Timothy Taylor's new book digs into the restaurant industry
The Rise and Fall of Magic Wolf follows a young chef named Teo in Paris and Vancouver
Timothy Taylor.
IF YOU LOVED the TV show The Bear, you’ll like The Rise and Fall of Magic Wolf. The new work of fiction by Timothy Taylor is set within the restaurant industry, with all its “behind, behind”s and other kitchen talk.
The book follows the career and life of lead character Teo (aka “Teo Tranquille”), who trains in a Paris eatery and returns to Vancouver to open first one, then two, then three new dining establishments with a business partner; there are so many late nights, affairs, and, ultimately, tragic scenarios that cause the restaurant group to collapse.
Starting in the mid ’90s, Taylor’s full-time job was freelance magazine journalism, and in that role he wrote a lot about kitchens, cooks, chefs, restaurants, and the whole food and beverage scene.
“I loved that work,” says Taylor, whose other books include 2001’s Stanley Park, about a young Vancouver chef. “And it reflected that this is just a core preoccupation for me: the way people eat, what they say about themselves with the way they eat, and how people talk about the place where they live using this same ‘language’ of food. And so it was kind of inevitable that I’d make my way back here in fiction eventually as well.
“The specific inspiration for the book was a series of events in the real world that drew our attention to the challenges of working in restaurants, the real darkness that can sometimes enter the workplace—and indeed all workplaces—in the form of abuse and mistreatment of employees,” Taylor tells Stir. “And with these real-world inspirations, I was drawn back into the world, crafting a story of enormous success and subsequent failure that allowed me to depict and discuss these types of events.”
Foodies will love the references to the world of dining throughout the oeuvre. “Every customer was a potential Magic Wolf brand ambassador,” Taylor writes in the book. “So every detail at a Magic Wolf restaurant had to be perfect, every element of décor, service, and food. At Rue Véron we were going for the impossible refinement and reserve of the French Laundry, the depth and honesty of flavours you’d find at Chez Panisse, the wow factor of the Fat Duck or El Bulli.”
Then there are detailed food descriptions, like one of the prep involved in making filets of mullet in a red-wine sauce: “Gauthier and I lifting the largest stockpot we had in the kitchen, three feet deep and wide, swinging it up onto a gas ring in the back corner, adding the halibut bones; food processor-loads of garlic, celery, carrot, shallot; branches of thyme; and handfuls of bay and peppercorns. My forehead glistening with sweat. And then the wine. It was a mid-range Côtes du Rhône that we used with our family meal. Bottles and bottles of it. I lost track after four cases were gone as I uncorked them and handed them over, Gauthier dumping in two at a time as the flame roared.”
Taylor explains that he has a pet theory that writers are often drawn to the work of specific “tradespeople”, imagining perhaps that these professional alter egos express in their work somehow more concretely what can be somewhat abstract in literary contemplation. There are writers who are particularly interested in athletes or in doctors, for instance.
“For me, for a long time, restaurants and cooks in particular have been that professional alter ego,” Taylor says. “And the beginning of that is easy enough to tease out. My very earliest memories are of my mother in the kitchen baking bread. I’d sit on the counter next to her and watch this process, mesmerized. But from that came my own interest in cooking, my own sense that these skills were intensely satisfying to develop and to practice, and then a very natural curious gaze which fell on those who do it professionally. If you start to gain some competence in almost any arena, I think it’s natural to look at the professionals who practise the same craft with admiration and a degree of wonder. They inspire and challenge you. And as a writer, that lead me to really wanting to understand the motives and psychology of the culinary artists that practise in this area.”
Taylor has never lived in France but has travelled there extensively, and says he was greatly influenced in his food interests while in rural France, going to small restaurants that would feature seasonality and locality as a crucial part of their offerings. All of that was new to North America in the mid-to-late ’90s, and it struck him as hugely important.
“Diners and cooks alike knew what came from their region, knew what was in season at any given time,” Taylor says. “And they ate accordingly. In North America at the same time you were still likely to find high-end rooms serving dishes that were ‘canonical’, these preparations that we understood simply to be—year round and regardless of where the stuff came from—what a sophisticated and cosmopolitan diner would know to eat. Things like sole meunière or escargots de Bourgogne. You saw these items on menus in Vancouver and that had nothing to do with Vancouver, obviously.
“So France had this big effect on my thinking about food,” he adds. “And I brought all that back with me to the original writing of Stanley Park. And then, as good fortune would have it, other people ended up thinking about exactly the same things quite separately. So you had the emergence of the ‘locavore’ movement and the publication of other books on this topic. Stanley Park was born of my experience in France. But it ended up being part of a larger conversation which I’d imagine was inspired differently depending on who was contributing.”
As for French culinary culture as depicted in The Rise and Fall of Magic Wolf, Taylor spent some time interviewing a friend, chef Adam Busby, who is the director at the Culinary Institute of America in Napa. His experiences from kitchens in France and Paris in particular were the inspiration for the first third of the book that takes place when the protagonist Teo himself is apprenticing in France.
“Adam told me hair-raising stories about kitchen realities back then,” Taylor says. “And a large number of those went directly into the book.”
Partial proceeds from copies of the book sold at Book Warehouse will be donated by Taylor to the BC Hospitality Foundation, Canada’s only charity focused exclusively on hospitality and tourism industry workers facing critical health challenges, through to December 31. Plus, Café Medina will donate its reservation fees to the BCHF from October 1 to December 31, and the Timothy & Jane Taylor Family Foundation will make a private donation to the BCHF, which will be matched by a corporate donation from Dana Lee Consulting Ltd. 
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