Last night I had the pleasure of a dining experience at Atelier, a restaurant, recently named by En Route magazine as one of Canada’s 10 Best New Restaurants 2009, that offers a 12-course blind tasting menu exclusively every night to a small, 22-guest dining room.
It was definitely one of the best dining experiences I've had in my life and I'd highly recommend it.
Atelier is so much more than a restaurant meal; it is food that surprises, food that tantalizes your senses in new ways, food that makes you giddy with delight, food that makes you think and food that spans the entire spectrum of delicious.
Chef Marc Lepine's avant-garde approach is a grand vision of what dining could and should be. It is an exciting peek at the future of cuisine.
Molecular Gastronomy - Expanding your culinary horizons:
The concept of "molecular gastronomy" is based on the examination of the science behind food and cooking and understanding it at a molecular level in terms of physics and chemistry.
In the culinary vernacular "molecular gastronomy" is applied to an avant-garde style of cuisine (also termed post-modern, experimental, deconstructionist, etc.) that involves using new technology and techniques to create new and unexpected textures and flavour combinations to confuse, tantalize and excite the taste buds and create an entirely new dining experience.
Practitioners of this style of cuisine often employ high concept, whimsy and irony to their dishes which are equal parts science experiment and work of art.
Techniques range from "sous-vide" (cooking food in vacuum-sealed bags at constantly-held low temperatures in immersion circulators) to using liquid nitrogen to flash freeze foods, using gas cartridges to create flavoured "foams" and making elaborate frozen creations on something called an anti-griddle (exactly what it sounds like, a griddle but for cold instead of heat).
Atelier: Equal parts kitchen, science lab and art studio
Atelier's Chef/Owner Marc Lepine and Chef de cuisine Sarah Allen have worked in the kitchens of some of the foremost exemplars of Molecular Gastronomy in North America (Grant Achatz of Chicago's Alinea and Wylie Dufresne of New York's WD-50 respectively).
Their decision to open a restaurant like Atelier in a town like Ottawa was definitely a ballsy one. Let's face it, though Ottawa may be geographically close to great foodie cities like Chicago, New York, Montreal and Toronto, attitudinally Ottawa is still very much a culinary backwater. This is a town where the likes of Kelsey's, Montana's and East-Side Mario's dominate the restaurant landscape and where most people's idea of fine dining is The Keg.
There are signs that attitudes are slowly changing; a handful of great new bistros and small-plate/wine pairing places have opened up in recent years and Atelier is at the very leading-edge of that group.
Approaching Atelier from the outside one gets no hint of the wonders within. The restaurant's bleak, post-industrial, charcoal grey exterior, steel grate window covers, its location in a quiet non-descript, dark, Little Italy backstreet and it's complete lack of signage definitely give it a strange sort of cachet, kind of like going to an exclusive night club that only "in" people know about.
The restaurant's white interior is comfortable, sleek and modern but not so modern as to be cold. In fact there are several homey touches like a child's finger painting displayed as framed artwork.
The service was warm and professional yet informal and without a hint of pretense. The team is young and the service quite personal; Executive Chef Marc Lepine phoned me personally the day before the visit to confirm the reservation.
The food is excellent. In order for avant-garde cuisine to work it must be impeccably executed. It would be so easy for these dishes to come off as precious, pretentious and off-putting messes of incongruent ideas but instead the food at Atelier was expertly prepared, delicious and presented with a sense of fun and whimsy.
Giggles and a chorus of "mmmmmm"s was the soundtrack of the meal as dish after dish was presented, explained (often to slight bemusement) and then devoured as bewilderment turned to surprise and delight that such a seemingly incongruous collection of flavours, textures and temperatures could work so well together and taste so delicious.
Onto the food porn
The 12-course tasting menu at Atelier (which we were given signed copies of at the end of the meal) reads like the list of musical numbers in the Playbill of a Broadway musical or the nameplates of artwork displayed in a gallery. Each course was a stop on an itinerary through a culinary Wonderland. The chefs change and add new items every week so in effect the menu completely changes every couple months.
The photos really don't do the food justice (I tried to be relatively discreet and didn't want to use a flash-camera so I just snapped these pics with my iPhone), the meal was really an experience to be taken in with all your senses and at best these photos are but postcards from my culinary journey:
0. Here's the dill pickle bread and powdered butter that we were presented upon being seated. The powdered butter looks neat but it spreads like regular butter and wasn't the "Molly McButter" consistency I expected.
1. "Smoke and a Pancake"
About 70% of what we perceive as taste is actually perceived through our sense of smell. This special "clip spoon" is a spoon/clothes pin hybrid that supports some sort of aromatic element (in this case a sprig of smoking rosemary) to tickle the olfactory sense while you eat.
