Most office buildings are cloistered away from nature, let alone agriculture. One exception is Toronto’s 124 Merton St, which is a boutique office building whose bounteous crops reap benefits for the tenants, both local and international.
Owner, artist, designer, and chef Vivian Reiss has been in the avant-garde of urban farming, having practiced it for over 38 years. She conceived the gardens of the boutique office building in midtown Toronto to function as an inspirational oasis for work and culinary creations. She has developed over 400 recipes using the crops grown in the building’s three garden spaces. All the gardens are open to the building’s tenants, whose offices range from 900 to 3,000 square feet.
As soon as you approach the woodland-themed front entrance, landscaped with rocks from the Canadian Shield, you know you are in a special place. Amid giant pines peeks a surprise. The midtown Toronto location affords a microclimate, allowing Mediterranean artichokes to grow and have a flourishing crop of edible artichokes. Imagine slow-roasted fresh, picked artichokes nestled among super sweet “Paul Robeson” tomatoes and fragrant rosemary just harvested from its rooftop urban farm, and you have an idea of the range of pleasures this office building can yield.
The second-floor courtyard goes more Canadian Prairie, with Saskatoon berry trees named after one of that province’s largest cities and named for the trees that provide crops of tasting berries both in the eponymous city and midtown Toronto. The Saskatoon trees are planted in substantial custom containers that divide the courtyard into various areas for lunch and meetings. Eclectic garden furniture, from designers like Woodward to the “Memphis” group, and a barbeque, lend whimsy and practicality to the space.
It is on the 6th-floor rooftop farm that 124 Merton Street goes genuinely international. Among the Canadian” Maypole” apple trees, Prairie “Romeo” and “Juliette” cherries, Haskap berries and giant sunflowers are 124 Merton’s premiere crop, the over 40 varieties of heritage tomatoes from around the world. The choice of varieties of tomatoes is vast, so keeping some favourites that win in the building’s annual tomato tasting, judged by professional food critics and tenants alike, makes it possible to grow and experiment with new types of tomatoes each year. The rooftop’s constant sunshine yields colourful crops, and its 6th-floor location protects the crops from wildlife, paradoxically a problem in urban edible gardens. Happily, though, bees find their way there to pollinate and animate the garden.
One of Reiss’ favourite tomatoes from the 2013 crop is the “Sweet Israeli,” a tomato whose honey-like flavour and coloration evoke dawn-inspired salad. In the salad above, Israeli couscous is cooked in water in which copious amounts of marigold petals have been boiled and strained, providing colour and flavour. The couscous, served at room temperature, is mixed with chopped preserved lemon, basil, fennel fronds and flowers, and more (this time uncooked) marigold petals and tossed with olive oil and some preserved lemon juice. It is then topped with a sliced “Sweet Israeli” tomato and strewn with more flowers.
Fuzzy-skinned tomatoes are both a botanical oddity and fun to grow. In past years, Reiss has grown “Wapiscon Peach” tomatoes, an apricot-coloured, midsize tomato whose flavour drew rave reviews. This year, Reiss experimented with “Big Red Peach” tomato , whose size and skin mimicked real peaches. This inspired two tarts, one savoury and one sweet. As an artist, Reiss was drawn to the visual pun of tomato and peach having similar appearances but not eaten or cooked conventionally together. Reiss thought,” Why not combine them in a tart?”
Sometimes, one wants to eat something straightforward like Reiss’ “Sunny Side Up.” To make this recipe, one needs a slate roof tile. The barbeque is heating, so slice as many varieties of tomatoes as you have available. Please place them in a decorative array on the slate. Drizzle the tomatoes with olive oil and sprinkle with salt as desired. Bake in a closed barbeque until the tomatoes are hot and begin to cook. Take slate off the barbeque and crack two eggs onto the tomatoes. Return to barbeque, close the top and cook until the whites of the eggs are set. Serve the dish on the slate with a grinding of black pepper and coarse sea salt. Casually strew some sunflower petals on the eggs and tomatoes. You will need as many slates as people, but you will want to eat this just by yourself, enjoying the tastes of summer without conversational distraction—summer’s simple pleasures and happiness on a slate.
for further information on units available at www.124merton.com email Ms. Reiss at vreiss@vreiss.com
