Aix Cuisine du Terroir

Some nights are just wonderful. The whole meal is an experience. The atmosphere is good, the service is flawless, and even if it weren’t so, this would be forgiven by the incredible quality and flavour of the food. This is Aix Cuisine du Terroir, a Vieux Port gem.

Montreal, and specifically its Old Port, are known for haute cuisine, most often a mix of French with local Quebec ingredients and traditional cooking styles. There’s always fois gras in the appetizers, a duck confit in salad or entrée form, exceptional cuts of beef, and often wild game. Aix Cuisine is true to form. The restaurant describes its cuisine type as “regional”. This is an interesting choice, because of what it insists NOT to be – French, Québecoise, or Contemporary. Here the chefs have mastered traditional French cooking techniques, gotten bored, and decided to use their skills to make something more, all without being pretentious. “Regional” implies that it incorporates the best of what’s around. That may include local game, poultry, and vegetables. The classic cooking techniques shine through, but the creative, yet comforting, food is what makes this a restaurant to be enjoyed, savoured and revisited.

To start, a half dozen freshwater pearls. Try the first oyster without the red wine vinegar and shallot and taste the sweet meat and liquor. On the second, just a drop of red suffices, making sure to not overpower the oyster’s natural flavour.

Then, smoked in-house salmon, arctic char and scallop with fennel and mango salsa.
This was the best home smoked anything I’ve ever had. It was fresh and not at all salty or sweetened. I think the best word to describe it is “clean”. Not too smoky at all. If you’ve never had a smoked scallop before, ordering this entrée will be eye-opening. Even better than scallop sashimi. The mango salsa didn’t add much, and only hid some of the flavour, but there was so much smoked salmon and char that had to be eaten that the mango salsa was a nice variety in the end. I would recommend sharing this appetizer. It is certainly not too big, but it is a lot of fish to start a meal.

Many of the appetizers had cream, so I stayed away, including the butternut squash soup of the day and the only other vegetarian option of quinoa, arugula, wild mushrooms and goat cheese gratin with red pepper coulis and balsamic reduction. This was a beautiful presentation, with layers of wilted green arugula stacked between earth brown mushrooms and quinoa. The balsamic gave the dish its necessary sweetness and contrasted with the red of the coulis. Not traditional French, but a good addition to the menu. Vegans are in trouble but vegetarians will not feel neglected.

At least until the main courses…If you don’t eat fish or meat you’re out of luck. Even the salad is a duck confit. Certainly the kitchen could create something for you, but a good creation takes time and thought, and this kitchen has consciously, and successfully, put its thought into its meat. A new menu had just started the week I attended. There were only two options without dairy, and zero fish options without butter or cream. Fortunately, I wanted the bison. Cooked two ways – osso bucco style and filet mignon. This is the way to fall in love with osso bucco and marrow. Similar to steak-frites, but served with woven potato chip-style local yukon and sweet potatoes, this dish far surpassed my expectations. The yukon fries had no taste, but the sweet potatoes were revelations, pairing well with the sweet flavour of the osso buco meat and jus. The marrow, saved for last, was…well, I’m speechless.

I’ve never been a fan of the chewiness of filet mignon, even when properly cooked, and only to medium-rare, but this one was not so bad. It was much more than a single person needs to eat, but is perfect to share with dining companions whose main course option is slightly less ample.

An example of “less ample” would not be the lamb. I actually said “Wow…” and stared on in wonder as it was served. That was the most enormous rack I’ve ever seen served. Slow-cooked for seven hours, the lamb was incredibly tender without losing the integrity of the meat. Whereas you can take a less expensive, generally tougher, piece of meat and slow-cook it for a long time to make it tender, here an already-beautiful piece of meat was improved upon by the simple cooking method. The pan jus was not overwhelming, and the flavour of the meat itself was really the highlight of the plate.

In going to this restaurant, my dining companions were told that they had to try the wild boar. So they did. Accompanied by the same fries, as well as some al dente obligatory greens, the boar was perfectly cooked. So if you want a fattier meat than bison and for some reason don’t feel up to kamouraska lamb, the boar would be a good choice. For a true splurge on top-quality beef, the $45 filet triple Aix consists of a AAA filet, seared fois gras (the French tradition of coating fatty liver in yet more fat to make it yet more delicious), truffles, fried potatoes and grilled asparagus (you certainly don’t order this dish for the asparagus. Ironically, you have my permission to order the duck main for the accompanying morel mushrooms…duck doesn’t soak up pan juice quite the same way).

