Life in Cowtown

I actually sat on this review for hmmmm…. a couple of months? Simply because now that my words are actually being read, I feel some responsibility to distance myself a bit from the immediacy of the experience in the interest of being as fair as can be, while only visiting a place once. Not much responsibility mind you, but some. Point is, I had a very mediocre dinner with a friend here, and am unlikely to return simply because my budget does not run to revisiting restaurants that don’t rock my world.

Without further ado – there was still snow around when a girlfriend and I drove here one dark night and found a well lit restaurant with an appealing concept – Vietnamese fusion. I love me some Vietnamese food with a loving love, so I was convinced that there’s a way to take those flavors we all know and love and mix them in novel ways for our enjoyment. I also read plenty of innovative chefs doing crazy things with Vietnamese food so I was really excited about the trip.

The restaurant was pretty nice – gorgeous curved ceiling over the bar, very well done lighting, elegant woven mats and upscale place settings. All the staff was beyond friendly and knowledgeable when discussing the menu. I was steered toward the caramelized chicken and my friend was determined to try the savoury crepe (stuffed with prawns, mung beans, hickama(?), bean sprouts and green onion). The first alarm bells went off at the spelling of jicama – while pronounced hickama it’s certainly not spelled that way, and someone should’ve looked at the menu before printing it out.

We started out with two appetizers, the spring rolls (simply because I couldn’t picture giving them up for all the fusion in the world), and coquilles St. Jacques provencale – a French twist on a French dish, I suppose. The spring rolls were on the thin side, and were quite passable, although certainly no better than the spring rolls in our favorite Vietnamese joint. The coquilles St. Jacques rated about a 4/5. The scallops were cooked perfectly, so kudos to the kitchen there, and the sauce was lovely if uninspiring, but it was not the best sauce for the dish. Somehow the basil and the smoky-ness didn’t go with the flavor of the scallops and I hardly cook scallops, so I can’t suggest how I’d do it. Lemony cream sauce probably….

Moving on. We got our entrees and that’s where things derailed for us. My friends crepe was huge and absolutely flavorless. If you look at the list of veggies again, mung beans, jicama, sprouts, you’ll likely guess that they need a pretty strong flavor base somewhere to balance them out. And it was utterly lacking. No salt, garlic, sauce or anything to enliven the bland, watery mess of a dish, whose only hint of a redeeming quality was the crispy outside. The dipping sauce provided was too watery to make any difference, and rolled off the veggies leaving a faint sweet flavor in its path. After picking at all the outside crispy bits, she ate all the prawns and called it a night.

My caramelized chicken was not much better. It was a rather dry breast with a poorly balanced caramelized sauce with too many bitter flavors. It was served on veggies without a hint of seasoning and a mound of plain white rice. Since the only flavors were from the chicken, namely salty, sweet and burnt, the dish was not a satisfying entrée. The meat had too much flavor and the rest had none.

On that note we declined dessert and decided that while fusion cuisine is excellent when done well, it is a poor substitute for the primal satisfaction of a real bowl of hot Vietnamese soup or noodles when done poorly. Given the rather high prices at the restaurant we expected the quality to match. In our experience – it did not.

And if you’re wondering, see my restaurant rating scale here.

2.5/5

Colonial Fusion Cuisine
163 Quarry Park Blvd. SE
(403) 723-6669

When my family and I immigrated to Canada we happened to arrive in Newfoundland in December. I won’t even attempt to recoup the shock of coastal cold after three years of basking on a tropical island, but needless to say it was formidable. After being installed in a temporary apartment, we waited for the courts to hear our case and decide whether we’d be an asset to this fine young country. A new country is always a very exciting place to explore, especially if you haven’t seen too much of the world and become thoroughly jaded. Culturally, climatically, and historically Russia, Cuba and Newfoundland were very different indeed.

One of the first things we did, after unpacking our few suitcases, is go to the local grocery store. If memory serves it was a Dominion, and it was a small supermarket, the kind that thrives in many urban neighborhoods. I clearly remember the awe of that first trip. The bright lights, the sheer amount of food, the choices and the selection were simply overwhelming. I think we wandered around the store in a kind of happy daze, just window shopping and having the pleasurable feeling that no matter how long you shopped you could never try all of it.

We purchased some staples – milk, bread, eggs, cheese, potatoes, pasta and a few condiments – ketchup, mayo, sour cream and the like. Having never seen any of the brand names in our lives, my parents guided their decisions strictly on cost so I’m sure we ended up with some variant of a store brand for many things. We also bought some veggies – some year-rounders like potatoes and onions, and some items that seemed wonderfully absurd in December – melons or strawberries or something. Hauling all the bounty home we settled in to prepare our first few meals and compare these newfangled packages of shiny colorful labeling to the stuff that we’d previously only seen in paper, colorless tubs or in bulk.

Soon a slight puzzled look was exchanged by us as first suspicions and confusion set in. As we chewed and tasted there was a definite disappointment in the air as slowly the realization came that all this wonderfully packaged, shiny or out of season bounty simply tasted bad. The dairy was flat and bland tasting, as anyone who’s traveled to Europe and had European dairy can vouch for. (In fact the only Canadian dairy brand I’ve had that compares so far, is the justly renowned Liberty). The mayo had none of the rich, eggy taste that we later discovered in Hellmann’s, the cheese was also – well like every overprocessed, supermarket cheese. The out of season fruit were woody, tasteless and watery and the bread was fluffy and sweet. Somewhere along the line we realized that the food we’d eaten all our lives had way more taste and we should not feel bad over the opportunities we missed not having a supermarket nearby all our lives.

Over many years we discovered some fine supermarket brands, farmers markets for fresh fruit and vegetables, went to eating more seasonally again and for me, at least, found other wonderful local food producers that cared enough to deliver a delicious product. There were other compensations too – the rice no longer had to be picked through to weed out the debris and weevils, the flour came pre-sifted, new spices could be explored and wonderful new condiments to be discovered – hello soy sauce! Not to mention the foraging – oh the foraging. Every single summer without fail finds us in the woods near Calgary foraging for wild mushrooms. Since most of the population fears getting sick or dying (cause driving is not way more dangerous), the only foragers out there are fellow Europeans who can’t believe the bounty. Some years the forest floor teems with mushrooms that grow as thick as carpet and you can fill your trunk within a four foot radius. Forest berries though less frequent, can also be found and wild saskatoons, raspberries, blackberries and currants round out the wild pantry.

We’ve come a long ways since that first supermarket shopping trip, and some days I still think that someone should print a small guide to supermarket brands so that newly arrived Canadians have a hope in navigating the morass.