Real Food

I had my Christmas get-together with my community service group tonight (suddenly I have become President, but that's another story). We went to a very good restaurant.

Now, to understand how excited I am about this, you have to understand that there are three main types of restaurant in this area. Number one is the greasy spoon, specializing in poutine and hot dogs and fried chicken. Number two is the "buffet chinois", often featuring onion rings, pizza, and hotdogs in sweet and sour sauce. Number three is the sit-down restaurant, which often looks fancy but which has the same damn menu everywhere (you can still get poutine, but there are also steaks and tired seafood. Obligatory sides are converted rice, overcooked frozen veggies, and very white buns in little bags).

I had my doubts about this restaurant, because it's new, and even though the decor was very nice and it had received rave reviews, it still had the potential to be a Number Three in disguise. Even the menu, though there were two kinds of sweetbreads and no poutine, rang a small warning bell (how can you have a ceviche of grilled scallops? Grilling scallops takes away from the whole point of a ceviche..yeesh).

Well, it turns out that this was a genuine restaurant. The first proof of this was that the bread was a chewy, homemade sourdough. The butter did not come in little plastic tubs, but was actually in little rosettes on a plate. Laugh if you like, but the nature of the bread and butter is usually a strong clue as to how good the food will be.

To start, I had a feuilleté of snails (snails in a herbed cream sauce, on a little triangle of puff pastry) that was delicious. The sauce was delicate but not over-garlicked, the snails were tender, and there was just enough pastry to sop up the sauce.

The soup was the most ordinary thing about the meal; it was a fairly standard puréed vegetable soup. Eh. Served in very nice bowls, though, with proper spoons (another hallmark of a good restaurant).

My main dish was osso bucco of local venison with a parmesan risotto and asparagus. Leaving aside the fact that this is not the time to serve asparagus, it was very good. The venison was very very tender, though the sauce was a touch salty, the risotto was creamy without being glutinous, and the asparagus was actually flavourful and not woody at all.

Dessert was a little mousse cake, served with a slice of what I can only call fruitcake toast. It sounds weird, but it was absolutely delicious. My only criticism of the dessert was that they had too many flavours; the cake was hazelnut and chocolate, but there was a raspberry coulis and a bunch of chopped fruit on the plate, plus the aforementioned slice of fruitcake and a ground cherry. I would have nixed the fruit and the coulis, and just left a little cocoa on the plate; the dessert didn't need the fruit element. Still, when this is the most serious critique I can make of a meal, I'm happy.

Coffee was excellent, strong and fragrant.

I think I may have had a perfect day. I'm not even too full.