Life in Cowtown

I’ve been blessed with a new co-worker who loves to eat as much as I do. So three days this week instead of pondering how sad it is to work every day (very sad), we’ve taken the liberty of a long lunch to check out three restaurants that participated in Downtown Dining Week, offering a three course menu for 25.00. The list of participating restaurants was impressive, spanning not only most high-end places downtown, but also Mission, Bridgeland and Kensington. Some restaurants only did an evening menu, while others were a long hike from the office, but in the end we narrowed it down to three: Teatro (because even though it’s a venerable institution, we’ve never been), Saint Germain (because they’re very new), and Rush (because they just got voted Calgary’s best restaurant by Avenue Magazine). 

None of them disappointed, and here’s a quick recap of the three.

 Bread rolls at Teatro

Teatro opened up with a tomato confit with a prosciutto, basil pesto and pecorino pepato. It was a lovely dish and received top marks from my co-worker, and a bit less so from me. The tomatoes were soft and tomatoey, the prosciutto lovely and the cheese sharp, but the room temperature dish could’ve used more pizzazz. Like a garlic oil in the pesto or some garlic chives slivered on top, it seemed to lack an element of spice that would make it great.

The chorizo pappardelle with red peppers, parmesan and green onion was a wonderful dish. Comforting, balanced, the pappardelle was perfectly cooked, the chorizo was sharp, and the sauce was a perfect balance of salty, sweet and sour with none of the excess sourness of lesser tomato sauces. It was a glorious bowl of pasta.

The dessert tasting was a duo of some chocolate concoction and the most amazing chocolate crème brulee I’ve ever had. It was decadent, outstanding and flawless and a perfect end to a great meal. In fact it was so good, I kind of forgot to take the photo before I ate it. It was worth it, trust me.  Overall, Teatro is a restaurant that totally deserves its standing as one of the pillars of fine dining in Calgary, and it’d return here in a heartbeat for a nice dinner.

I’m sorry, I ate it…  : ( It was THAT good.

Saint Germain is the only restaurant that actually offered a choice between two appetizers, entrees and desserts, and my friend and I both wanted the same thing. So in the spirit of enjoying the lunch fully, (who needs variety), we had the same starters and mains and a different dessert each. We had a wonderful smokey lentil soup to start, and it was thick and hearty and good.

The prosaic fish and chips that we chose over merguez sausage and white beans were pretty good, but not original enough to win big points. The fish was flaky soft on the inside,  moist and steamy and enclosed in perfectly crisp batter, and the fries were thin and pretty good, not great. They could’ve used more salt and were a bit on the dry side. The dish came with two dipping sauces – one a tomato based sauce similar in texture to cocktail sauce, and some sort of mayo based concoction that was just addictive. Guess which one was gone first, veg or mayo?

The desserts were a white Provencal cake with lavender honey ice cream and a walnut tarte. The cake left us both indifferent – it was a plain, dryish white disk without much flavor and the ice cream didn’t seem to help, but the walnut tart was fantastic. Crumbly, crunchy, rich and nutty it was a close second to the crème brulee the day before. The prices here were totally affordable with the awesome sounding daily special (something along the lines of lamb and pickled onions and…) falling into the 12-15 dollar range, which makes this the most realistic place for an actual weekday lunch.

Meh

Yum

Rush fully deserves its current standing as the best restaurant in town. I am so often disappointed by newly hyped restaurants that I wasn’t sure I’d be impressed, but I was.

The apple and celery root soup was sublime – a creamy dreamy bowl of goodness with flakes of smoked ham hock that actually made us silent for a moment.

The braised short rib was not only fork tender and possessing a rich savoury flavor, but served over creamy polenta and the best braised greens I’ve ever had, it was a study in umami and comfort. It was a seriously solid dish, so rich and good that it made you reevaluate an ingredient you thought you knew. Dishes that make you do that deserve the highest praise in my books.

The dessert was a letdown, but mainly because I fell victim to my expectations. See when I hear the words lemon tart, my mind trained like Pavlov’s dog, automatically thinks of A Ladybug Bakery’s lemon tart. It’s a reflex that I can’t help, and frankly don’t want to, since it’s the best lemon tart on the planet and probably in the universe. So to get a lemon SQUARE (a very different animal) on my plate trying to sail under false pretenses was cause for intense disappointment and longing for the real deal. See when a town has a lemon tart THAT good, you might as well give up and either serve theirs, or carefully try and skirt the competition altogether.  Anyhow, the lemon square was kind of boring though the raspberry gelato was intensely flavored and sweet. It was the weakest dessert out of the three restaurants, but I’ll totally forgive them due to their mindblowing food.

Square - not tart

If your town has a dining week I totally urge you to partake and experience all those places you’re not sure are worth the money.

I’m going to go bond with P90X DVD now.

This week has been full of weird and quirky info that I feel compelled to share:

Best poem:

I am sitting here in front of the window,
and I am being bored.
I wish I was two puppy’s
so I could play together.

