Kitchen Galerie

Kitchen Galerie

Glorified fruit salad. I liked you until you gave me glorified fruit salad. If that’s as creative as you can be, oh great chefs, well, you need to try a little harder.
I was warned not to get my hopes up. Kitchen Galerie is creating tons of buzz with their chefs who are servers who are fun. A team of quasi-bad-ass guys who joke and yell in their open kitchen (the stove is in the dinig room) and dance to the cool music they play in the restaurant. There are probably some tattoos involved, and there’s definitely a lot of meat and potatoes. All this being said, this is still an upscale place. A table d’hote menu cost you upwards of $45 including tax and tip, so with wine and choosing one of the 6 fois gras options, prices get increasingly astronomical. That’s pretty standard in Montreal, though, as long as the food lives up to the expectations.

Expectations…Maybe it’s not fair to expect so much of these guys, but I spent a lot of the meal being impressed rather than disappointed. You’re welcomed into the restaurant casually, you sit, look around at the other diners wearing jeans and t-shirts, and get explained the menu by a guy who is serving for the night. He knows everything about every dish. He can recommend wine, knowing exactly what flavours in the dishes will match with the extensive wine list. This guy has obviously done a lot of eating amazing food and drinking amazing wine, even if he looks more like a beer drinker…or a lumberjack. A fairly attractive lumberjack, mind you.

First, the bread came. The crusty baguette was perfect. Soft and doughy, but crisp on the outside. Now I was convinced this was going to be a great meal.

As much as this is a meat-centric restaurant, a vegetarian can also have a good time as long as they don’t mind having no choice in their meal. A gazpacho to start and a goat cheese pasta as a main. Unfortunately the tomatoes in the gazpacho are not at their best. It’s certainly not August yet, so the soup lacked any kind of a punch (this is certainly a restaurant where a punch wouldn’t be out of place). The texture of the vegetable brunoise (very finely chopped vegetables) was very nice, featuring fresh shallots, but it couldn’t make up for the mildly sweet, but otherwise bland flavour of the heaping bowl of red. In fact I have a small feeling that my amuse-bouche came from the same brunoise. While the other diners at my table were given a lobster-avocado mouthful to start the meal, my dairy-free concoction was made of finely diced carrots and shallots with green onions, kosher salt and truffle oil. There may not have been truffle oil in the gazpacho, but the very, very subtle flavour of it in my little pot of mouth-amusement was strikingly similar to the soup. I also wish I could have tasted more of the truffle oil, though I was happy every time I came across a big grain of salt that would explode when I bit into it and bring out the flavour of the rest of the mouthful of sweet but mild carrots.
Then a starter of tilapia, seared and planked to cook it through. Unfortunately a little too cooked through. The poor little fish probably knew he was raised in a tightly enclosed fish farm on the remains of other fish that he would otherwise not choose to eat. Kind of like broiler chickens. That kind of upbringing would make anyone a little tough. In a tough neighbourhood he had to fend for himself, and elbow his way through the crowds to eat (the entrée of red snapper is actually deemed completely unsustainable by Seachoice, and really shouldn’t be on the menu at all…). The tomato confit rushed juice into the slightly over-done flesh of the tilapia, but only saved the thickest parts. The cherry tomatoes didn’t gain anything from rosemary or garlic (maybe the same tomatoes used for the gazpacho). The tomato oil garnish was beautiful, though flavourless after a bite of the confit version. Plated on salad of fresh spinach, the greens seemed more like plate garnish than something that worked well with the fish and tomato. So not an ingenious dish, but not bad.

The excellent appetizer of the evening was the beef and pork terrine. A less than traditional version, this small slab of lusciously fatty meat was interlaced with nuts and spices beside a little salad with beautifully thin and sweet yellow beets that worked much better with the rest of the dish than the leafy bed for the tipalia. The terrine was better on its own than with the perfect baguette, but it was incredible with the server/cook’s wine suggestion of a 2008 California Cabernet Sauvignon, Frontier Red from Fess Parker ($45). Suddenly the wine was sweet and the terrine was buttery. Ah! That’s what the tilapia needed! More butter! If I wasn’t lactose-intolerant it would have been swimming in the stuff, and the fish would have been more tender.

