Buffalo Rising Online

Aug 17th 2007, 2:50pm By Christa Glennie Seychew

Toro is the first restaurant to be featured in the countdown toward the winner of BR's Chef's Challenge: White Cow Yogurt.

Toro’s arrival on Elmwood five years ago marks a time when the avenue was transitioning from a “strip” into a “village”. Owner Nick Kotrides helped to bring about that change with his first establishment, Faherty's, the popular bar with a neighborhood feel that is located next door to Toro.

Toro’s current chef, Justin Brink, studied at the Institute of Culinary Education in Manhattan and then spent a number of years cooking in vacation hot spots for the likes of Emeril Lagasse. Brink has been with Toro since its inception, donning the toak of the executive chef last autumn after Chef Dino Debell moved to Hertel’s Empire Grill, which is Kotrides’ third restaurant venture.

Toro's cuisine revolves around twenty or more plates offered on their standard menu and a lengthy list of specials. This allows Toro to maintain the dishes beloved by its regulars while taking advantage of seasonal ingredients and culinary trends. Because they are inventive, delicious and loved by Toro’s regulars, items like the chicken spring roll, the lobster corndogs with sweet and hot mustard and the tamale of chicken and corn with yellow mole sauce hold their place on the menu. Other dishes, like the soft shell crab “BLT” and the mussels in a chardonnay-plum broth, capitalize on the limited availability of fresh, seasonal ingredients

Occasionally a “nightly special” garners so much attention that it moves onto the standard menu. Take, for example, the dish featuring a portobello mushroom stuffed with ricotta, feta and spinach, wrapped in puff pastry and served with a confit of tomatoes and thyme. Offered as a nightly special for a long time, it can be found on the latest edition of the menu.

When I met with Chef Brink on the day of the tasting, he told me that, once the secret ingredient was revealed, he had considered making something Greek, Middle Eastern or Indian. What he ended up preparing borrows from at least two of those cuisines.

Brink prepared a lamb loin by marinating it in yogurt and garam masala. It was dressed with a creamy yogurt sauce, laden with nicely diced chunks of juicy papaya and habanera peppers. The lamb and its sauce were served on skordilia. Skordilia is a Greek dish traditionally made of potatoes and garlic, but Brink chose to incorporate lemon, ginger and yogurt here as well, leaving the mashed potato-like dish with a bright and tangy flavor. Plated on big slices of yellow tomato dressed with olive oil, the plate was certainly colorful. The lamb was flavorful and cooked nicely, the yogurt filled with sweet papaya and the surprisingly subtle heat imparted by the peppers was especially enjoyable. I think that the skordilia may have been fine on its own or aside a more traditional dish, but in this application it just didn’t fit.

Brink’s use of the yogurt as a marinade for the meat, a binder for the “sauce” and an ingredient in the starch was, to me, the sign of a chef capable of thinking outside of the box and willing to try anything.

Thank you, Chef Brink and Toro, for taking part in Buffalo Rising’s second Chef's Challenge: White Cow Yogurt.

Tune in next Tuesday for the next installment of BR Chefs Challenge: White Cow's Yogurt.


Toro
492 Elmwood Avenue, Buffalo, 14222
716.886.9457