First customer at Ascari Enoteca!

26 November 2011 by pat.

Yup, I was the first one in the door last evening when Ascari Enoteca opened, corner of Queen St. East and Caroline Ave.

They don’t have their liquor license yet — they will in time for Tuesday’s Grand Opening — but I enjoyed myself thoroughly.

They’ve done nice things with the space: it’s completely unrecognizable from two incarnations ago when it was Lou’s Variety, and the only thing I recognize from when Ben had his gallery here is the depth of the window ledges. Muted colours and grey tables made me think of menswear fabrics; open steel kitchen, so you can see what’s going on.

First, I had a Chinotto to drink. Sort of like a bitters without the alcohol.

Very pleasant to sip while I read through the menu. Lots of choices. Lots of things I want to try. I have a hard time nailing it down to two dishes. Finally decide on the Crostini alla Toscana and the Cavatelli.

The crostini arrive, and they are gorgeous to behold. They’re also really tasty. A very smooth chicken liver paté — not even a hint of bitterness — served on a crusty toast with some caramelized onions on top, and a fried sage leaf topping it all off, sprinkled with sea salt.  It was really good, one of the better liver patés I’ve had in a restaurant. The presentation was novel, and the flavours worked together perfectly.

That is followed by the cavatelli. They make their pasta in-house, and it’s delicious. There’s a little bit of black truffle in the pasta, which is cooked to the point that it has some resistance against the teeth. The cavatelli comes with confit of duck, brussels sprouts, and chanterelle mushrooms. Freshly ground pepper on top, and that’s it. Simple, beautiful ingredients. It is quite a large serving of pasta. I didn’t have room for dessert.

Crazy, I know, but I decided to have an espresso at the end of dinner (hmm, maybe that’s why I was up so late). Beautiful cup, perfect crema, smooth flavour.

Total bill was about $42.00. I’ll be back.

 

 

 

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F’Amelia Restaurant: I’ll be back

18 November 2011 by pat.

F’Amelia opened almost two months ago on Amelia Street in Old Cabbagetown. Near the corner of Parliament Street, it’s a short trip by TTC from home (would be even shorter by bike, but it was chilly and windy today). I’ve been following the restaurant’s Twitter account since they opened, and they’ve been following mine, and we’ve chatted about food, ingredients, and local birds (they have a collection of bird feeders out back).

I was itching to get out today, and decided it was time for a trip over to Riverdale Zoo Farm, and a good opportunity to go to F’Amelia — their menu certainly appealed to me.

I was an early bird at the restaurant, which opens at 5pm (eek, it’s almost dark out at 5 now). Great people. I regret not writing down the name of the manager, because she is adorable and efficient and knowledgeable. I was greeted, seated, and ordered a Negroni while trying to decide what to eat from the menu. And then Todd Vestby, one of the owners, came out and gave me a warm greeting. It’s always nice to meet the face behind the tweets and find out the story of a restaurant. You can find more info on their website. I was lucky — executive chef Maurizio Verga was working tonight, and I had the opportunity to meet him. Everyone was personable, and I felt they all really cared about the place.

I’m going to have to come back with friends to try the Antipasto Misto. I bet it’s a good plate.

Mains are very hard to choose from. Plus they have a special today of a stuffed pasta that includes lemon and raisins and meat, and a few other ingredients that make it sound like a lemony mincemeat (if you’ve ever had a true mincemeat, not one of the ones made solely of fruit). One thing I love about their menu is that they offer all the mains in two sizes. I can choose the smaller one, and maybe have room for other dishes!

Desserts look good. Will I have room?

While I’m sipping my drink, bread arrives. It’s all made in house, and is delicious. I failed miserably at making focaccia twice this year, and here it was, simple and perfect, with some salt and rosemary. Plus a chunk of a good sturdy bread that was tender and almost like a buttermilk biscuit. A drizzle of good olive oil on the plate to dip the bread.

Because I’m a fan of cold water oily sustainable fish, I wanted to try their warm mackerel salad. I’m glad I did, because it was delicious. The fish was firm and fresh, fried from the skin side, so nice crispy skin on top, with some frizzled lettuce greens. Underneath lay ingredients that complemented the fish beautifully. Grilled radicchio was superb, providing charry bitterness against the fish’s richness, and then potatoes and sunchokes to provide sweetness. Highly recommended!