See, this is the problem. I called in advance and told the Chefs that I was lactose-intolerant. Normally that’s fine. They’ll say, “Sure, there are things you can eat,” or, “We’ll make some exceptions. Our Chefs are very good,” etc. What I was told was, “Our Chefs love it when there’s something like this! It’s a fun challenge!” So they got my hopes up. My little heart was moved, touched. This team of creative, successful, respectable young men was going to go out of their way to cater to me. I could be their muse and push them to new culinary feats.

Instead, like almost every other restaurant, they just left things out. They used a bland oil instead of butter. Now oil is fine as long as you do it well, and use the right oil, but if not…well, I don’t deal well with getting my heart broken. It’s not like I go all Carrie or anything, but men can be so disappointing. Lets just leave it at that.

I once ate a restaurant with a woman who didn’t think it necessary to inform the kitchen in advance that she couldn’t eat anything that had touched black pepper. That’s SO much worse than dairy! Out go stocks, sauces, long-cooking meats or vegetables, soups, anything remotely prepped in advance. Really, I’m not that bad, and will not excuse the kitchen gallery for their less than stellar creativity when it came to dealing with a stomach that can’t handle all the beautiful cream and butter their knives like to throw into dishes.
Moving on. The main courses fared much better. This is a meat place, so once you start learning to ignore the fish and vegetarian options you fare much better. Braised rabbit came sitting on a large bed of thinly sliced, buttered up potatoes. Even the Quebec asparagus got to soak up the braising liquid. While this was definitely the smallest portion of meat of the evening’s mains, what was there was perfectly cooked, tender and flavourful. The slow-cooking brought out the best of the high-quality meat.
Still, there wasn’t enough there to satisfy a larger appetite, which is why it was good that two other dining companions got the rib-eye beef for 2, since there was more than enough leftover to fill the wanting belly of the diner who finished off the lovely rabbit. A huge hunk of meat on the bone cooked medium-rare placed above and around (it was that large) a bed of creamy mashed potatoes and some green beans, all served on an enormous white platter. It even says in the menu that people sharing this dish need to sit across from one another because of the communal plate. Don’t worry, though. You probably won’t be fighting for the last bite (not unless you’re our server, who said he can eat the whole portion himself). Not because it’s not good, just because it’s huge. The sauce is a simple red wine reduction with anise (either ouzo or some other kind of black licorice flavoured liqueur, or anise) and comes on the side. There’s more than enough to help out the potatoes and coat the roasted root vegetables, as well as covering the meat, if you so wish.

Wait, winter’s over. Why are they still using root vegetables? There were already lots of mashed potatoes and enough green beans to call a serving of green vegetables on the platter. The winter vegetables didn’t make the plate look much more attractive. Besides the amount of beef, there wasn’t much going on on the plate (no garnishes or extra flavours), but it was good on its own, and this was one huge chunk of meat.
I was a little worried when I wasn’t asked how I wanted my veal chop cooked, but when it came out a nice medium-rare I was happy. I would have just said to cook it however the chefs suggested anyway. My veal reduction was simple, being spiked with nothing (no anise here), but I’m glad there wasn’t too strong a flavour to overpower the highlight of the dish – the crushed potatoes. These weren’t creamy. They were just crushed enough to give texture, and the salt, garlic and herbs were perfect combined with whatever kind of fat they were cooked in. I don’t know if the supposed lobster mushrooms sneaked off (lobsters being slow creatures on land, so their mushrooms probably being about the same…), but if they were in the potato mixture, they certainly helped. The sliced and quartered pieces of salty sausage thrown over and around the potatoes were wonderful on their own as well as with a bite of the veal, but added too much salt to the spectacular potatoes.

