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Absinthe Café

Posted on November 18th, 2007
Review date: 2007-11-18

"Smells like fresh paint in here," my date remarks to our server on our first visit here, in early September.

"Oh, Everything's fresh in here" is our server's clever comeback line.

Turns out she's clever all round: making us feel welcome, knowing well the menu, speaking with intelligence about our options, recommending a wine with enthusiasm and sound advice.

Absinthe smells a bit like fresh paint because it's new - at least new to this address, having recently moved from its small hang out on Holland Avenue to this larger, ex-Schnitzel-House space on Wellington Street, cleverly close to the new home of the Great Canadian Theatre Company.

It's an expansively handsome room, in a dark, broody, uncluttered sort of way. "ABSINTHE" and the flat, slotted, pointy spoon that is the emblem of this restaurant, have been spelled out in gold paint on the murky emerald-green wall behind the bar. The balance of walls, pumpkin-coloured, are hung with mirrors. The floors are bare, dark wood; same for the tables, low lit with candles. The chairs and benches are black and leatherish. The room is a long, wide rectangle, left long and wide and uninterruptedly rectangular. It can be loud. Very loud. Between the bare walls, bare floor, high and naked ceiling, the conversations, music and laughter ricochet around the place. It may be exactly what you want, or it may be exhausting, depending on your mood. The other little issue with the new space is the wide front door. On a chilly evening, the wind assaults your legs. Plans may well be afoot to deal with it. Curtains, or a second door, something. Before January would be nice.

Still in charge at Absinthe is chef/owner Patrick Garland. His Autumn menu is short, seasonally sound and big on assertive flavours. A tomato salad is lovely - served warm with a thick and oily purée of basil and a tomato coulis, and oozing Brie cheese around slices of flavourful heirloom tomatoes. I like the tuna ceviche taco, and the "seafood trio" which unites a grilled scallop with a perky mango salsa, a shrimp with some sauce Gribiche (hard cooked eggs, mustard, pickles, vinegar) and a smoked and fresh salmon rillette set on a dollop of rémoulade (think tartar sauce). Spiced squash soup has a bright surface of red and green oil and a good hit of spice, but the squash flavour is weak, the soup itself a bit watery.

Nothing weak in Absinthe's Caesar salad though. The anchovies and mustard, Worcestershire and lemon are all in excellent form, and freshly grated parmigiano adds to the substantial richness of the dressing. The house herbed bread is toasted up for croutons. We debate the missing bacon. I argue it doesn't need it. My date's a bacon-in-Caesar man. He's also a steak-must-follow-Caesar man, but he finds his cut of beef tough, bits of it stringy.

Two weeks later I return for the steak-frites, Absinthe's signature dish ($18). This time it's perfect: the crust darkly seared, the slices tender, very flavourful, sliced thinly and against the grain. Garland calls it a "drop filet" which I find puzzling, and by which I take it he means a skirt steak, or a hanger steak - one that needs some loving before it's cooked, and when cooked past medium rare, is not something you want to eat. Marinated, seared to rare, left to rest, sliced on the diagonal, it's a wonderful, flavourful gem. In a tenderloin world, it's a brave cut to feature: how do you discourage someone who wants theirs cooked medium-well without being nasty about it? It comes with good frites, an aioli with horseradish pow and green beans, smeared in roasted onions and garlic.

Less manly, more delicate, the red snapper's a winner, served with a crepe studded with peppers and onions. Quail is stuffed with spinach, wrapped in bacon and scented with rosemary, and the result is a moist and juicy bird with a sound flavour. I enjoy the stuffed baby zucchini that comes with duck. I like it more than the duck, which is tough.

The house profiteroles are filled up with scoops of homemade ice cream and set in a dark pool of chocolate sauce. There's a satisfying chocolate cake and a solid crème brulée. Only the coffee is weak. There is, of course, a stronger ending: you might want a lesson in the rituals of drinking absinthe and put that perforated spoon to good use.