Next came the surprise course! One perfectly seared sweet scallop surmounting a seafood risotto that included shrimp, clams, and impossibly tender squid. Really. I was wondering if I was mistaken, or if it was something else, like some stem of a mushroom that I wasn’t familiar with. The executive chef, ‘Rizio, came out at that time, and I had the opportunity to ask him about it. He cooks his squid sous vide! It gets added to the risotto at the last moment. Very tasty risotto.

Next came my third polenta dish of the last three weeks. I thought the polenta I had at Rosa’s in San Francisco was tasty. This was better. Creamy perfect polenta, with osso buco and marrow butter. There’s rosemary in the polenta, giving it a rich herby perfume that can stand up to the richness of the veal shank. Sometimes polenta has so much cheese in it that the flavour of the corn is lost. Not the case here.

With the stew on top…the brunoise was perfectly cubed. The meat is so perfectly exquisitely rich, tender, braised long enough to be tender, not overcooked (which makes a meat taste dried-out). This dish deserves a revisit. I had the small one: I can see coming back and having the full size. It turns out that Chef Maurizio is from Bergamo, just north of Milan, in the heart of polenta region. He really cares about his polenta, and it shows.

Alas, no room for dessert. However, I’m honoured that Chef Maurizio brought me a glass of his dessert liqueur — similar to a limoncello, yet his own. It was a great way to finish the dinner.

 I sip my after-dinner liqueur, and watch around me as the restaurant starts to fill up. There are couples, families — opposite me, it looks like the grandparents have taken their two well-behaved little grandchildren out for pizza. Staff and customers recognize each other. It’s definitely full of neighbourhood people, and I think that a lot of them are regulars already.

Given the owners, staff, and the food,  I’d be proud to have a restaurant like F’Amelia in my neighbourhood.

 

 

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Another delicious Matt Kantor Little Kitchen feast!

15 November 2011 by pat.

As you might know, Matt Kantor is doing something a bit different this fall, and preparing a series of dinners for about a dozen people. Last night was the first of three for his Meat and Beer week — there will be two more events at Olliffe Butchers this week. And they’re all sold out!

I got there a bit early last evening. Well, a half-hour early, actually. Everyone was busy elsewhere, so I just looked in the window and shot off a few pictures. I like the front window of Olliffe, and the butcher-stamp look of their logo. Nice job, guys.

Great idea to have a display case of charcuterie right by the front window. Everything looks so delicious. I’m going when I’m back up town next Tuesday. I want to see what their Soppresatta and locally-cured Lardo are like. Hmm, maybe some pancetta, too.

Good artwork for a butcher store. Font geek likes the typeface on the butchery diagram.

Aaah! Here comes Matt!

Oops. Yah, we’re seriously early. Please walk around the block a few times and come back at 8, like it said on the email Sunday (Actually, Matt just said “come back at 8.” I’m the one pointing out that it said “Dinner at 8″ on the email).

So I wandered around for a while, took pictures of store windows, and I’ll get them up online, maybe later today. Some shops have their Christmas decorations up already! And sad to say, I was looking at them. Maybe I’ll actually decorate this year. I should get my winter Icicle lights up today while it’s still above 10C and the plastic wiring is pliant.

The old Summerhill train station still looks lovely as an LCBO. The fountain outside almost made me jump out of my skin on the way home, however. It has one of those deer-scare type setups, where a container fills with water, tips, noise happens, water spills out. Caught me unaware.

Came back just before 8, just had enough time to snap a shot of people outside and cross the road, and Matt opened the door and invited us all in.

Fundamentally rustic table centrepieces: beef rib bones in triads going the length of the table.

Time to peruse the menu. As usual for Matt, lots of variety, interesting combinations, delicious pairings. I can hardly wait to start.

Matt’s introduction to the dinner — alas, he’s on the edge of losing his voice!

First dish up in the sausage ceviche — now, it’s not raw sausage cooked by the acid of a citrus fruit. It’s actually been cooked. It’s served with a lot of the ingredients you’d find in a ceviche. It makes for a tasty appetizer. Matt, feel free to tell me what type of sausage it was!

