Michelin-Star and “Gluten-Free” are not words that often go together. Sure, a Michelin Star restaurant has enough skill in the kitchen to adapt a meal for a gluten-free diner, but a naturally GF-friendly meal? Rare. So when I read that Michelin-Starred French gluten-free chef Nadia Sammut was coming to Montreal for the winter restaurant festival, Montréal en Lumière, I booked my tickets…
…which was no small commitment because the reservation was pay-in-advance and no cancellations. That was a $230 gulp of fear.
But it was worth it. I didn’t cancel and the meal was completely worth the money. Not every dish was a hit. But enough of them were so stunning that it’s obvious where the Star comes from. Before I get to the food, though, I just want to say that from the research I’ve done on Nadia Sammut, her restaurant La Fenière is more of a lifestyle, a philosophy, than just a Michelin Starred place to eat. It’s also an auberge, a cooking school, a reintegration project, a sustainability project and a wedding venue. (There’s a NYTimes article about her gluten-free restaurant and cooking school.)
While this was a festival-only pop-up, and you’ll have to go to France (or her next festival appearance) for a similar meal, here’s the breakdown of my experience and what you can look forward to:
AMUSE-BOUCHES
Tofu de pois chiches, poudre de basilic sacré
Tartelette baba ultra-fine, jus corsé miso de châtaigne, fenouil mariné, poutargue [bottarga]
Tempura de feuille de shiso pourpre, condiment d’olive rôtie, baies d’épine-vinettes et raisins secs
ENTRÉES
Chawanmushi au dashi de laurier, enoki dorés
Huitre fumée et pochée, amazone de betterave jaune à l’eau de rose, citron caviar, oxalis et huile de cerfeuil
PLAT
Omble chevalier mariné au shio koji et câpres, émulsion de poutargue, lait d’amande et collagène de poisson, caviar d’omble, feuilles de bourrache tombées et ciselées.
PRÉ-DESSERT
Glace signature pois chiches Nadia Sammut
DESSERT de Muriel Aublet-Cuvelier [another invited French chef]
Poire pochée au caramel, cidre de glace, moelleux et croustillant aux pacanes, glace à la vanille et aux poivre de voatsiperiferry de Madagascar
I should say that staff at the host Montreal restaurant, Restaurant Lloyd, were very helpful in keeping the meal at the relaxed pace we wanted and explaining the dishes a little. Unfortunately, they hadn’t been able to try the menu in the past few nights, but they were very capable servers. They double-checked with the kitchen for me re: my other intolerances (which I’d contacted them about in advance and they had confirmed that the whole menu would actually be perfect for me, as it was – no changes necessary, they said, which my server confirmed).
The menu is a bit deceiving because things didn’t come out in the combinations we expected, but it was all there. And every dish came with a poem written by the chef. The goal was to connect the dish to the land, because she’ used allow’s a big believer in local ingredients. At least, that’s the understanding I got from our server.
The amuse-bouches came as a trio, not a duo as the menu says.
The top was the “tofu” (not “tofu”), which I think was made with chickpea instead of tofu and came dusted with that dark-green sacred basil powder. This mouthful was honestly just a bit odd. It was bitter from the tofu and bitter from the basil, with no acid or sweetness or even salt to offset it.
But the second bite – the buckwheat tartelette with chestnut miso and marinated fennel – was a step back on track:
I perhaps didn’t taste the light ( light = “lumière”), but I got the salt, which was a relief after the bland chickpea tofu. I can definitely imagine a fixed moment when I luxuriated in the salty-sweetness of the chestnut miso. The fennel was more texture than flavour, but that’s all it needed to be. I couldn’t identify the bottarga (salted mullet eggs, think pure umami), but it was mildly salty and deep, so I assume that was it. The tartelette tasted a bit refrigerated, but it still crunched.
This little tempura shiso leaf above was the first “wow” moment for me.
The “shiso pourpre” was not so “pourpre” (purple). But there was just enough of that liquorice flavour to identify it. The sweet minced raisins, barberries and roasted olives added this incredible sweet-and-sour-and-salty chewiness to the delicate, crispy green leaf. This was perfect. The grease made the leaf feel indulgent – no small feat.
The oyster: I was ready to give a standing ovation after this one. It came before the Chawanmushi, not with it or in it as the menu indicates. But this was, I think, the best oyster of my life. The yellow beet amazake was yellow beet that had fermented into creamy sweetness. It was warm and comforting with the not-so-smoky poached oyster (not smoky at all, actually, but still tender). The bitter green oil was the perfect offset, adding a slippery mouthfeel.
Why was this oyster so good? It’s true, I’m a huge fan of amazake, a Japanese sweet fermented rice kind of porridge, made with fermented rice koji, which is similar to sake, but it’s only fermented briefly, so the carbohydrates convert to sugar but don’t convert to alcohol. I think the beet gave it a little colour and a little sweetness.
I couldn’t smell the rose water either. And the little spherified lemon “caviar” was hard to pop unless you pressed a bunch against the side of your mouth at once, but the lemon kind of made all the sweetness sing and the sweetness plus bitterness plus mouthfeel…amazing.
Chawanmushi is a seemingly simple dish of very gently poached egg custard with Japanese dashi broth. There’s an earthiness from seaweed and/or bonito flakes in the dashi usually, but what sweet this custard apart was the lightness. It melted on the tongue like cream. The enoki mushrooms added to that umami from the broth, making it savoury rather than just egg-y.
