Category: Food / drink

Shouldn't the second Session99 be called Session100? No? Okay then.

Dan Dickinson2 Comments

“What better way,” we thought, “to spend a sunny Saturday afternoon than drinking Ontario craft beer?”

We couldn’t agree with ourselves more.

We returned to 99 Sudbury for the second annual Session99 Craft Beer Festival, and immediately found it to be far more busy than last year’s. Certainly it was easier to understand: last year there was a confusing — and, I think, fairly ripoff-ish — method of advanced tickets + per-beer tickets, whereas this year a single charge got you entry, lots of food, and unlimited beer samples.

Here’s what we tried, round by round:

  1. Two Augusta Ales from Kensington Brewing
  2. A Blueberry Wheat and an Ambre de la Chaudiere from Mill Street
  3. F&M’s Pepperazzi (made with jalapeno) and a Kensington Watermelon Wheat (Nellie seemed intent on trying the fruity wheat beers)
  4. From the new Bellwoods Brewery, the Picket Fence Wheat for me and the Sharkwitch IIPA for her
  5. My first of two Spearheads, the Moroccan brown ale, and the first of Nellie’s two collaboration brews, the Black Oak Daily Bread (w/ Sawdust City and Cheshire Valley)
  6. I had the second of my two Spearheads, the Belgian Stout, while Nellie hit the head
  7. Our first stop at Sawdust City yielded two fantastic beers: a very hoppy Golden Beach Pale Wheat for me, and a mixture of the Cockpuncher (seriously, cockpuncher!) IPA + Belgian witbier for Nellie
  8. I had a Hogsback Brewing traditional Scottish ale, but was annoyed with myself ex post facto for having visited a booth manned mainly by hoochies…I just didn’t notice until after they’d poured the sample. I have a general no-hoochie-booth rule at beer events…it’s a good indication that their beer will suck. I’m looking at you, True North Brewing. Meanwhile, Nellie had her second collaboration beer, but for the life of us we can’t remember what it was. Something from Amsterdam maybe?
  9. Perennial favourite Great Lakes gave us two new ones to try: the Lake Effect IPA for Nellie (even though I thought she should have tried the Armadildo) and some kind of porter for me…I forget which, but it definitely wasn’t the 25th anniversary Robust (which I have in my fridge, just waiting for me)
  10. Still ahead of Nellie, I had a Wellington Iron Duke, mainly because I can now officially say I got to 49/50 of my Project FiftyBrew beers
  11. Flying Monkey’s sample list had something called the Raped By Grapes, which was too sweet for Nellie (and also about which I suspect they received a few complaints) while I had the scotch ale, which was decent but not great
  12. Back to Sawdust City for the straight up Cockpuncher IPA (me) while Nellie had the Belgian Dubbel IPA (which I think was made in conjunction with Black Oak and Microbrasserie Charlevoix)

At this point it was nearly 4PM — the end of our session — and it was only then that we really figured out the food situation. We managed to squeeze in a few tiny cupcakes from The Sassy Lamb, including the peanut butter + maple buttercream icing + bacon “Canadian Mancake” which I so loved last year, and a pineapple-y one made with Spearhead’s IPA. We didn’t get burgers from Burger Bar, or gourmet corndogs from Cowbell, mainly because we’d stuffed ourselves before heading to the festival. Lesson learned for next year.

Highlights: Bellwoods, the two new Spearhead beers (for me), and the two collaboration beers (for Nellie), but most especially Sawdust City. I loved everything I tried from these guys. And to my earlier point about the relationship between beer quality and booth personnel hotness? Sawdust City was manned by a guy sporting a handlebar mustache and a giant dude with a mullet. That drew me like a magnet, and now we will never not order their beer if we see it on a menu.

By the time we walked down to King, I needed two things: a little more food in my belly, and a urinal. Beerbistro fit the bill on both counts (bonus: at Beerbistro you can watch vintage beer ads on screens above the urinals, and marvel at just how racist advertising used to be!) and we turned out to be hungrier than we’d thought. Then we walked home, drank a Muskoka Summer Weisse on the patio. Not long after that we nodded off and slept for ten hours. Summer!

Image from j_philipp, used under Creative Commons license

"That man is playing Galaga! Thought we wouldn't notice. But we did."

Dan Dickinson1 Comment

Somehow, in the couple of months that it’s been in theatres, we’ve managed not to see The Avengers (imdb | rotten tomatoes) even once. Finally, with a little bit of time to spare during the week, we rectified that error.

