Posted by Corey Mintz in bbq, restaurant review on August 4, 2007 at 8:11 am

Cluck Grunt & Low
362 Bloor Street West
416-962-5050
dinner for two with all taxes, tip, and beer: $80

I am eating fat. The fat that I’m enjoying used to be stuck between the ribs of a pig. It eased the wear of musculoskeletal expansion/contraction of the ribcage and acted as an insulator to help preserve core temperature and prevent heat loss from the pig’s thorax. Not anymore. The bone resting in my slippery hands was one of the fourteen that protected the lungs and heart. It’s now, stripped of meat, dripping with its own rendered juices mingled with chilies and herbs. The fat was hard, elastic-like. Now it’s soft. It pulls apart at the dull tear of a human’s teeth. I am mesmerised by this rib. Not to be a sore winner but ribcage, you got served. I’m getting ahead of myself though.

Executive chef Marc Thuet (now the sole exec due to the sudden departure of Paul Boehmer) is at the vanguard of something new in Toronto. Opening a rib shack in the Annex AND doing it organic is a double litmus test. We are not a rib town. The menu doesn’t hype it but all of Cluck, Grunt & Low’s produce and meat is organic (from Eigensen Farm). That can mean food costs rising 40% above industry standards. Will Torontonians appreciate this? I hope so. I was talking to an employer once about the possibility of an organic deli in this town and he said, “You can’t expect the consumer to understand the value of your product or appreciate the qualitative difference between you and your competitors unless you market that value to them.” That’s a cleaned up version of what was a potty-mouthed lift of P.T. Barnum’s statement that, “No one ever went broke underestimating the public’s taste”. But early on a Sunday evening, one week after opening, every dark-stained wooden seat in Toronto’s new rib joint is filled with eager carnivores.

It’s pretty raucous and the servers are spinning in circles trying to find the right tables. Still, our food arrives quickly. Two sides accompany a half-rack of Memphis ribs ($14). The coleslaw is a little flat, lacking acidic bite. The baked beans, shiny brown from steeping in Creemore Lager and molasses, stir sweet memories of a childhood I wish I’d had. I can visualize myself propped over the kitchen table, hypnotized by issue # 10 of Secret Wars, shovelling spoonfuls of these yummy beans into a mouth not yet sullied by years of foul language.

I also never ate ribs as a kid. My strongest rib memory is Cliff Huxtable’s yearning for them despite his wife’s caloric finger wagging. Maybe a Jew hasn’t any right to preside over a plate ‘o ribs. But Cluck, Grunt & Low made it personal. The name refers to the fictitious mascots Cluckberg, Gruntstein & Lowenthal, lobbyists against fast food. It would be foolish to get on my high horse about anthropomorphizing food I’m about to eat or animal rights because Thuet would probably start braising the shanks under me. But would it have killed them to change Gruntstein to Gruntington? If only to escape the ire of the JDL?

The ribs are terrific. The line between the succulence of flesh and fat blurs and every gram of edible matter gets gnawed and sucked off the bone fast. Even my aversion to dirty dining hands is tossed aside as I slam dunk the evidence into the table’s bone-bucket (regularly cleared like ashtrays by attentive servers) with a satisfying clank that makes me want to pound more ribs back. Colossal beef ribs slathered in sauce defy my attempts at dignity. They look like the thing that tips Fred’s car over in the opening of The Flintstones.

A pulled pork sandwich ($7) on a kaiser from Thuet’s bakery is crammed with smoked hock meat, moist with tangy house BBQ sauce and padded with the crunch of coleslaw. A side of dirty rice is under-seasoned and peppered with random kitchen scraps (pine nuts, ground beef?) stretched out over rice. Potato salad laced with toasted cumin is a better choice. The brisket ($7) is, though it’s a cliché to say so, dry. But like the service it’s important to remember they just opened. Give ‘em time.

My tummy is hemorrhaging meat. But the sweet, boozy kiss of bourbon ice cream perched on top of a warmed slice of a gooey pecan pie ($6) from Thuet’s bakery is worth the sugar-bullet I take for the team. When the fleshy smoke clears I’m left with the obvious question. It echoes between the posh hardwood floors and the spools of paper towel on the tables, between the “I’m’a get my rib on” old-timeyness of a BBQ shack and the urban fervor for healthy, ethical alternatives found in the restaurant’s tag-line, “Slow Food, Fast”. Is Toronto ready? I hope so.