CapitalDining.ca

Review date: 2009-01-18

I didn't think I'd like this place very much. I'm suspicious of gastro technology. It bores me and I'm not clever enough to get it. Though I'll admit a little professional curiosity.

My husband was a different story. Twelve tiny courses of high-tech-freaky, ultra-fussed-over food, from a stove-less kitchen, served blind over three hours? (Are you serious?) When he could be at home supping on leftover chilli with a beer?

The last time I had to promise him the sky and the moon and favours of all sorts if he'd be my dining date was for my fifth and final visit to The Mill. (A different sort of freakish evening. But let me not digress.)

Here's what happened. He spent three hours giggling. Claims it was the most fun he's had dining out in a long time.

Atelier is chef Marc Lepine's avant garde, 22-seat restaurant, open two months now on Rochester Street. Lepine was the executive chef at The Courtyard Restaurant for a number of years. He left that position last year to build this project, based on the Barcelona model of the kitchen-as-laboratory, seeking creative ways to ramp up the sensory experience of eating.

To that end, traditional cooking gear is shucked out, and a range of high-tech equipment is used to play around with the texture, form, aroma and colour of ingredients in order to create dishes designed to mess you up a bit. (After our meal we visited an uncluttered, hyper-efficient kitchen that looked more like an operating room.) This place he called Atelier, which means an artist's workroom.

It's a workroom with a tricky location. This modern restaurant doesn't even have a sign. It may be coming still, or it may be part of the secret alchemic plan. For now, 540 Rochester Street is a gun-metal grey two storey house that looks like it's had a fire-rash around its windows. Curious rusty grates stand in for railing and window treatments. We ask ourselves, Was this pokey little place surrounded by parking lot and government office towers really the temple for an exhibitionist chef's over-imaginative ego? Husband's mood was dark.

Things improved inside, up the steps, through the grey and black dining room with oversized white leather armchairs, dark wood tables and the framed art of a three year old Lepine child on the pale walls. Things continued to look up with our greeting. The young staff settled us with the wine list and offered drinks before outlining the ground rules. There would be no menu unless we insisted. Menus are for the weak, said my man. Bring it on.

And so it began. Thirteen small, blind courses. Some no more than two bites, some slightly more substantial, all of them stylized, all of them designed to confront the senses in some way.

The shock is that it's unsettlingly delicious. This is food that takes your mouth and your mind for a ride. Textures play with and against each other. So do aromas and temperature. Some things pop, others fizz and steam, some things crunch when you think they should slide, and flavours mix and create déja memories - of childhood dishes, of ball game food.

There are plates that are over the top twee - a long, fussy Versailles garden of perfectly behaved dots and smears, tiny piles of this and that and thin lines of coloured dust. I wanted to hate it. But when you consider the ingredients and the flavours, they begin to come together in shockingly sensible patterns. And in the mouth, there are many Holey Moley moments.

Mind you, the charm of the food would be vacuum sucked right out of it if the service were pretentious. Led by sommelier Steve Robinson, the staff are beautifully human. There is none of the sombre earnestness you might expect to accompany an ahead of its time, high-end restaurant. They giggle along. Which brings me to the paragraph where I would ordinarily launch into an explanation of the food, starting from the top with the Screwdriver lollipop and going course by course by course through to the Elvis truffle. Well I'm not going to do that. I've never written a review without a word about the grub I ate, but here goes nothing. It's meant to be a surprise and I'm playing along.

Did everything work perfectly? No. Some experiments missed the mark, but not many. Most were extraordinary. And the nature and pace of the meal meant you never had time to grow too attached to any of them, the delicious, the fun or the "nice-try" plates.

A short three and a half hours later, and the experience is over. I am told they can speed it up if you'd like; two and a half is probably the Reader's Digest version. I don't know why you'd want to.

This is a brilliantly creative place. Tweak the budget and book a table.