But first, a bite to eat: I met Nellie at The Oxley, which has quickly become my favourite watering hole in Yorkville, mainly because all other Yorkville watering holes suck huge, save the flight deck at The Pilot. It has a smashing burger and interesting beer and a fantastic back patio, which is more than enough to make it my new work local. Anyway, when I arrived Nellie had staked out a position on the patio…which would have been fine, except that Toronto has been hotter than a marathoner’s armpit all week and I was wearing a dark suit. Anywayanyway: food good, drinks cold, back to theatre.

So we were a bit dawdly getting there and actually had the time wrong, so we got there five minutes late…or, in today’s theatre-going experience, just before the ads finished playing and just before the previews began. We each had time to pee out all remaining beer before the movie even started. Unbeknownst to us, though, we had elected to see it in 3D. Which I hate. Super, super-hate. But I’ll try not to let that ruin my impression of the movie.

That impression: it was great. Lots and lots of fun, and funny. Especially The Hulk; he had a couple of classic comedy moments, which I appreciated far more than Tony Stark’s non-stop sarcasm. But it was everything a comic book movie should be, and the special effects were stellar. I don’t know if I’ll bother buying it when it comes out on DVD — there’s not a lot of heft to it, if you know what I mean — but I’ll certainly watch it over and over when it comes on TMN. You know, two years from now.

.:.

Image from j_philipp, used under Creative Commons license

SoHot Climaxxx: not a porn star

Dan DickinsonLeave a comment

After last weekend’s trip to PEC and the subsequent week of eating rather poorly, Nellie decided to undertake a wee project this past weekend: make fantastic meals all weekend and eat them at home. It sounded good to me. I’d been away at meetings for three days and wanted some real food. We decided we’d (finally!) set up the balcony for summer, take care of some shit around the condo and enjoy our meals at home all weekend long. So naturally we started off with drinks and snack down the street at Origin.

What? Look, it was Friday afternoon, the sun was out, we got out of work/meetings early and I wanted to have a bite and a glass of cold wine on a patio. So we ate overpriced snacks and drank some good wine (Norm Hardie Melon de Bourgogne and Riesling; Hidden Bench rosé, and some Vinho Verde that I can’t remember) and soaked up the day’s remaining sun.

Friday night we aimed low: nachos, beer (Denison’s for me, Coors Light — seriously — for her) and Project X (imdb | rotten tomatoes) on TV. We were saving our strength. The next morning we got up early, bought seventy pounds of stuff at St. Lawrence Market, had bacon and eggs and tomatoes for breakfast and got to work on the balcony. We got the tile down and the benches cleaned off just in time for us to have lunch: prosciutto on fresh ciabatta (mine: pecorino cheese, spicy bordeaux mustard; Nellie’s: parmesan, honey, black pepper) and grilled veggies, with the bottle of Lighthall rosé we picked up in PEC the weekend before. I don’t normally like rosé, but this one (a Cab Franc) was pretty good.

Not a bad setting either, right?

While we continued to work around the condo and begin the prep for dinner Nellie made us a fantastic batch of lavender lemonade, with lavender from our stop in PEC. We also opened a bottle of Le Clos Jordanne 2009 Village Reserve Chardonnay. Between that and knowing we’d have more Chardonnay with dinner we found ourselves in the mood to watch Bottle Shock (imdb | rotten tomatoes) so, with a little downloading, watch it we did.

Dinner that night was a new one: saffron chicken & basmati rice. Admittedly it needed a little extra flavour, so we threw in a little SoHot Climaxxx sauce (lime, garlic, cayenne) to perk it up. But the real star of the show was the Hidden Bench 2008 Tête de Cuvée Chardonnay. It was beautiful and creamy and buttery like a California chardonnay, but somehow still tasted like Niagara. We both wanted to marry it. Marry it hard.

Apologies for the poor-quality photo…I wasn’t paying attention to the exposure on my Android and had to use a pic from Nellie’s old iPhone. Anyway, there was no dessert — unless you count the rest of that bottle of Clos Jordanne. Which we did.

Sunday I was up early and availed myself of the St. Urbain bagels, strawberries and raspberries we’d bought at the market the day before. Then, by the time Nellie was up and we’d run a few errands, it was time for lunch: maple & chili glazed trout with a thai cucumber salad (w/ lime & fresh basil). I’d decided to pair it with a Clos Jordanne 2009 Village Reserve Pinot before I knew the trout would be in that kind of sauce, so admittedly the wine didn’t go at all. Still, all components of the meal were tasty on their own, so we toughed it out.