Cuisine: Contemporary
Cost: $$$: Starters, $8 to $12; main dishes, $18 to $26

Hours: Daily for lunch and dinner.
Accessibility: Fully accessible.

1208 Wellington Street, Ottawa, ON
613-761-1138
website

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Dressing Down

Posted on November 15th, 2007

Chanel Number 5 was the final flourish in my mother’s munitions. A dab behind each ear, a dob in the crease of each arm. There would be a final look in the mirror, a stroke to her hair, a smile for the two little girls studying her every move, and she’d signal her readiness by picking up her evening bag. Her date would be waiting in the kitchen, perhaps buffing his shoes, a Red Label for company.

My sister and I would descend the stairs ahead of my mother like bridesmaids announcing the main attraction. When my father looked up at her and told her how lovely she looked, we’d squirm with pleasure, feeling we’d had some hand in her perfection. Had we not passed her the bobby pins, zipped her back into the long green taffeta dress, fastened her pearls, shellacked her Beehive?

A kiss for each of us, and they’d head out the door, my father first sweeping away the worst of the Golden Retriever hair before helping her into the station wagon. They were headed to La Scala to celebrate their tenth wedding anniversary. This was Toronto, 1968, and La Scala was the Italian powerhouse restaurant on the southeast corner of Bay and Charles Streets, to which they returned yearly to celebrate a happy marriage.

Always, smoked salmon and shrimp cocktail to start. My dad would have a rare steak, my mum the Dover sole almandine. There would be flaming Baked Alaska and Peach Melba and Sanka taken in the room by the fire. I’d hear about every bite and every sip the morning after The Big Night. My mother reveled in the details every bit as much as my sister and I.

My husband knows this story and has similar recollections from his own family history, which spanned a number of Canadian cities – Montreal, Winnipeg, Toronto, Ottawa. In 1968, in our worlds, a man with a charge card or, perhaps more likely, a simple wad of cash, treated his girl to a meal “out.” It was, to put it plainly, a big deal, and every other diner in the room recognized the production in which they were participating by the simple act of dressing for it. To do otherwise was unthinkable. Like wearing jeans to church or an I’m with Stupid t-shirt to a play.

Last week Ken and I were planning for our own Big Day, a twentieth anniversary, one marker of which was to be our own dinner out at a very elegant, very expensive Ottawa-area restaurant. And out of a perverse curiosity, I phoned around to ask The Question to which I already knew the answer: Do you have a dress code?

I knew the answer, because I eat for a living. In the twenty years I’ve been poking around restaurants with forks and pens, I’ve seen a dramatic change in the way people dress for dinner at our region’s most elegant restaurants.

So I didn’t just ask if there was a dress code; I asked what happened to the dress code?

After a certain amount of awkward verbal blundering, the first respondent finally announced, “We gave up.” It had become too much work to enforce. They had started to cave with a more relaxed policy one summer (when less is required of us) and once September arrived, they just never buttoned down again on the jackets-compulsory business.

Next, I checked Le Baccara’s policy: “Business casual, necktie optional.” 
 I called Signatures: “We suggest resort casual.” Suggest? Resort casual? And if someone shows up in shorts and a T? “Well, we would try to accommodate them in a, er, private manner with something, uh, more suitable.”
I could hear him squirm.

At Wilfrid’s in the Chateau Laurier, its “smart casual. Jeans are allowed, but not “ripped jeans,” and T-shirts are OK but not with loud logos on them.” 
 Ditto for Hy’s. “No short shorts either.”

When the dearly departed Café Henry Burger built a wine bar into its back end, I knew the dress code (where gentlemen were “encouraged to wear a jacket”) would be abandoned. 
 We do not, was the answer to the question of dress code enforced, at Beckta’s Dining and Wine. 
Me: “So anything goes?” 
He: “…Er, yes.”
Twenty years ago there would have been a stash of blazers in the manager’s office of a dozen traditional dining rooms. No-one I spoke with could quite remember the gradual mothballing of those coats.

