Ferreira Cafe

Portuguese

Again, I didn’t go here to review it, but I wanted to talk about it. This is what I do, talk about food. Periodically I do and talk about other things.

Anyway, we show up a tiny, tiny bit late for a reservation but are very courteously shown to our table in the VERY busy restaurant on a Saturday night. Peel Street is the place to be apparently. Perfect seat across from the open kitchen to watch the show. Our server doesn’t appear for 15 minutes. We wait. And watch. Presumably they know we’re here since the busboy/runner came around with three Portuguese rolls and some exquisite extra virgin olive oil. The green tinge was beautiful and the taste was very good. No butter here. We’re in Portugal.

So when the server finally comes I get scared. She talks really loud and really fast. Mind you, it’s busy and it’s loud in there, but I feel panicked. Exactly the opposite of the calm professionalism of MAS Cuisine. We go for the sardines grilled with Maldon salt and a salad of arugula, tomatoes and canteloupe to start. The two glasses of house white are a chardonnay from Chile and a Portuguese vinho verde (I think?) from Douro. The Portuguese was very dry and acidic and the Chardonnay was a little more flavourful and sweet. The dry went well with the sardines, which came with a little ramekin of sundried tomato pesto with olives, and went nicely with the Portuguese bun. The salad was refreshing, and even though the arugula wasn’t amazing, and the tomatoes were just good (it’s still not tomato season), the melon was perfect, so the sweetness of the fruit and the bitterness of the green was also nice.

For mains, a bouillabaisse, a shrimp dish with fresh vegetables, and a black cod with port wine. I was dying to try the black cod since it’s my favouite thing in the world, but Portugal is not the place for it. The fish already tastes like butter, but putting the port on it kind of wrecked it since no more butter was added. The port reduction tasted like a veal reduction and so the fish just tasted like an absolutely perfectly cooked fish. There was nothing sinfully butter about the meat of the black cod itself. Basically this meal was perfect in execution and not perfect in conception, the opposite of what you might expect from a menu that doesn’t often change. The bouillabaisse, was plentiful, with a rotating card of fresh fish in it (there are a few things that change depending on the day and season, of course) to include clams, cod, halibut, shrimp and a bunch of things I didn’t know very well. Some potatoes made this a giant meal. If you love simple, fresh fish, this is a perfect dish, but it’s home-cooking. There was no fancy sauce or exciting flavour that jumped out at you. So at $35 you are paying for plain fish. The only thing I didn’t like at the restaurant (despite the wait for the server and then the excruciatingly long wait for the main dishes. Oddly enough the appetizers came incredibly quickly. Different kitchen section and man in charge I think) was the Portuguese tomato rice. Kind of like a very oily paella without the meat. It’s better than plain rice, but it’s a side that’s just thrown on plates. It didn’t go with the black cod, but I couldn’t have the mashed potatoes because they do use milk in those, despite being an almost-butter-free country. I didn’t want to think about the rolls.

So the real fun was watching the kitchen have a problem. Somewhere in the line some orders got messed up and things were left sitting, building up under the heat lamps for awhile. Far too long in the opinion of the chef and myself. The runners were trying to figure out what went where. Maybe some of the chits got out of order, but whatever happened, food started getting run around, the Chef came around the outside of the kitchen to figure it out, and the whole kitchen got really backed up for awhile. Our meals got long.

So nothing spectacular on the menu that we tried (though the salt on the sardines was very good, the quality of the fish was incredible, and I like the olive oil and sundried tomato pesto a lot), but there was a whole lot more menu to sample. This is very good food on Peel Street, not some over-priced joint trying to make money off of people in finance who know nothing about food. It’s good, satisfying, ample-portioned, traditional and contemporary Portuguese.

Expect to Pay: $80-$120 per person including tax, tip and wine (at least a glass, probably some port)
Hours: Mon-Fri 11:45am-3pm, Mon-Wed 5:30pm-11pm, Thurs-Sat 5:30pm-midnight
(514) 848-0988
www.ferreiracafe.com