Note that Nellie needs a napkin, whereas I am generally able to not spill food on myself. Anyway. Partway through the afternoon I realized that lunch hadn’t been very substantial, and so made another prosciutto-on-ciabatta. It was just too good to let go.

Some cleaning up and bedroom-rearranging later, it was time to start prepping the final meal of the weekend: pizza two ways (the rest of the prosciutto with a shredded pecorino cheese, and a spicy genoa salami with a softer, melted pecorino), both done with Nellie’s homemade dough and marinara sauce. I’m never sure what wine goes with this kind of pizza, so we just had the bottle of St. Laurent we picked up at Harwood last weekend. I’m not sure it matched, but it didn’t not match either. So we’ll call that a draw.

So how did we do? Well, first and foremost it was all delicious. What’s more, a little math suggests that we spent about $90 on all the ingredients that went into all seven meals, notwithstanding the wine (which was paid for long before Nellie decided to do embark on this adventure). That’s less than we’d spent at Origin for a link of chorizo, four curry shrimp and two glasses of wine apiece, before tip. So yeah, there might be something to this whole eating-at-home thing after all.

"Honk if you've come for wine"

Dan Dickinson4 Comments

Sometimes your first trips to a place aren’t great, but you learn enough to make a fantastic repeat visit. Other times your first visit is a great one, and no return trip ever lives up to your first memories. However, once in a blue moon a first trip to a place so good it doesn’t seem repeatable is followed by a second trip that’s very nearly perfect. This past weekend, our second time in Prince Edward County (after a very good first visit in 2010) was just that: very nearly perfect.

Friday

That’s right, kids: we took the day off work to go drink wine. The night before we left we decided to have some extra fun on the way: we met our good friend Kaylea for lunch in Port Hope. She gave us a box of chocolates made right there in Port Hope and treated us to a tasty meal on the patio at Gusto overlooking the river, where we drank some Closson Chase Pinot Noir, gave her a bottle of Benjamin Bridge Nova 7 and her fiancé Matt’s USB charger (which we’ve had for months), and saw a deer run up-river.

We said our goodbyes and returned to our car not ten seconds before it was about to get slapped with a parking ticket. We hadn’t even noticed the meter behind a large sign. Or maybe the cop had seen our rental sticker and given us a break. Either way, it was an early bit of luck, and luck like that is what perfect weekends are made of. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

We drove a little further and entered Prince Edward County at its west end, making our first stop By Chadsey’s Cairns. We’d never been before, and hadn’t planned on going this time either, but a friend’s request via Facebook to pick up a bottle swayed us. We pulled into the farmhouse, met Richard, and walked around the lane to the little apple house where they now sell their wine. We spoke with him a while, picked up a few atypical bottles (like their Gamay/Pinot blend) for ourselves and the friend-requested Chenins, and continued on down the road. Just then, it felt like a switch had been flipped: we’d been in the county less than ten minutes and already we felt right at home at this pace, among this scenery, with these people.

Our next stop was a favourite from the first visit: Keint-He. As we got out of the car we saw a deer, the second that day, on the edge of a field across the road. It stood stock still, and we wondered if it was a decoy the locals put up to make the tourists gawk. Self-conscious, we walked into the tasting room and ran their table, walking out with four bottles. The deer was gone. We sighed with relief and tried to look confident.

A few minutes later we checked in at the Newsroom Suites, our killer lodging find from the previous visit. Seriously: a roomy, convenient, non-frilly suite with free wi-fi situated directly across the street from the best restaurant in PEC. There wasn’t even a question of staying anywhere else. We dropped our bags and turned right back around, though — we had more wineries to hit.

We’d planned to visit Closson Chase next, but realized we’d drive right past The Old Third on the way. This had been a ‘maybe’ on our list, but a tweet from Rick Van Sickle (“Please don’t take all the Old Third Pinot!”) had piqued my curiousity, so in we pulled. And Rick wasn’t kidding about the Pinot…it’s all they sell (the sign outside didn’t say “wine” or “tasting room open”, it said “Pinot Noir”) and they do a magnificent job of it. We walked out with two bottles of their 2010 Pinot, got to the car, then realized we needed to go back in and get one of the few remaining bottles of the 2009. There wasn’t even a label on that one. I loved that.

