link between the food you put into your body and what you get out of it. The result is a menu that has a health-food influence, with such nutritionally rich oddities as stinging-nettle spaghetti, sunflower milk and wild foraged greens ($17).
And, although the nutrition company the siblings started (Two Brothers) still lives in the background at Ursa, the older brother is taking the lead on projects involving the development of a food lab to showcase the restaurant’s proven capacity to operate as a commercial purveyor of functional foods. Lucas, Two Brothers’ creative director, is also overseeing Ursa’s participation in Culinaria, a joint New York University/University of Toronto program applying a multidisciplinary approach to food security, urban agriculture, nutrition and cultural sensitivity, and developing the Salt Springs Seed Sanctuary of Canada, an initiative to cultivate a seed bank on the West Coast.
Back at the restaurant, the majority of the menu — which changes regularly — is based on vegetables and grains, although meat has its place, too. Since January, Ursa’s co-owner and executive chef, Jacob, has personally slaughtered all the four-legged animals served on his plates. It is, he says, “One
more step in understanding the process.” The first was hard, he admits. On the second, he cried. And by the third, he says, “It just made sense.”
But Jacob focuses his energy on vegetarian fare. And, in anticipation of a time when there will be less access to “four-legged animals” as a primary source of food, Ursa’s menu spotlights protein alternatives.
In meat’s place, Jacob proposes insects and mealworms, and he has taken on the formidable task of indoctrinating the population to their palatability. “It’s uncomfortable how delicious they are,” enthuses the 32-year-old, who has a childhood memory of sitting in front of his grandparents’ house eating ants. “[They taste] like toasted nuts. If you don’t like them, just close your eyes. You have to take away the yuck factor.” It’s no mean feat, concedes the man invited to cook “future food proteins” at this year’s Mad (the Danish word for “food”) symposium in Copenhagen, Denmark.
Jacob has executed his unique food philosophy with an eyes-open appreciation to the risks. “The first years were great,” he says. Lucas adds: “We have guests coming in from Sweden, Paris and London, and chefs love it, but we’ve struggled for traction with the local crowd. Toronto sometimes needs a simple answer. Spaghetti. Tacos.”
But Jacob, who has worked at Toronto’s Windsor Arms Hotel, Thuet Bistro and Centro, says he’s found his calling. His experience with athletes trained him on cause-and-effect eating. To witness the points NBA players achieved after consuming high-performance foods compared to when they were on long road trips, “eating like shit,” was an awakening. “We all react like this. We just don’t pay attention,” he explains.
It’s why much of the menu at Ursa — named for a constellation, which resembles a soup ladle, and because Jacob’s childhood nickname was Bear cub, another name for the Ursa Minor constellation — is conceived with the food’s function in mind. Is it anti-inflammatory? Does it have enough good bacteria? Is the dairy probiotic? Is the turmeric a medicinal grade? Is the fibre in the raw bread prebiotic? Are the dishes served in an order that capitalizes on how the digestive tract absorbs them? Think root vegetable tartare with cocoa, house-made white miso and shiso ($15), and walnut foie with sprouted ancient grains, escarole, high bush cranberry and orange ($27).
If you ate at the restaurant regularly “You’d be like LeBron James,” says Jacob. Although he admits he hasn’t done enough to inform the public about what to expect at his special restaurant before welcoming them into it. “The average person comes here and expects an eight-ounce steak. They want to know, ‘Why are you serving me kombucha [a lightly effervescent fermented drink of sweetened black tea]?’” he says.
So, although Ursa is primarily a spot for special occasions, Jacob is planning a menu shakeup to make the restaurant more accessible. “I’ve been told that our level of cuisine is either suited for a $400 tasting menu to make it sustainable for us and to give it the cachet it needs to succeed, or to become a little cheaper. So we’re doing both.” That means opening up the $75 five-course, $90 seven-course and $105 nine-course tasting menus, which Jacob concedes are above most folks’ price range, as à-la-carte options, so now guests will be able to order a single plate and a drink and spend just $25. It might also mean serving exclusive offerings from a dining room add-on to the fledgling food-development lab under cultivation on the restaurant’s second floor.
Either way, Jacob pitches forward, although he’s aware of the toll it takes to run a restaurant like Ursa. “I have worn myself down,” he confesses. “You put so much energy into every detail of this.” The “details” include picking fish up personally from fishermen in Georgian Bay, Ont., and soy beans from a Mennonite farmer near Orangeville, Ont., making soy milk from scratch and maintaining a garden and insect farm on the restaurant’s upper level. Travelling that far into your own supply chain, Lucas guesses, adds about 200 hours a week to a restaurant’s operation.
It’s worth it, believes Terry Kobayashi. It’s why he left his executive sous-chef post at Momofuku this past spring to join buddy Jacob as an Ursa partner. “We do things that nobody else does, almost 100 per cent of the time, anywhere,” he says.
“[You couldn’t guess] the number of times I’ve been told that it’s going to be a long, hard fight,” sighs Jacob. “But it needs to happen. It needs to be demonstrated that a small business can function under these constraints. I figured out a way to do that; I have a model. Now I just need to make a little bit of noise and get people’s attention.”
And, he’s got “a bunch of things” planned to attract diners, including launching Monday dinners in the fall with the Canadian Chefs’ Congress and Michael Stadtländer to raise awareness for issues — such as the news that pesticides are killing Ontario’s bees — but also to bring people through the doors. That’s the ticket.