This was my favourite poem:
Reflection of a wave
A fish slips between the iodine,
Wood sorrel restrains it.
I couldn’t help imagining some matronly green wood sorrel greens saying, “No, no, no, fish! You can’t go off the plate! Stay back!”
In this dish, you can actually see that poutargue (bottarga, aka grated sea mullet, aka pure fish umami). It’s the golden flakes around the edge of the plate. The red spheres are fish eggs, which popped more easily than the spherified lemon caviar with the oyster above, but in a less surprising way. The brine is a stronger, more traditional flavour.
The shio koji made the fish tender, like confit. Maybe it was also confit? Or vacuum-sealed and sous vide (or both). The two slices of crispy skin weren’t salted, so they tasted just a little bitter. They weren’t even completely crispy, more crunchy. The greens were lovely and bitter. You could taste the almond milk in the sauce, and it was neat that it was thickened with fish collagen and not flour or butter. But the dish was also very monotonous. So, it was delicious and filling, but repetitive. I ate it all.
Then came the fourth brilliant dish (1. oyster; 2. tempura shiso; 3. chawanmushi): the signature chickpea sorbet with these caramelized roasted chickpeas and some kind of caramel-coloured sauce that tasted like it had a little acidity in there, maybe apple cider vinegar, but I couldn’t tell. All I know is that the sorbet was incredibly smooth (hurray for Pacojets) and didn’t really taste like chickpeas. It was sweet, but not too sweet, and neither was the sauce. Overall, the dish was just refreshing. And those chickpeas added nuttiness, crunchiness and a savoury note.
Contrast that with the dessert of poached pear, which could make your teeth fall out. While Nadia Sammut’s cuisine was all about subtlety and balance, this dish from Parisian pastry chef Muriel Aublet-Cuvelier was about extreme sensory stimulation. The caramelized poached pear was cubed pear pieces in a gelatinized caramel (the layer immediately below the quenelle of sorbet). The next layer down was a soft pecan cake, followed by a super crispy pecan wafer on the bottom. I loved the pecan wafer, which tasted buttery despite being dairy-free.
But I couldn’t finish it because my teeth were aching. The quenelle was supposed to be vanilla-pepper ice cream, but I was told just before the dish came that they’d had to swap out the ice cream for a pear sorbet. The pear sorbet didn’t work. I normally wouldn’t complain, but I was told both in advance and that evening that the menu needed no changes for me. I don’t like having the rug slipped out from under me last minute. Fine, if you can save the integrity of the dish, but this one needed the creaminess of the ice cream to offset the sweetness (confirmed my dining partner). Instead, I got acid and more sugar. It made my nose squint, like when you sip lemon juice. My partner also confirmed that his version was much better, though still incredibly sweet. This was the second dish I didn’t finish (the only other being the tofu and sacred basil amuse).
Last note: The juice and wine pairings
It wasn’t clear from the online menu that the $40 option was alcohol-free and the $75 version was with alcohol. It just seemed like a low-end and high-end option. So it was interesting to see the super creative non-alcoholic options, including warm white tea with shiso; lacto-fermented carrot extract, roasted buckwheat and sweet gale hydrolat (like a water left from a distilling process); cold-infused balsam fir with rosemary hydrolat and lemon juice; and ginger beer with infused mint, liquorice and coriander seeds. If I could drink tea, I might have tried it, but the last time I had a juice pairing, the sugar was just too much.
As for the alcohol pairings, I’m not sure whether Nadia Sammut (or her team) was behind those. Hakutsuru has a full line of sakes, and drinking warm sake is fine depending on the sake, but if a menu just says hot Hakutusuru sake, I’m going to think it’s the $11 bottle from the SAQ that is perfectly fine for cooking, but not what I’m looking to pair with Michelin Star food.
A Blanc de Noirs Champagne is always nice, but it’s not interesting. I get that it’s hard to pair a drink with two or three different pieces of food (in this case, the oyster and the chawanmushi), but this Devaux Coeur des Bar feels a bit like a cop-out.
The Domaine Farge wine (Saint Joseph – Vania cuvée) seems interesting. It’s a domaine located 2 hours north of Nadia Sammut’s southeastern France restaurant, La Fenière. It’s made with Saint-Joseph white grapes, which I’ve never tried. So it’s possible the chef selected it, but the wine is not actually on the La Fenière wine list, at least the online version (nothing from the Domaine is), so it’s hard to tell. I may have just wanted a glass of that with dinner, but it was not on the Restaurant Lloyd wine list, which was full of large producers making commercial, uninteresting wines.
And while the last cocktail pairing was surely tasty, sugar on sugar on sugar on sugar (Calvados, apple cider and ginger beer) with that caramelized pear dessert would have just been too much. It also seemed like a waste of good Calvados, which made me think the Calvados was not exciting enough to begin with.
Anyway, enough complaining, because this really was a great meal overall, and I didn’t waste money on wine pairings. I haven’t been so surprised and excited by restaurant food since Perch in Ottawa. And while Perch was better overall (and the wine pairing is worth it), this was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for me to taste the food of an exceptional French woman doing so much for local products and gluten-free cuisine.
That amazake oyster…
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