For two days only, Laloux, the fine dining restaurant extraordinaire of chef Jonathan Lapierre-Réhayem, will be serving a $60 six-course vegan tasting menu for Montreal en Lumière. Those courses also happen to be gluten-free! As long as that tagliatelle is made of seaweed and doesn’t just include seaweed and the buckwheat cake is 100% buckwheat.
I fell in love with Laloux a few years ago, and it’s stayed at the top of my list for special occasion dining. And this just proves to me how exciting the restaurant can be. To see a locavore chef going outside the meat + veg or even the veg + meat box is special in Montreal, land of pig and lamb in which we live.
So tonight and tomorrow night only, here’s what you can get at Laloux:
Amuse bouche:
Roots vegetables chips, field peas and onion ashes
First appetizer:
Wild mushroom consommé, Quebec nut and hemp crumble,
celeriac, celery and savory
Second appetizer:
Seaweed tagliatelle, marinated sea lettuce,
shiitake and grilled green onions
Main:
Naked oat grains, truffle, black garlic, roasted sunchoke, sumflower,
chervil and marinated mustard seeds
Pre-dessert
Dessert:
Macaé chocolate mousse cake, buckwheat honey cake,
honey mushroom gel and parsnip powder
$60 per person
(plus wine, taxes and service)
Naked oats are gluten-free as they haven’t been contaminated with flour in a processing plant. Buckwheat is gluten-free.
Dim Sum Deconstructed
Sadly, you can’t get this menu anymore, but here’s a review of Lapierre-Réhayem’sone-day-only dimsum brunch from last Sunday. Why dim sum? Because Shenzhen, China is the guest city for this year’s Montreal en Lumière. This meal was an homage to the year’s theme.
Gluten free dimsum? The menu wasn’t marketed as gluten free, but the chef used Massawippi gluten-free tamari (“Miso Damari”). So when I arrived, I was told I could eat everything except the duck dumplings! No big deal, since just look at everything else I could eat:
I could have cried from joy! It’s been years since I had dimsum, and although this was far from traditional (gyoza and tempura feel more Japanese; General Tao is dinner, not brunch; and quail, shrimp and carrot salad feel a world away from turnip cakes and bao buns), I really like dumplings…
Like these!
Mushroom dumplings in open-ended rice paper rolls with tons of green onions and some piment d’Espelette adding the tiniest tongue tingle (kind of a Sichuan peppercorn substitute without the lip numbing sensation). They were pretty greasy inside but soft and chewy and savoury in the best kind of way, especially when dipped in that gluten-free tamari.
Then there were these. Bet you’ve never had veal sweetbread General Tao, but it kind of fit into the more traditional Chinese cooking using organic meats. They weren’t crispy or spicy, but they were rich, mushy and tender in a comfort food kind of way.
Next up, maple-glazed quail with orange and cider vinegar. I didn’t taste any orange or cider, but I did taste delicious quail and crispy skin with a speckle of that Espelette pepper/Sichuan peppercorn replacer.
Sea whelks are often tough and chewy, like overcooked squid – or overcooked sea whelks. I’d never had them this tender before. They were bright from the lemon and puréed coriander oil, light, salty from the soy and savoury from the green onions and toasted black and regular sesame seeds. It was my surprise favourite dish.
Last but not least, sweet-and-sour spare ribs. I rarely eat pork because of low quality of production and ethical reasons, but Laloux is one of the handful of places in Montreal where I’ll occasionally give in to ribs or chops, not that Laloux would ever put a giant pork chop à la Pied de Cochon on its menu anyway. But sweet-and-sour anything is a weakness acquired from growing up on Chinese takeout. These weren’t sweet or sour, really, but you could taste the quality of the meat, and at least they weren’t slathered in a cheap corn syrup based bottled sauce like real takeout.
After all that, there was no room for shrimp salad or the gorgeous shredded carrot and fennel plate I saw some tables getting. And there was definitely no room for Japanese cheesecake, coconut pudding and matcha ice cream for dessert. But I did get a fortune cookie to break open (and not eat, since they’re clearly not g-f).
Cute, right? That day, I was definitely the pigeon.
Laloux
Where: 250 Avenue des Pins Est
What: Vegan Tasting Menu, Feb. 27 and 28, 2016
How much: $60 plus tax and tip
Reservations: 514 287 9127 or Open Table
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