Then: back toward Closson Chase, as planned. We loved everything we got there on our last visit, and all their wines we’d tried since. We left with four things: three bottles, and their opinion that the 2001 Chardonnay I won at auction a while back should be drinking beautifully right now. Thank heavens; I was worried I’d won some vinegar.

We had one more new winery to visit: Stanners. It was good. Not great, but good. And not expensive either, which is always welcome in PEC. We left with two bottles.

Our final stop of the day was the one most likely to be the busiest: Norman Hardie. We bought four bottles for ourselves and one for a friend, and dished some dirt with the employees about our mutual friend Duarte.

We had an hour or so to unload the car and relax in our suite before dinner at East & Main, definitely our favourite restaurant in the county, and right  across the street. We had a fantastic meal, even if we (okay, I) probably annoyed our server a little. Pro tip: don’t ask the vegetarians where they can buy cured meats. Anyawkward, here’s what we ate:

  • Dan
    • seared scallops w/ double smoked bacon, onion soubise, crispy parsnips
    • breast of moscovy duck w/ frites, fresh berry demi-glaze
    • maple crème brûlée
  • Nellie
    • fresh ravioli w/ braised beef, highline mushroom
    • 10oz grass fed striploin w/ celery root & potato purée, caramelized onion sauce
    • lemon tart w/ fresh fruit
  • Both
    • Biale 2007 “Party Line” Zinfandel from Napa (I know, I know: it was sacrilege to leave the County’s bottle list, but we couldn’t find a Pinot that we thought would hold up to Nellie’s steak. So we went with an old favourite from our Napa trip)

After dinner, relaxing in our room, all we could think was: that was one badass first day of vacation.

Saturday

We slept in a little, despite the bird outside our window that sounded like a car alarm, then got up and had breakfast just down the street at the Tall Poppy Cafe. Nellie had a “Bob”, which was kind of like a McMuffin for grown-ups, while I had some killer French toast. Suitably powered up, we resumed our winery pillaging.

We aimed for the southern part of the county, to some less-frequented but well-regarded wineries. The terrain changed again here: more twisting roads, more rolling hills. It felt a little bit like home…there was even a community named Athol. Along the way we saw yet another deer sitting calmly in a field, with only its head and neck sticking up, looking at us like we were interrupting brunch.

Our first stop in the area was Lighthall, a winery we’d never heard of until Kaylea recommended it earlier in the week. We weren’t expecting much, but…wow. Great find. Glenn, the winemaker, was so friendly, so informative, so helpful, so funny. And the wine was terrific: we left with two bottles of wine and two, ahem, bundles of top-secret material about which we’re sworn to secrecy. We’d thought about picking up a bottle of the 2009 Reserve Pinot Noir, but it was slightly pricey for something we couldn’t taste, especially when we’re already so well-stocked for pricey Pinot.

We finished our time in that part of the county with a visit to Exultet (where we got a nice crisp white and a top-flight Pinot that’s going straight into the wine fridge) and Long Dog (where we found zero dogs, sadly, but one very affectionate cat, a loud and somewhat annoying tour group, and a few nice bottles of plonk) before turning back to the north.

Since Fifth Town Cheese is now out of business we stopped in at Black River Cheese, but — apart from the ice cream-loving biker convention outside — it was pretty disappointing. As was Waupoos, by the way: it certainly offered a pretty venue, but when we parked the car and looked inside the tasting room we just…we couldn’t do it. It was too crowded, too touristy, too much. We started the car and got back on the road. Nearby tourist attraction Lake On The Mountain wasn’t terribly impressive either (looks-wise, at least…it’s still kind of interesting), but the views of the Bay of Quinte from up high were worth the stop.

At this point we were getting hungry, so we stopped for lunch in Picton at Buddha Dog, a magical place where tiny hot dogs come covered in interesting sauces like jerk and red pepper jelly and beef chili. We listened to 80s music (Frankie Goes To Hollywood!) and drank local root beer, and had three dogs each, and it all hit the spot perfectly. Full of mini-dog, we rescued our car from the Giant Tiger parking lot and pressed on.

We stopped briefly at the Marshmallow Room in Bloomfield to arm ourselves for dinner that night: meat, cheese, bread, and preserves to go with the dessert we’d picked up that morning at the Tall Poppy. Our plan was to have a simple meal at our place that night along with some of the wine we picked up that day.

