The Montreal Highlights Festival – As a person who eats mostly vegetables, a fair bit of raw, and generally cooks for herself, the festival means 11 days of treating my body both well (in terms of delicious things) and less well (in terms of meats, oils, and items that maybe aren’t the best for me). But life just isn’t worth living to me without flavour, new tastes, new combinations, amazing chefs, and memorable restaurant experiences with great company. So here are my Montreal Festival en Lumière awards:
Most Original Dish: Whiting, oyster, and clam in sweet cranberry and wild ginger broth with raw leek, parsley roots, tapioca pearls, beet purée and cilantro roots at “Sapristi!” at La Fabrique, Feb. 21, 2012.
Nicolas Darnauguilhem’s opening dish was the most stunning flavour combo of the fest for me. Who would have thought slippery smooth tapioca pearls (à la bubble tea) and squishy oysters would be a match made in heaven? Then pure sweetness from the resuscitated dried cranberries (sweetened by nothing but the cranberries themselves, said Chef) on top of a spoonful of beet purée, intense warmth from ginger and the surprise of the leek.
Best Classic Dish: “Rossini-Style Eumatini Beef Mignon with a crispy basket of baby vegetables” at “Gourmet Symphony” at Le Beaver Club, Feb. 24, 2012.
Beef medallions wrapped around freshly grated black truffle and fois gras, sushi-style. There’s nothing revolutionary about this dish, but the beauty was in the careful balancing of ingredients: 3 small medallions of perfectly tender beef (I usually hate beef, and I savoured every bite of this. The menu also listed the farm it came from. Some people think that’s pretentious; I like it) with just enough black truffle (not too much – very important), and creamy fois gras. Served with a potato chip in the form of a topless box containing perfectly al dente root vegetables (photo here), it worked even without the wine pairing: Pinot Noir, Eola Hills, Réserve La Créole, Oregon, 2008.
Best Overall Meal: La Porte, “Lunchtime Favourites”, Feb. 16.
From start to finish, perfection. Melt-in-your-mouth salmon with actual flavour (next to impossible since most restaurants use the same unsustainable, farmed, bland, Atlantic fish) with toasted buckwheat, sweet cabbage, and apple. Perfectly seared scallop with blood sausage and celery root rémoulade. Napoléon-style paper-thin brittle layered with caramelized apples and sided with molasses-thick apple reduction, simple apple sauce and light-as-air pear sorbet – hot, cold, crunchy, smooth, chewy, sweet, bitter…heaven. Homemade rose marshmallows with dark chocolate, and soft raspberry candies with enough lemon to pucker your lips coated in sugar for a sweet end.
Best Service: La Fabrique, Feb. 24, 2012
The best table overlooking the open kitchen where the guest chef shone; polite, informative sommelier; gracious service from the co-owners; and that special feeling that comes when the chefs speak with you about the meal, since they know they’re on display all evening and dinner is also theatre.
Runner-up: Oyster Blast at Decca77 , Feb. 25, 2012 – all-you-can-shuck oysters. This was a DIY event. Meaning you eat what you can shuck, but I probably would have starved if the servers hadn’t felt so bad for me that they volunteered to help. “I just learned this morning,” said one server who quickly opened a dozen bivalves and loaded up my plate. Discouraging, really…but I was full of nothing but thanks as I dug into the more than 12 varieties they had on the buffet. Shuck! (Replace “Sh” with “F”.) Shucking is hard! (Do not replace “Sh” with “F”.)
Best Dessert: Gluten-free, dairy-free chocolate torte, “Gourmet Symphony”, Le Beaver Club, Feb. 24, 2012
The thing about this meal (see photos here) was that it was served banquet-style, so there was one sitting, everyone was served at once, and the meal started at 7pm, no matter when you arrived. Wine was topped-up on the house since the wait between courses was so long. Special plates (ex: food intolerances) were served first, so my dairy-free, gluten-free option always came promptly (after waiting ridiculous amounts of time, of course). There were tons of servers, and they all knew who I was and what I could and couldn’t eat. And because it’s a restaurant in a hotel, they had gluten-free bread in the freezer, and brought out a rack of olive oil and balsamic at my request. So I wasn’t munching half-slices of tapioca toast pre-meal and between courses, almost like a normal person (minus the tapioca). I also finally got to scoop up sauces and place the second course of scallop and lobster ceviche with yuzu juice on the toast for a crunch with the generous portion of sweet, creamy, lightly marinated seafood.