I will tell you what we paid. Dinner at Atelier costs $75 per diner. The wine pairing (optional) is a further $55. I don't begrudge them a cent.

Cuisine: Contemporary
Cost: $$$$: Tasting menu only, $75

Hours: Dinner only, Monday to Saturday, for which reservations are required

Accessibility: Steps at entrance.

540 Rochester St., Ottawa, ON
613-321-3537
website

Review date: 2009-01-11

Into the category of neighbourhood-restaurant-I-wouldn't-cross- town-for-but-if-it-were-close-by-I'd-be-a-regular, I slot Phnom Penh in Hintonburg. The food is tasty, there's lots of it, the price is reasonable, the service is fast and friendly, and the place has an engaging family-run feeling that is getting harder to fine.

It describes itself as Cambodian and certainly the name suggests that would be the driving force in the kitchen, but you could easily end up with a meal you would get at a Chinese restaurant. Or a Vietnamese or Thai. (If you want to try traditional Cambodian, ask.)

We asked and were directed by our server (who was a dear) to two dishes. Number 212 - mi ga la (a noodle dish served warm, not hot, with dried shrimp and peanut, laden with peppers and chicken, slices of fish cake, crab sticks and hard boiled egg) - and the house red curry. We enjoy the latter less, as the eggplant is cooked to mushy shreds and the chunks of sweet potato are waterlogged within the red, slightly spicy, coconut broth. But picking around the fake crab, the mi ga la was very good. And so were lots of other dishes, served up quickly and kindly and in heaping portions.

I would recommend you start with such mundane things as shrimp rolls. For $6.95 you get 9 of them. They're two-bite, crunchy treats, the shrimp within soft, the casing crisp and brown and just greasy enough. You hold them by the tails and dunk them in a fish sauce cocktail. They come with a side of shrimp chips. (Note to shrimp- lovers in a dangerous world: this is how you get your fix while weathering the recession.)

If you have resolved to cut back on deep fried crunchy treats, there are fresh spring rolls, served with peanut or fish sauce (your choice) where you can have more shrimp (or pork, chicken, tofu) with noodles, herbs and crunchy lettuce wrapped and rolled in softened rice paper. Chopped shrimp meets chopped pineapple in a crisp triangle roll (one of the "Five Flavours Deep-Fried" appetizer.) The other four "flavours" include minced shrimp cling to a stick of sugar cane, ground pork doing essentially the same thing, plus mashed taro and mashed sweetened yam each given a wrap and a fry in this motley collection of appetizers, marked Number 12.

Back to healthy choices: Vietnamese-style grilled beef with lemongrass is tasty and sufficiently tender on a bed of vermicelli drenched with the fish sauce dressing provided. It comes with a refreshing salad of carrots and cucumber, bean sprouts, peppers, and red chillies - light and limey, with roasted peanuts for crunch.

There are a variety of noodle soups. The pork noodle soup is listed as a Phnom Penh special, so we order up Number 120, with shrimp, pork, squid, fish cake and crab meat (ie, Pollock sticks) and find it not the best, not the worst bowl, but fine and filling and affordable.

The noodle dishes go on and on here. Fresh Udon noodles with deep fried tofu, egg noodles with scallion and bean sprouts, pad Thai or fried wide rice noodles with bok choy and vegetables, to which you may add the usual option of chicken/ beef/ pork/ tofu/ shrimp/ seafood (curiously all at the same price).

Order fried vegetables and you will be pleased with the fresh, crisp, perfectly cooked collage of greens, trees and mushrooms.

None of the desserts appeal, so we order Chinese fried bread sticks and dunk them in our Jasmine tea before settling a very fair bill, and waddling home with leftovers neatly packaged and labeled.

Cuisine: Chinese
Cost: $: Starters, $2 to $7; main dishes, $7 to $13

Hours: Tuesday to Sunday, from 11 a.m. to 9 p.m.

Accessibility: Fully accessible.

1100 Wellington Street W., Ottawa, ON
613-722-8588
website