It was accompanied by the first beer of the night (full flight of beers, different one for each course). This was a pleasant ale, good place to start, accompanied the food without competing with it.

They went well together! Our next beer had a flashy label, a good joke, and nice flavour.

It was mild, a bit of spice, and went really well with the sous-vide pork tenderloin, served with some crunchy chickpeas, dice of quince, schmear of rooibos lemon chiffon pudding, and some tarragon leaves. OK, that caught me by surprise a little. Wasn’t expecting pudding with pork, but it worked really nicely, the same way that a sweet applesauce or jelly goes with pork. The vanilla/lemony notes brought out the subtle flavours of a meat that serves to underpin other tastes. The licorice of the tarragon really came out with the beer.  The pork tenderloin was, like all the meats, incredibly tender. Cooking it sous vide, it had lost none of its juicy nature.

Next up was an Amsterdam Bone Shaker IPA. Like all IPAs, hopsy bitterness remained after sipping.

That bitterness worked well to accompany the richness of the Chantecler Chicken Risotto with butternut squash and pine nuts. This was a really great dish. The chicken is a variety I’ve only had once before, at Brad Long’s Veritas Local Fare on King Street East.  It’s got a wonderful rich chicken taste that you hardly ever find any more. The risotto was creamy, slightly sweet and rich from the squash, and each grain was still al dente at its core. The lightly toasted pine nuts completed the dish beautifully. One person commented “it’s like rice pudding.” Yup, But better. And for dinner.

The next two dishes on the menu were switched, so the chicken risotto was followed by Muscovy duck, then lamb biryani.

The Muscovy duck was accompanied by a strawberry beer, Amsterdam Framboise. A slightly medicinal nose, the flavour of the beer is great, and works really well with duck.

The duck was served two ways: we had a slice of juicy, tender, rare breast, and a crepe (Matt, was there cocoa in that crepe?) with leg meat and mushrooms. Hazelnut streusel was strewn about to add a sweet note to the lamb, and there were a few eye-interesting ingredients, in terms of some Romanesco (fractal food!), some delicious mushrooms, and a dollop of Romanesco purée. There was a round ball — just behind the breast meat — that looks like a truffle. Well, it wasn’t a mushroom truffle, and it wasn’t a chocolate, either. It was a tartuffo! Surprise! And the ice cream was carmelized onion. Absolutely delicious.

This was followed by a Great Lakes Winter Ale (I missed its picture!), which had a lovely light taste of cloves, and accompanied the deconstructed lamb biryani that came next. A couple of pieces of saffron cake, a white mousse, some plump sweet raisins, and some very tasty braised lamb, all done up with Indian spices and herbs. Another case where Matt surprised us by putting sweet and savory together in a delicious plate.

On to the dark beers. To accompany the beef, we had Black Oak Nutcracker Porter. Chocolate, molasses, creamy, coffee notes, this could be dessert.

It was a perfect counterpart to what came next. We’re in a butcher shop that prides itself on its dry aged beef. It’s on display in a cooler, directly behind the table. Big glorious slabs of meat, hanging, tenderizing, drying. We were fortunate to have some 60 day aged beef, prepared two ways: braised shortribs, glazed in honey, almost tasted like candy. Meaty candy. The shortribs were topped with some blue cheese, which I ate with both of the dishes, because blue cheese and well aged beef just belong together. The ribeye was succulent, and the cheese went with it the way it should, bringing out the stronger tastes in the beef, contributing umami. Sunchoke foam was a light palate cleanser, and worked with the potato to prepare the mouth for another round of beefy goodness.

That brought us to our final dish of the evening — and I forgot another beer picture! This one was really a dessert beer: Cannery Brewing Maple Stout. Oh yes, yes, yes. The maple note is strong — not as strong as it is in the maple liqueur one can buy in Quebec, but almost. And the maple works with the pecans, and the foie gras ice cream, caramel sauce, poached apple, and streusel topping.

I’m very glad there were no more courses! It was delicious, each course was different, and I’m still quite full from last night.

Hope you make it out to Matt’s next set of dinners — whatever it happens to be, it will be a pleasure.

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