But first, we had three more wineries we wanted to visit. Hinterland was all about sparkling, so not my bag, but certainly right in Nellie’s wheelhouse…and also appealing to the bachelorette party that came in after us. Grange of Prince Edward was disappointing — busy, touristy, and with lacklustre wines. Frankly, when we pulled into Karlo next we were expecting more of the same given all the cars and tour vans, but we were pleasantly surprised — we left with three bottles (though they charged us for only two, for some reason) including a Petit Verdot. And this helpful crowd control tip:

We passed a few hours back at our hotel, snacking and drinking wine on the porch. We watched the staff of East & Main get ready for their dinner service across the street, thinking back to how great our meal had been the night before. We kept thinking about it, and thinking about it, and comparing it to how our compilation-of-the-county dinner was going to be, and before long we said “fuck it” and called East & Main to make a reservation for that evening. That’s right, the same restaurant two nights in a row. Don’t judge us.

Our second dinner there was even better: the food may actually have not been quite as good on the second go-round, but two other things really made the night: first, they had the Lighthall ’09 Reserve Pinot that we’d eyed earlier in the day; second, our server was amazeballs.

Ze lineup:

  • Dan
    • fresh ravioli w/ braised beef, highline mushrooms (yup, we just flipped the apps from the night before)
    • pork loin w/ grilled vegetables and lentils in a mushroom and merlot reduction sauce
    • cinnamon apple pie ice cream
  • Nellie
    • seared scallops w/ double smoked bacon, onion soubise, crispy parsnips
    • fresh rigatoni alfredo w/ shrimp, grilled red onion, highline mushrooms, spinach, garlic white wine cream
    • lemon sorbet (but only because they were out of the lemon tart)
  • Both
    • Lighthall Vineyards 2009 Pinot Noir Réserve (Having visited Lighthall earlier that day and seeing what this bottle cost retail, we knew that it was a STEAL here)

Like I said, our server — Laura — was sweet, and seemed to find us amusing, and really looked after us. At one point we forced her take a bite of my dessert even though it’s against the rules, just because it felt like we should. Years ago we realized you get far more out of being great to the people looking after you in bars and restaurants (sometimes they buy you lunch and give you chocolates and invite you to special occasions) than you do by being mean or bossy, and this was a perfect example of that tenet. Even though the meal didn’t quite measure up to what we’d had the night before, I’d rank it among the best dining experiences we’ve ever had.

Sunday

I let Nellie sleep in Sunday morning while I went for a somewhat greasier breakfast back at the Tall Poppy. Bacon, eggs, toast, cappuccino: everything a growing boy needs. We took our time getting ready, packed, and loaded up the car with our wine purchases (at this point we were pretty close to the three dozen mark) and took off. Our only plans for the day were to visit a lavender farm (seriously), eat some pizza, make one more winery stop on the way out of the county and make haste back to Toronto.

We stopped at PEC Lavender, where they had lots of (brace yourself) lavender, as well as a well-maintained Farmall that reminded me of my youth, even if it wasn’t quite the same model I grew up with.

Not long after that we were sitting outside at Norm Hardie’s winery, eating thin-crust pizza baked in wood-fired ovens, drinking glasses of his Chardonnay, chatting with a lovely British gentleman named John. The pizzas were superb, the weather was perfect, and the wine was — as always — immaculate. We bought a lone bottle of the Melon de Bourgogne, re-packed the trunk to minimize bottle-sliding and bid John and the rest of Hardie adieu.

Nellie did have a few more sips of wine, at Harwood, a winery on the way to the 401. Our main reason for stopping was to pick up a bottle of Pinot Gris for our friend but Nellie also decided to take a bottle of their St. Laurent, something you don’t see every day. I opted not to sample — I was driving, and anyway, I couldn’t think of a better final taste of the county than the Hardie chardonnay I’d paired with lunch.