The green beans were necessary and fresh, and subtly sweet compared to the salty acidity of the meat and sauce. My favourite part of the presentation of the dish was how the potatoes and green beans were seemingly haphazardly spread around the bottom of the plate and then the veal chop was hacked into two enormous halves and placed carefully on top. Hunting under the meat for the bountiful hidden treasure was fun, and made the whole evening seem like what the chefs wanted it to be – entertaining, care-free, rough gourmet. Home-style cooking for hungry people who appreciate expensive high-quality ingredients (meat, mushrooms, truffles, and wine). The veal chop itself was beautifully seared so the fat locked onto the meat and moisturized the flesh. Not too chewy, not too fatty, not too lean. This was the veritable Goldilocks of meat chops. Just right.

My only complaint is the wine that paired so well with the sweet fat of the beef and pork terrine and the tomato confit didn’t go well with the veal. On its own the veal didn’t taste spicy but with the wine it suddenly did. As interesting as this was, it didn’t help the veal. So was this the veal’s fault of the wine’s fault?
For dessert, nothing innovative. Just some (mostly) very good takes on standard chocolate mousse, New York style cheesecake, and creme caramel. The pot of rich 65%(?) chocolate ganache came with a generous dollop of whipped cream. A few bites were all that could be managed after the portion of beef. Again, the creme caramel was extremely rich. The top was expertly torched, and made it a little more fun spooning out the insides. The cheesecake came with a much too sweet blueberry coulis, but at least there was lemon in the cheese to lend some acid and flavour to the mix. It’s a long, long way from Quebec blueberry season, so these ones would disappoint any Quebecer who knew that blueberries here are small and a little acidic, not large, kind of sweet, but otherwise bland and uninteresting. The other ridiculously sweet topping, a thick caramel, was luscious, but would have been better paired with a blueberry coulis that had a little more lemon in it. The cheesecake shouldn’t have to do all the work on its own.

Up until this point I was pretty happy with my meal. There had been some problems, not necessarily mistakes, but more so differences of opinion between myself and the chefs, but there had been some wonderful surprises – the terrine, the rabbit, the crushed potatoes, and the ample and nicely cooked meat. Ingredients were fresh and dishes were generally well thought out. Then the moment I had been waiting for…

…the server promised me a special dessert since there was nothing on the menu I could eat (everything had cream) but it was a table d’hote that was supposed to come with dessert. I generally do not pass on trying a dessert if it’s part of the meal and I can digest it. There are such things as “wrapped to go, please?” I was so excited. See, when you’re lactose intolerant, dessert at a nice restaurant means fruit salad. I hate fruit salad. There’s nothing wrong with fruit salad. In fact, I’ve eaten some phenomenal fruit salads, but I can make them at home with phenomenal fruit. There isn’t a whole lot of culinary magic that goes into fruit salad. Not like creme caramel or a pot of chocolate with fruit whipped cream, or a home-made caramel sauce. So I will judge a restaurant that promises me that the “chefs like a challenge” by the quality of the special dessert that I am offered.
In general, I do prefer soup to salad. It fills you up more. Unfortunately, when it comes to dessert neither term that I generally associate with restaurant dinner appetizers, soup or salad, belongs in front of me. You can purée gorgeous canteloupe with sugar and water, pour it into a bowl, dice some apples, grapefruit, amazing oranges (just like the ones currently in my fridge), and pineapple to throw over top and say “fait accompli”, aka “we fed the lactose intolerant girl,” but I’m sorry, that’s not good enough. If you’re going to get a girl all excited about a special dessert at one of the newest hot restaurants in town then you’ve got to deliver more than fruit soup.

65% Chocolate soup…Maybe I could change my mind about dessert soup, but what would the other 35% of the soup be?

Hours: Tues-Sat 6pm-11pm
Expect to Pay: $55-$90, including tax, tip and at least one glass of something red or white
(514) 315-8994
www.kitchengalerie.com