I really wanted to love this restaurant on Lajoie St. in Outremont. Sommelier Lindsay Brennan has some incredible natural Spanish wines on her menu and the knowledge and skill to sell them well. And if Alma were a bar, that would be enough. But since it’s a restaurant, the food needs to match. While some of chef Juan Lopez Luna’s dishes are stellar, others are unfortunately either very expensive for what you get, and in my experience, bland and, in one instance, undercooked.
Rent is expensive in Outremont. So of course prices are going to be steep. There are salaries to pay, Hydro bills, food costs. Alma is also very small, so isn’t making money on volume (even when the size doubles thanks to a summer terrasse). But I have a problem ordering expensive dishes that don’t wow.
Take olives. Un Po’ di Più’s olives are marinated in heaven and always worth it. So are the candied lemon peel olives at Pullman, both places for a drink and a snack. But I don’t usually want them as an appetizer for a full meal if I’m only there with only one other person. There’s no way I’ll finish them. We’d be thirsty all night and pretty full from all the good fat. I especially don’t want them if they’re more than $5 for a small bowl. That’s $5 I’d rather put into more shrimp, see below.
I also have a problem ordering really fancy conserves at a restaurant. Bar, yes, but dinner place, no. I want to save room for something more creative. Anyone can open a can of expensive sardines and put them on freshly baked baguette from a local bakery. So we skipped the canned fish in favour of fennel. Maybe not the best move.
What we got was approximately a quarter of a raw fennel bulb dressed simply (boringly) in olive oil, lemon zest and black charcoal powder. The charcoal didn’t taste like anything, so it was just there to be pretty, and the zest didn’t add the needed acidity to give the snack some flavour. Maybe it was just the lack of salt?
If I had an Outremont expense account, I’d order four plates of the tasty but simple spot prawns. They’re no longer on the menu, seasonal as they are, but at three shrimp to an order and more garlic and parsley than shrimp, you’re not getting your money’s worth unless you eat the shell, head and tail like a good Spaniard (I imagine). And how many Montreal diners do that? Maybe fewer than the number of shrimp in this dish.
The most generous portion of the night was the sausage. It was huge! It looked like a bunch of intestines (I imagine) coiled up on the plate. But it was pure fat and juice with, again, no acidity to offset the richness; the baby swiss chard and sprouts on top couldn’t cut it. Bang for your buck, finally, but a whole lot of straight-up sausage.
Next up, some perfectly executed octopus. I loved that the grill kept these tender but meaty. They dissolve in your mouth from being cooked sous vide and they weren’t rubbery either. There’s grill mastery to this dish, but the couple of deep-fried spuds (approximately three, which is maybe the restaurant’s favourite number?) were just mushy and bland as though they weren’t salted when they came out of the fryer. They were beautifully browned on the outside, yet the crust didn’t have any crispiness to it, making it feel like a waste of oil.
But there’s no way you should call three potatoes cylindrical prisms with a bland mayo patatas bravas. Where was the smokiness of the paprika? Heck, where was the tomato sauce? I’m okay with it being non-spicy, because this is Montreal after all – home of spice scaredy cats, but the tomatoes seem to have peaced out. And the lemon juice and garlic of the aioli? Also MIA. Those three sprigs of basil were fun, but not super helpful to the success of the dish. Instead of enhancing the octopus, everything else in the bowl just brought it down.
Fine. Whatever. We’re just being nitpicky, right? Overall, dinner is still not going so badly. We’re loving the wine. Loving the service. Loving the ambiance. We feel so warm and cozy and special in the Outremont space. But the problem is that by the time our last dish comes to the table we’ve been in the restaurant for more than an hour and a half and in that time it’s filled up. Now the kitchen is looking a bit rushed. There are a bunch of chits hanging in front of the grill station. Sure, the cooks look all relaxed, but they’ve got a lot of food to get plated fast.
When our whole fish (sea bream, maybe?) comes out, we ooh and ahh. It’s normal for the tail to be a bit more cooked than the body, so I start with that before the residual heat cooks it any further. And it’s delicious. Simple, served with a delicious chimichurri (I couldn’t have the butter-based sauce it was supposed to come with, so they swapped it out – thumbs up for that), some breakfast radishes and zucchini with a bunch of pea sprouts on top.
But then we opened up the fish and started working our way in to the thicker parts and that’s when we realized it wasn’t cooked through. The skin was blackened, but about two thirds of the fillet was pink and undercooked. I think the biggest travesty is overcooking expensive fish, so my heart goes out to a kitchen that shares that belief, but if you’re serving the whole fish, the entire thing needs to be done. I started picking through the head in search of the juicy cheeks and collar meat. Those bits make up about a quarter of the fish’s meat, I figured, so about a quarter of the price of the dish that I wasn’t about to waste. I put them on my fork and brought them to my mouth, and hesitated. If the fish is super fresh, it’s almost like sushi, right? I’m sure the fish is fresh. But am I going to chance it? Besides, the texture of undercooked fish is wrong here. You want it soft and almost flaking so you can scoop it through the sauce. Instead, the sauce just slides off of it. So I put the meat down and left about a third of the expensive fish on the plate. The server probably just thought we were full.
I didn’t say anything to the staff because I wanted to love this restaurant. But with the high prices and the less-than-amazing overall impression, I won’t be back. Maybe no one else has had this experience. And if I could come just for a drink and those olives, I would. But with so many other places in the city to enjoy, from the consistent Buvette Chez Simone to the new Provisions Wine Bar where small plates come with a little more excitement, I’m left shrugging my shoulders and hoping there are enough Outremont residents unconcerned by prices and the occasional bland potato and undercooked bream to keep this ship afloat.
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