Our drive home was easy, and we listened to Allo Darlin’ and Sloan, and made fun of other drivers, and talked our next trip. Woofstock caused a minor inconvenience when returning the car, but it was worth it for the rampant cuteness we saw on the way home. And then came the unpacking:

In total, that’s 32 bottles from 13 different wineries:

  1. By Chadsey’s Cairns 2009 Gamay/Pinot Noir
  2. By Chadsey’s Cairns 2011 Muscat
  3. Closson Chase 2009 Churchside Pinot Noir
  4. Closson Chase 2009 S. Kocsis Chardonnay
  5. Closson Chase 2009 K.J. Watson Chardonnay
  6. Exultet 2009 Pinot Noir
  7. Exultet 2011 White Light Vidal/Pinot Noir
  8. Grange of Prince Edward 2007 Victoria Block Chardonnay (which we drank last night)
  9. Harwood 2009 St. Laurent
  10. Hinterland 2009 Rose
  11. Karlo 2010 Choa Chardonnay
  12. Karlo 2010 Cabernet Franc
  13. Karlo 2010 5th Element Petit Verdot
  14. Keint-He 2008 Pinot2 Pinot Noir/Pinot Meunier
  15. Keint-He 2008 Pinot2 Pinot Noir/Pinot Meunier
  16. Keint-He 2009 Little Creek-Benway Pinot Noir
  17. Keint-He 2008 Pineaux Sauvage Pinot Noir (Botrytis-affected)
  18. Lighthall 2009 Cabernet Franc
  19. Lighthall [**REDACTED**]
  20. Lighthall 2011 Progression Vidal
  21. Long Dog 2007 Otto Riserva Pinot Noir
  22. Long Dog 2008 Bella Riserva Chardonnay
  23. Norman Hardie 2008 Cuvee “L” Chardonnay
  24. Norman Hardie 2009 County Pinot Noir
  25. Norman Hardie 2010 County Chardonnay
  26. Norman Hardie 2011 County Melon de Bourgogne
  27. Norman Hardie 2011 County Pinot Gris
  28. The Old Third 2009 Pinot Noir
  29. The Old Third 2010 Pinot Noir
  30. The Old Third 2010 Pinot Noir
  31. Stanners 2010 Cabernet Franc
  32. Stanners 2010 Lincoln Lakeshore Chardonnay (which we drank on our front porch Saturday afternoon)

We also picked up a few bottles for friends: 2010 & 2011 Chenin Blanc from By Chadsey’s Cairns, a Harwood 2010 Pinot Gris, another [**REDACTED**] from Lighthall, and a Norman Hardie 2010 County Chardonnay.

So yeah…this might just have been the perfect weekend getaway. We had amazing weather. We had incredible dining experiences, on and off the table. We picked up plenty of our favourite wines and were surprised with some fantastic new finds. Our car & hotel rentals were problem-free, which is pretty much all you can ask for. We saw beautiful scenery, and felt relaxed practically the moment we arrived. We even managed an impromptu visit with a dear friend. Best of all we returned refreshed, relaxed and loaded down with tasty wine. What the hell else do we need out of a weekend, I ask you?

Rien. Absolument rien.

Image by Jace XIII, under Creative Commons License

May and June appear set to come up Milhouse

Dan Dickinson3 Comments

It occurs to be that we have a surplus of awesomeness lined up for the rest of this month:

June isn’t looking too shabby either, what with a Picasso exhibit at the AGO, a long weekend in Prince Edward County, the Flaming Lips playing (free) at Dundas Square, Session 99 craft beer festival and a 5-day trip to New York.

Also: today was the first beer-on-patio day of the year!

Life? Good.

.:.

Image by Jace XIII, under Creative Commons License

The big barese

Dan Dickinson1 Comment

This past Friday, to the detriment of both our waistlines and wallets (but utter joy of our taste buds) we revisited the previous Friday’s theatre of operations: Dundas West / Brockton Village / whatever. It was even better this week.

It started out in the very same way: leave work late and head straight to Midfield Wine Bar. I’ll be honest, we made dinner reservations in the area that Tuesday when we decided we wanted an excuse to go back to Midfield. Anyway, we sat at the bar and were greeted by Chris as warmly as if we were regulars and not just second-timers. Peckish, we ordered a board (much the same as last week’s, but with Serrano ham and an excellent clothbound Red Leicester cheese this time) and let him start picking wines. I had a white from Vouvray that I don’t quite remember, the Santagostino Nero d’Avola/Syrah I’d enjoyed so much the previous week, the Castello di Verduno Basadone (I’d never had a wine like that before) and an 04 Chateau Lescalle from Bordeaux. All excellent, especially the reds. Nellie had a Stratus Tollgate white, a Sauvignon Blanc of some kind and two more reds which have since slipped her mind.

Midway through our drinks & eats, our friend Duarte showed up. Socialite that he is, he knew all three couples sitting at the bar, even though none of us knew the other. I think it’d been a few years since we’d seen him face-to-face so it was good to catch up with him while he waited for his friend.