I have no idea who to attribute it to, since it was sent to me by a friend without a signature. If it’s yours – sorry, but I love it.

*********

My friends two year old son is suffering from a sudden mysterious neurological illness that left his peripheral nervous system totally down. (The doctors think he’ll be okay, but they’d really like to diagnose him.) The neurologists are testing him for everything known to man to see what caused it, and some of the things he had to do were:

- Check to see if he has any unvarnished furniture in the house - take a white cloth and rub all furniture hard to see if it stains.
- Vacuum the entire floor with a special sealed vacuum bag to see if anything is present
- Bring in all household pills he may have had access to and so on.

What I got out of that conversation is that our houses are probably more toxic than we ever even imagine. I want to read Slow Death by Rubber Duck, but dread it at the same time. 

*******

Google does NOT in fact have all the answers. Earlier this week my boyfriend and I were watching that story on that guy who killed that young girl while she was jogging, you know? And he asked me whether pedophilia exists in the animal world. Weird but legit question. Well I’m not Google, so I fired up the trusty laptop and went to town. And I got nothing. No relevant search results at all. I don’t know what to make of that. I feel a little scared and lonely now that my search engine that could failed me. (Actually this is so not the first time I’ve stumped Google, but I can’t remember what else is NOT out there, and that’s probably a good thing).

*******

In other news, I am officially starting my tomatoes today, and the race begins anew. Seeds go in the pods tonight. Wish me a warm summer please!

It’s no secret that going out to eat is one of my favorite things to do, right up there with skiing and reading, and people, that says a lot. I’m one of those travelers that will have a ‘must eat’ list before going on a trip, although I don’t plan every meal, that would be anal. Just a list of several restaurants that define a city, from big names to hole in the wall gems. Often I came back from those vacations and cried because they reached a level of awesomeness rarely seen in Cowtown. So it was in the spirit of low expectations that I checked out Calgary’s newest restaurant last Thursday, and it was surprisingly awesome.

Having been open for only two days when my friend Vanessa and I descended on it, they were still a bit unprepared in the drinks department, especially when it came to anything other than wine – no beer kegs yet, no hard cider, no soda for a highball, but undeterred we requested a caesar. It was rather serviceable as my friend put  – worse than Spur and better than the Keg. They must have been out of veggies too, as it arrived unadorned with beans, celery or asparagus – namely the best parts of a caesar.  But they were JUST opened, so can’t really complain.

The menu was quirky and fabulous  – bone marrow gratin (in Calgary!), romaine with crispy chicken skin, arugula and tuna conserva with lemon pickled new potatoes and shaved celery, baked raclette… and although it was hard to decide, ya gotta start somewhere, so we went with carnivore’s delight -  the bone marrow gratin, duck fat poutine, and the share burger – a min. 9 oz order of a garlic sausage burger topped with an egg.

This was my friends’ first time with the bone marrow, and luckily she’s an adventurous soul – it consists of two thick rounds of bone, seasoned lightly and broiled, served with flakes of parsley to cut the richness, flakes of sea salt for crunch and to bring out the flavor and thin crostini. The marrow was as divine as expected – warm, rich, beefy and robust. (For the uninitiated souls the texture is similar to soft boiled eggs’ egg yolk and the taste is not unlike bread and drippings, or dragging your bread through the bottom of a roast dish.) The crostini appeared to be buttered though, which is a bit of overkill since beef marrow itself is intensely rich. (Yeah, go ahead and ask for more crostini right away – four is just not enough.)

The duck fat fried poutine was… ducky. A small dish of thick, hand cut fries with a mild duck fat flavor and just a bit less gravy than it should have had. It was well seasoned, and had the fries been crisper and the gravy more bountiful it would have reached greatness.

The burger was not a traditional beef burger, but a sausage burger as stated on the menu. A thick patty charred on the outside and cooked to medium on the inside it was one of the most satisfying burgers I’ve had in a while. Topped with a sunny side up egg which slowly dripped over the meat and served on golden brioche it was just an embarrassment of riches when it comes to flavor. I’m almost reluctant to admit that in the midst of this carnivorous nirvana I actually wouldn’t have minded some tomatoes or pickles on the side – just to cut the richness. But no worries – I ordered a second caesar instead.

The portions are on the small side which led me to wonder at the outset whether we ordered enough food, and I’m happy to say my concerns were unfounded. The three dishes we shared left us very comfortably full, on the verge of stuffed really, and according to all witness accounts we eat like lumberjacks, so believe me when I tell you that three dishes between two people is plenty. Of course we did go all out on the meat front – had we ordered some lighter fare we might have had some room for dessert, which sounded just as original and fun as the menu – Saskatoon berries layered in a jar with cheese cake and graham crackers anyone?  Alas we did not, so it will be with pleasure that I’ll be returning there in the weeks to come to see Charcut come into their own and be an extremely worthy and welcome addition to the Calgary scene.