And whereas other Festival en Lumiere restaurants treated my food intolerances as jokes (pickles are NOT an acceptable 4th course replacement for a cheese plate in a $75 dinner…Neither is recycled fruit salad with traces of very much not dairy-free chocolate mousse that’s easily mistaken for mold – which would be only slightly worse). Here, instead of a soup with sour cream and blue cheese croutons (all things I can’t eat), I was given a simple (but BEAUTIFUL and delicious) gaspacho. The kitchen had gone out of their way to serve me something the equivalent of the dish it replaced. Not as gourmet, perhaps, but much more effort than, say, Wild Alaskan salmon with potato purée and vermouth sauce…without the potato purée and vermouth sauce. I’m quite capable of grilling an expensive piece of salmon in olive oil and salt myself, thanks.
Cue dessert at Le Beaver Club. Instead of a “coffee delight with chocolate pie” (a stunning dish given to my dining companion on a dinner plate evenly divided between a stacked custard-layered pastry in a semi-circle – half the plate – of caramel, and the other half filled with a chocolate-coffee molten cake plus a scoop of cooling ice cream), I got a rich hockey puck-sized piece of chocolate heaven made with the Beaver Club’s own chocolate (they have their own chocolatier in-house, apparently. I’m not sure if this is also the pastry chef, but I don’t think so). I’m not usually a lover of chocolate, and especially not a lover of raspberry and chocolate together, but the raspberry coulis here was fresh and not too sweet a liberal amount of lemon to pucker it up – the perfect foil for the also not-too-sweet chocolate. It was simple and beautiful; classic elegance in the form of cake that I could actually eat. Two thumbs way, way up.
Runner-Up: La Porte, “Lunchtime Favourites“, Feb. 16. (See Above.)
Best Vegetable: Raw leek at Sapristi!” at La Fabrique, Feb. 21, 2012.
That raw shaved leek. Seriously, it made the dish. (Definitely not the pickles. See ‘Best Dessert’ above.)
Runner-Up: Brussels sprouts with deer medallions and fois gras at “Hats Off to Thierry” at Les Cons Servent, Feb. 23, 2012
The deer was okay. The fois gras was…fatty…but the brussel sprouts were coated in salt and cooked to tender, falling apart perfection (that’s how I like them, anyway). They stood out against the dark, heavy flavour palette of the dish.
Best Under-Appreciated Dish: Grilled Calamari with salted grilled tomato, boiled potatoes and green beans at “Lunching Around the World” at Tasca, Feb. 20, 2012
Squid is generally tough and chewy – it seizing up when cooked and takes a good bit of time afterwards soaking in a sauce to relax, kind like the rest of us with baths. Here it was not tough, having been long-marinated, perfectly seasoned, and tricked into thinking the grill was still the bath. Beautifully charred, and oh-so-affordable. That in itself is pretty good, but the kicker is that the sides weren’t toss-offs either. The grilled tomato (well, the top part that was cut open and grilled and salted) made the dish. The beans weren’t overcooked, and the potatoes were waxy joy, and completely butter-free.
Most Memorable Moment: “Oyster Blast” at Decca77, Feb. 25, 2012
Wrapping up the festival with plate after plate of oysters and a glass of prosecco, and savouring pound after pound of (much easier to remove from the shell) mussels in a pickled pepper salad. Dressed in an apron, arm sore from shucking (well, attempting to shuck), a trip to Decca77 will rarely be so casual and plain old fun. Most days, though, they probably shuck for you whether you look like a shucking wimp or not.
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