Next year, they may be handing out Senators caps instead of ties.

Would I expose myself as a dreadful fuddy duddy for feeling ever so somewhat sad about that?

I suspect what’s happened in restaurants is the same thing that has taken place in so much of our modern lives. We have rejected formality. We live in a society where saying Sir and Madam is seen as putting on airs. Standing up when a new guest enters a room is being showy. In our rush to show how democratic and rank free we are we’ve given up on all the symbolism that buttressed the old ways. Offering seats to women, holding chairs and doors, making toasts, removing hats. Having discarded these relics, what was once considered being polite is now the new pretentious.

But maybe there’s a solution in all this democracy. If restaurants no longer wish to have the authority to set dress codes, maybe we should leave it to the diners themselves. When a new guest arrives, let’s have a vote. I for one would welcome it. I’ve shown up in a skirt and pumps, I’ve made my man wear a tie, I’ve gone to some trouble, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to let someone in a Back in Black World Tour T-shirt and a Red Sox cap plunk themselves next to me.
In keeping with another pop tradition of our modern, egalitarian world, that dude is off my island.

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Piz’za-za

Posted on November 11th, 2007
Review date: 2007-11-11

This cheerfully French and jam-packed Gatineau restaurant is mostly about pizza and wine. You learn this as soon as you are seated at a small pub-table and presented with a thick wine list and a thin menu, dense with pizza options.

But Piz'za-za is also about lemon pie, and you may not be aware of that until you've filled up on pizza and wine. Which would be a shame.

Who'd have thought to save room for pie in a pizza joint? Somewhere in Piz'za-za's open kitchen of pizza tossers is an accomplished baker. The lemon pie is of true homemade goodness: light on the theatrics of puddles, drizzles and kiwi garnishes, served up wide, dense and rindy, with a blob of real whipped cream.

Then again, who'd have thought there'd be a wine list of affordable discoveries, thoughtfully assembled and reasonably priced in such a place? It includes a lengthy house list, plus a page of treats assembled by a visiting sommelier ("Les Vins Invités").

While you inspect the list you might want to start with the house antipasti. It is a sizeable and satisfying plate of nibbles (and a steal at $7.75) prettily packed with cheese and Italian cold cuts, hard cooked eggs, marinated artichokes and olives, feta, fruit and a Greek salad.

The pizza is good. It would be great if the oven were wood-fired, rather than gas fired - the way steak is elevated when cooked over charcoal - but the thin crust is chewy and yeasty, the sauce tasty, the herbs fresh and the toppings, for the most part, sensible. I like the Napolitaine, with Roma tomatoes and wide leaves of basil. Fine too is the "escargot forestiers," with fat, soft escargots and roasted mushrooms, both drenched in garlic. The four-cheese (provolone, chevre, brie and parmesan) is rich and pungent, and the "inferno" is indeed fiery with Merguez sausage and jalapeno peppers igniting the shell, balanced with capers, red onion and docile mozzarella cheese.

There are big salads to go along with the pizza pies, served in tall, deep bowls and topped with roasted vegetables, or smoked trout, or warm seafood, or crisp green vegetables - asparagus, green beans, scallions. The dressings taste homemade and are perfectly pleasant, but they are drizzled sparingly on top of the deep mounds and we find the perfectly pleasant dressing fails to reach the greens beneath.

There is a trio of pasta dishes, including a meaty lasagna, baked in its own dish, and totally agreeable.

Desserts, as you may have gathered, are another strength. Did I mention the lemon pie?

They also have an attractive upstairs room, for overflow and private functions.

Cuisine: Italian
Cost: $: Antipasti and salad, $5 to $11; pizza and pasta $8 to $13

Hours: Lunch, Monday to Friday; dinner daily
Accessibility: Steps to restaurant; washrooms are upstairs.

36 rue Laval, Gatineau, QC
819-771-0565
website

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