The first course/amuse-bouche is a little blini on top of which sits a globe of liquefied corn in a thin alginate shell so when you pop it in your mouth the alginate shell ruptures and the liquified corn spills out and floods your palate (much like a poached egg). The crunchiness of the pancake combined with that concentrated flavour of fresh, ripe corn made for the perfect bite.
2. "Club Sandwich"
The next course was a play on the club sandwich with three layers of seared tuna in place of the bread and a delicious avocado/caper salsa in between the layers.
3. "Nitro Noodle Soup"
This curried carrot soup was absolutely delicous, the "noodles" are actually ribbons of crême fraiche flash frozen with liquid nitrogen. It arrived at the table smoking and as the "noodles" slowly melted they contrasted the spice in the soup with a cool creaminess that was just heavenly.
4. "Charred Olive"
The top component is a piece of arctic char (a northern cousin of the salmon) cooked sous-vide, the brown sheet is made of kalamata olive and there are globules of red pepper gel and fish roe. I cooked a filet of arctic char at home last week by pan frying it but the slower/low-temperature sous-vide method of cooking it here gave it a completely different taste and delicate texture. It was like a completely different fish.
5. "Scallop"
A perfectly seared scallop topped with green-apple and a pomegranate foam. The scallop was cooked perfectly with a nice caramelized layer from the searing, the green apple provided the hint of acid and the pomegranate gave it a nice sweet accent.
6. "Fruit Cocktail"
Firstly, this is Atelier's "test tube" spoon, for our meal it came filled with watermelon juice:
It was meant to be poured into the glass containing our "fruit salad" course served as an inter-mezzo or palate cleanser. The fruit salad contained a variety of dried/powdered/foamed fruits, topped with a slice of liquid nitro frozen watermelon and blueberry gel, once all the elements were mixed together with the watermelon juice from the test tube it tasted exactly like a refreshing summer fruit salad. It was an interactive and fun presentation of a course.
7. "Pigs and a Blanket"
This dish looked like it belonged in an art gallery, I can't even begin to recall what all the different components were aside from the little alginated globule of crab apple puree that split open like a poached egg. The gelatinous "blanket" covered two pieces of suckling pig cooked sous-vide.
Admittedly, I'm not a huge fan of pork. It is so easy to overcook pork to the point where it's dry and flavourless. One piece of this pig included the rind and the layer of fat (similar to the roast pork my parents buy in Chinatown) but Atelier's version cooked sous-vide resulted in the most moist, tender and flavourful piece of pork I'd ever tasted.
8. "Shades of Beige"
Conceptually, this dish was a bit all-over the board but the individual compenents were all impeccable. It featured a variety of mushrooms (including black trumpet mushrooms), duck confit, and potato fried in duck fat (arguably the most delicious fat known to man). It's always a party when duck confit is invited!
9. "Beef"
This piece of filet mignon was cooked sous vide and then quickly seared, the cooking was so perfect I was nearly moved to tears. The sides were a celeriac puree and a parsnip custard.
10. "Hawaii 5-0"
The Hawaii 5-0 was our first dessert course (As an aside I'm a HUGE fan of multiple courses for dessert). It was basically a play on Hawaiian pizza with many forms of pineapple (cake, gel, mousse), powdered coconut as well as bacon bits. The donut was a delicious frozen cream shell. The savouriness of the bacon pairs surprisingly well with the pineapple.
11. "Cheeky Monkey"
Another art-gallery worthy presentation, this dessert features pieces of banana cake, peanut fudge, dehydrated chocolate powders, mousses and a small scoop of curry ice cream. Yup, that's right, curry. I've had chocolate truffles and ganache with chili powder before which cuts the sweetness of the chocolate with a nice spicy kick. The curry ice cream did that here but the addition of the cold, creamy texture made for such an unexpected experience on the palate.
12. "The Captains Crunch"
As a kind of mignardises course we were given these yummy house-made white chocolate truffles coated with Cap'n Crunch cereal (they were devoured before I could snap a pic).
The restaurant also offers an option of a flight of wine pairings from the sommelier to accentuate each course. This was the selection last night:
At the end of the meal, we were invited back to the kitchen to meet the chefs. After being so impressed with the meal I felt like I was off to see the Wizard of Oz. The chefs graciously greeted us into their surprisingly tiny kitchen. There was a distinct lack of several things a regular restaurant kitchen would have; gas ranges (they use induction cooking elements), a deep fat fryer, a griddle which just added to the overall mystique of the meal.
The trip to the kitchen was the perfect way to end off the evening. I'd implore anybody with a sense of adventure to give this restaurant a try. Yes, it's not exactly cheap but it is definitely a good value especially if you consider it as much entertainment as it is food (our dinner lasted almost 4-hours that seemed to just whiz by). It makes for a wonderful and worthwhile splurge.
I can't wait to go back to see what other wonders await.
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