![]() This summer, you might find dandelion pizza, radish-dressed pickerel caught by Peter Williams (Ponzo knows the fisherman) and cannoli (the moulds are Ponzo’s nonna’s). The restaurant’s menu is an ever-changing valentine to Ponzo’s Roman, Sicilian and Sardinian ancestry and also to the flavours of the county. Now I have 26 hives.” His Ponzo Family Farm honey makes its way to the restaurant and the hotel shop. “My wife has horses, we have chickens, and when I moved here I bought four bee hives. “There’s a sense of possibility and also a real sense of community here,” Ponzo tells me. Chef Albert Ponzo was the chef at Toronto’s Le Select for 11 years before he decided to leave the city with his wife and three children to settle on a farm. Most of the seasonally driven food is grown 15 minutes away, at the Sorbaras’ organic vegetable farm. If temporarily disoriented, the Royal’s dining room will plant you back on County soil. “I wanted people to have that feeling of ‘where are we?’” “Yes, you could be in Barcelona, London, New York!” says Korngold. Perched on a colourful Spanish-sourced pouf in the hotel’s parlour, I felt I could easily have been on Barcelona’s Passeig De Gracia. The result is eminently civilized, but also whimsical and welcoming. The hotel reopened last year after a five-year restoration by the architects Giannone Petricone Associates (also behind the Terroni restaurants). Korngold proceeded to leave his Bay Street COO job to escort the Royal into its new existence. A 19th-century railway hotel that fell into disrepair and lay derelict for 14 years, it was bought by Korngold’s father-in-law, former Ontario finance minister Greg Sorbara, who rescued it from demolition. The Royal itself could host a master class in rebirth. He’s calling from his nearby farm and birds are chirping so excitedly in the background I can hardly hear him. “The County provides the opportunity for rebirth,” says Sol Korngold, general manager of the Royal Hotel in Picton. I would hardly be the first Toronto escapee in P.E.C. After only a few hours in the County, I feel a rising urge to take up duck husbandry and canning, shed my city self and become the country person I didn’t know I had in me. An image from it stuck with me: We’re all nesting dolls, who carry within us different selves - the people we’ve been, but also the ones we might still become. Just before my visit, I was reading Maggie Smith’s superb memoir, “You Can Make This Place Beautiful”, which is about the dissolution of a marriage but also about renaissance and self-retrieval. There’s a sense here that second acts are not only possible, but welcome.
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