How could I forget the wine? We put our trust in our server. He was impeccably trained and knowledgeable. Good service is an art, and our server was an artist. We were treated with nothing but respect, with the perfect balance of attentiveness and distance. Wine service etiquette was precise and beautiful. Most importantly, the wine suggestion made was intuitive to what would work well with all our meals, as well as being suggested because it was micro-oxygenized. What does that possibly mean? Micro-oxygenation is a process of injecting fermenting wine with specific amounts of oxygen, replicating the process of aging wine in barrels. It is far less costly and time consuming, and is growing in popularity because of the results it may achieve. While the wine must be good in the first place, a young wine could quickly rival a beautifully-aged wine of equal quality. For example, a young Bordeaux could seem far older than it looked.

With sublime desserts including a lemon tarte encircled with crème anglaise, because they forgot I was lactose-intolerant, a winter-fruit gratin (again, cream) or various chocolate delicacies, and a choice of Quebec dessert wines, the evening ends beautifully. Even the sorbet and fruit, usually the restaurant cop-out dessert of choice, was thoughtful, balancing a raspberry sorbet on a tiny, uniquely shaped meringue. A sweet complement for the acid of the sorbet and accompanying fruit.

On a return lunch visit, however, I fell a little bit out of love with this restaurant…How quickly beauty fades. First the not-so-wondrous chefs used un-ripe fruit as garnish in the appetizer and in the fruit salad (a traditional dessert ploy, because they often assume if you’re going for the fruit for dessert it’s because you really care more about cutting calories than enjoying flavour). Sorry, I don’t appreciate flavourless fruit as much as North America appreciates flavourless pork (ie calling it ‘white meat’ when there’s absolutely nothing white about it, by sucking out all the taste), so my ground cherry was a sad experience (ground cherries are orange-coloured, but raspberry-sized fruit that are surrounded in paper-like yellow-orange skins. They’re often unfolded to be bitten off the stem. There’s no pit and there’s a mild, sweet, un-cherry-like flavour. When ripe, a revelation). In other provinces maybe you can get away with a flavourless, or sour, ground cherry, but in Quebec, home of ground cherries, you have to expect better. Sure, it’s not ground cherry season, but if you’re going to serve it, it has to be good. Especially a restaurant that touts ‘local’ products…they wouldn’t do well if their local kamouraska lamb tasted awful, even it just happened to saunter down the street into the kitchen, thus eliminating its own carbon footprint.

Then the not-so-local fig. I felt like a Greek person broke into tears somewhere with every bite I took. Like when a kid says they don’t believe in fairies and somewhere a fairy dies. So I only took 2 bites – the first to try the fig, excitedly, and the second to make sure I had actually tasted what I tasted, in utter disappointment. The cooked jam of figs tasted beautiful, however, because they don’t need to be as ripe for that. Add sugar and you’re fine, but fresh is another story. If you’ve never had a fresh fig, don’t have your first here. Stick to the meat, avoid the fruit.

Oh, also hope for my first server. Apparently all servers here do not receive the same training. The second was not as impressive with dealing with my table’s food sensitivities (though it was mostly the kitchen’s fault for thinking it’s okay to send out an appetizer of 4 chipotle shrimp on salad when the dish is supposed to be chipotle shrimp with vegetable strudel on mesclun greens. Without the strudel you skip half the appeal of the dish. They certainly don’t charge you half the price…and this AFTER saying the dish was dairy-free, and there was no problem ordering it. Of course I know pastry has dairy in it, but if you say yours doesn’t and you’re my chef idols, I’ll believe you. Blind faith has lead me astray. In his defense, the server had actually not allowed my dining companion, who did not want the strudel part of the dish in the first place, to order the shrimp without the strudel, because it would ruin the integrity of the dish. So when my plate came out strudel-less after the kitchen had said not to worry, our server was a surprised, and appropriately apologetic. The duck was a better option. They do a more-than-adequate confit and a decent grilled).

Ah, the fickleness of love. This is a beautiful restaurant for classics dishes that are effortlessly blended with unique ingredients in the name of complementary flavours. From star anise pan juices with Québec duck, to avocado and wasabi sorbet accompanying seared tuna in buttercream, each plate is purposefully balanced. So despite the minor glitches…

…there will always be a place in my heart for Aix Cuisine du Terroir.

Price: $45 for a table d’hôte of three services and an amuse-bouche, $25 at lunch
Appetizers: $15 Entrées: $33
Expect to pay $50-$70 plus wine