Has Chez Piggy been done to death? Probably. Some of the done-ing by me over the years. I’ve noshed at a good many Kingston restaurants, and written about some of them – Olivea, Casa Domenico, Aqua Terra by Clark come to mind – but I tend to return to The Pig. I still get a good meal, that’s the primo motive. But there are sentimental reasons beyond the food. There is not a restaurant anywhere in my world at whose table I can sit today where I once sat as an 18 year old… no longer anywhere close to just the other day.
Chez Piggy reminds me of its founders. I had a long, liquid lunch with Zal Yanovsky and Rose Richardson in 1999, for a story I wrote on Chez Piggy’s 20th anniversary. Zal died three years later, at 58, just before his second business Pan Chancho Bakery was set to open. The Kingston community lost Rose in 2005.
Chez Piggy reminds me of my dad, who I loved dearly and miss still, and who braved “hippy food” for me in 1980 when he’d stop en route to Ottawa from our Toronto home, to take his daughter to a brand new restaurant she had been aching to try. We share a freshman year, The Pig and I. Its first year of business was my first year at Queen’s University.
And The Pig carries on, poised to enter its 34th year. Remarkable.
It was a wintry lunch, en route from Toronto to Ottawa on a snowy, blowy day. The hands had too long been clenched on the wheel of the wagon. They were in need of being wrapped around a bowl of soup. Ginger squash was the daily offering at Chez Piggy, perky with lime zest and juice, rich and smooth with coconut milk. We shared the soup, and a spinach salad with candied pecans and grated beets. And then a burger – a most excellent burger topped with bacon and mustard and a juicy ripe tomato.
We headed a couple of blocks down Princess Street to Pan Chancho Bakery for dessert and to pick up a tourtiere to pop in the oven for dinner at home. And a jar of smoked paprika because I was out. And two éclairs for the boys at home. Tough to stop pointing to things in cases and reaching for treasures on shelves at this place.
It was good to find the Pig and its Pan Chancho offspring in such good form.
