Le Samuel de Champlain Restaurant: Montreal Highlights Festival

Portuguese

It’s nearly impossible to get a reservation now for any Montreal Highlights Festival restaurants, so I was surprised when I called Le Samuel de Champlain to make a reservation and I had my choice of lunches, dinners and happy hours. I crossed my fingers that they just had a big space, not that nobody was coming. The menu itself was supposed to be inspired by visiting Portuguese chef, Pedro Nunes, who had spotlighted at the restaurant the week before: 5 courses featuring seafood, both a Quebec and Portuguese specialty, and I had been told the meal would include octopus, lobster and lamb. To be fair, I went in looking to judge. I expected things to go wrong. It was in a hotel, so probably a big dining room with very formal service. The food would probably be alright.

The evening started off with a greeting from the host, who was a bit, well, creepy in a funny kind of way… I had to swallow a laugh when he placed the palate-cleansing sorbet (does this count as a course?) in front of me and whispered, “Sorbet!”, then moved to my companion’s right side, placed the sorbet and repeated for his sake, “Sorbet!”. Magic! Voila!

Then there was the menu and the wine. The octopus was there with green apple salad, a few coins of chorizo and a line of balsamic reduction…because there’s always a balsamic reduction (1), followed by the aforementioned magic(!) mandarin sorbet with sweet basil, translated from “sorbet” in French and Portuguese to “sherbet” in English (2 – but to be clear, sherbet is not sorbet…trust me, I’ve gotten sick enough to know), then red wine-braised lamb shank with smoked ham and turnip (3), and finally a mango mousse with ‘chocolate delight’ (4 – translated to ‘moulleux au chocolat’ which doesn’t really make any sense since moulleux is an adjective, not a noun, and means soft and smooth. So what I imagined was a ‘melted chocolate thing’).

Hmm…

Wasn’t there supposed to be lobster? Weren’t there 5 courses? Did all the lobsters fall out of the bag and run screaming from the kitchen? I have it on good authority from a friend with much more lobster picking-up experience than I that this never actually happens. Their speed on land is very slow. No less terrifying, however, even when you think of them as ugly turtles.

The point is, how can you call it a seafood menu when the main dish is lamb? The octopus was actually incredibly tender, but the few thin pieces qualify more as an amuse-bouche than an appetizer. In fact, I have a feeling that it was meant to be the amuse-bouche and the lobster got bumped.

So the wine…there were two suggested wines, one red and one white, from José Neiva Correia (he had been at the restaurant himself along with Chef Nunes for the big dinner on the 18th on which this evening’s meal was based). We tried both the white Arinto and the red Touriga. I was nervous because when you order what is supposed to be a glass of good wine, the server should hold the glass by the stem, but glasses of red were being placed on tables around us with paws wrapped around the bowl of the glasses. To a wine afficionado there would in effect now be no reason to taste the wine as the temperature and thus the flavour would be affected by the heat of the hand. For the same reason you hold a glass of wine by the stem when you drink (if it’s a wine that you care about), it should be served from the stem as well. For the white I really wouldn’t have cared, as it wasn’t very good with the octopus anyway. I think it was supposed to pair with the escaped (magic?!) lobster, but it was too sweet, as my companion noted, for the mild octopus.

Just one more quick note about sub-par things before I mention the things that were good: In a hotel that does so much formal service for banquets, it’s normal for the servers to be trained to place every dish a certain way. The table is set precisely, the wine glasses have no water marks (the servers may actually be fired for not checking the glass before they place it in front of a guest), the plates should be placed so that each guest is faced with the identical positioning of a plate’s particular design, as well as the orientation of the food and cutlery on the plate itself. Basically it’s the perfect job for, and was certainly created by, obsessive-compulsive people. Now maybe you don’t care about these things, but it’s something that will differentiate a highly-trained server or serving staff from the rest. Think the Four Seasons or the Bellagio versus a Holiday Inn or the Tropicana. Anyway, the restaurant, situated in a Marriott hotel should have fallen somewhere closer to the Four Seasons, and sadly didn’t.

Okay, good things. Octopus. Check. The sorbet was actually pretty good. It was fairly smooth and not too sweet, though it lacked the acidic bite you want from a palate-cleanser. The sweet basil (maybe an inspiration of the Vietnamese head chef?) actually tasted like basil, not like chewable green, which is always good.

Then the lamb. Simple, incredibly tender, ample braised lamb shank. The tips of the lamb were kind of cold, as was my companion’s turnip…but it was awfully cold in the dining room, so the fact that the rest of the food was still warm was more impressive than the cool parts were disappointing.

So shank is a cheap cut of lamb, requiring it to be marinated and cooked for hours in an acidic sauce (often red wine) to make it delicious. And it was. There was really nothing complicated about the dish. It was just a half a turnip, a few luscious pieces of shank, a cabbage roll (a cabbage roll?) and a sprig of curly parsley. The dish was monotonously red as the turnip was cooked with the lamb and the cabbage roll was somewhere between red and translucent. This felt like a hearty, country meal. Not what I expected, but certainly not bad. Not what you expect from the Highlights Festival, though. And I’ll repeat – a cabbage roll? To be honest I checked to make sure the lamb shank was traditional Portuguese fare and sure enough, braised lamb is standard, as is the red wine sauce, but no luck with the cabbage roll. It wasn’t filled with rice or beef like a Polish roll, so maybe the fusion element of some kind of sweet bread and maybe ham inside justified its inclusion.

Dessert was cute. I got more sorbet. Not so cute. I like sorbet for dessert only slightly more than I like fruit salad, and I harbour a great resentment for fruit salad at a nice restaurant. The watermelon sorbet was nice enough, and I was happy to see that the only fruit were blueberries. My companion got the mysterious ‘moulleux’. Two slightly-flattened timbit-shaped cakes covered in cocoa. It took us a long time to figure out what was inside, as you couldn’t cut through the first one. After sawing into it, the inside turned out to be a pure piece of white chocolate. Not so moulleux (adjective). Oh! I understood! The white chocolate was supposed to be melted! Oops…

The second moulleux (noun) proved me right, as it was heated to the proper temperature and the inside was heated to a smooth and soft consistency. Microwaves are fickle things…

The most interesting part of the plate were the little multi-coloured pebbles upon which the ball of mango mousse sat. Now that I think about it, they may have been the colours of the Portuguese flag, and were actually composed of two different textures. The plain ones just soft sugar and butter and the coloured ones were crunchy (think the size and snap of pop rocks candy). That was probably the most imaginative food-type thing put in front of us the whole evening.

So, the meal was good, but certainly not as good as we had hoped. It lacked creativity and innovation, which is a huge part of what gets Montreal diners to splurge on expensive meals in the middle of the restaurant off-season. It’s hard to get people out of their homes when it’s cold outside, and offering simply-presented home-style cooking is not the impetus that cold Montrealers are looking for. The meal was fairly authentic Portuguese (there were only 3 green things – a sprig of parsley, a piece of basil, and a few pea sprouts on the octopus, but the fruity olive oil for the bread will make me dream of Portuguese summers).

This is not what Le Samuel de Chanplain will serve on a regular basis, and so Chef Thach-Ngoc Vo pulled off the actual cooking very respectably. Maybe on another day the service would have been impeccable, the presentation stunning, but wait until at least the end of the festival to give this place a chance. Perhaps by then the lobsters will have wandered back into the kitchen from the grocery store with a few, much needed leafy greens.

Price: $38 for Festival Menu, $10-$15 for a glass of Portuguese wine

Expect to Pay: Too much for just a decent meal ($65 a person including tax and tip)