We had dinner reservations for 10:00 just down the street at Enoteca Sociale, erstwhile (just) hotspot and still darling of the Toronto dining scene. We usually try to wait until some of the scene-buzz has worn off a place before trying it out, so the time seemed right. I don’t know if the food is better or worse than when it first opened (note: if it were much better I don’t think I could have stood it) but I think the vibe was more to our liking now than it would have been then. It was charming and efficient, and classy and tousled, and just the right level of noisy. All of which to say, it was completely unlike our experience at Salt the previous weekend.

Now then, down to the important stuff: ze food. I’m copying and pasting straight off the menu*:

  • Starter: Spicy barese sausage, grilled artichokes & shishito peppers, pecorino fresco
    • Dan: Aglianico del Vulture “Liscone” 2008 DOC, Cantine Madonna delle Grazie, Basilicata
    • Nellie: Frascati Superiore 2010 DOC, Casale Marchese, Lazio
  • Dan’s main: trecce, pork sausage, charred broccoli & tomato peperonata
    • Gutturnio “Fermo” 2010 DOC, Roberto Manara, Emilia Romagna
  • Nellie’s main: lobster spaghetti, tomato, chili, basil
    • NV Franciacorta Brut DOCG, Majolini, Lombardia
  • Dessert: sticky toffee pudding, cardamom syrup & vanilla bean ice cream

My trecce (braided pasta) was really good. So was Nellie’s spaghetti, though there was so much lobster she couldn’t finish it. But my god…my god, that barese sausage. It might have been the most flavourful meat I’ve ever tasted. And if you took a bite with some of the shishito pepper? Goddamn! Unreal. I wanted to run back into the kitchen and steal the rest. I composed an ode to barese sausage on the spot. I considered nominating that sausage to be named to the order of Canada. So yeah, I liked the barese sausage.

Sigh…clearly, with Midfield and Enoteca being three blocks apart, this wallet & waistline problem isn’t going away.

* Seriously, restaurants who publish their entire menu, with wine pairings, on the website (not in a PDF) are a blogger’s best friend.

 

Salt: mediocre, like the Angelina Jolie film. Midfield: anything but middlin'.

Dan Dickinson1 Comment

Since by Friday my sickness was gone — meaning I could once again breathe through my nose and taste things — we finished the week with a bit of a double-hit, deciding to try out a couple of wine bars in a part of town that we just never get to. I mean, literally…we have never walked around this neighbourhood. Shocking.

Midfield Wine Bar is a new spot on Dundas West that we liked immediately. The decor feels a bit rugged and minimalist at first, but it’s not an oversight — it’s by design. Everything here is dead simple. Small tables, simple chairs, cash only, a healthy bar, a brief menu (charcuterie, oysters, terrines, bread) and a well-curated wine list. I’m trying to remember everything I had…I remember the Stratus Charlie Baker Riesling, some Sangiovese or another, and a fantastic Santagostino Nero D’Avola/Syrah. Our charcuterie board was fantastic too…smearing some honeycomb on the spicy sopressata was the smartest thing I did all day. It’s not the place to go if you’re looking for a ginormous meal, but if you love interesting wine (and maybe fancy a snack) then make your way to Midfield. And let them pick the glasses for you; it’s just more fun that way.

Alas, it was time to leave Midfield. We had a dinner reservation down the street at Salt Wine Bar (sense a theme?) at 9:30. In retrospect we should have just stayed at Midfield and ordered a second board. It’s not that Salt was bad…it was just a rather soul-jerking shift to decamp a truly authentic place like Midfield for a minor outpost of Ossington hipster-douchery. It was the usual loud/cramped scenario in there. Our server was nice, but she couldn’t tell me a thing about the wine list; I don’t remember what bottle we ended up with or how it tasted. Food: the lamb tacos and lobster risotto were just okay, but the scallops and pork belly were both pretty good. So considering we got a pretty modest amount of food and wine, the bill felt outsized. It’s not a strict avoid in my books — that is, I wouldn’t warn somebody away from there if they wanted to try it — but I don’t see us making a return trip anytime soon.

.:.

Thankfully, after all that wine we had a beer respite (note to self: copyright the term beerespite) on Saturday. We met up with CBGB at Beerbistro for our friend Lisa’s birthday, in an attempt to turn her — an avowed disliker of beer — into a fan of the suds. Thankfully Beerbistro offers flights of three small glasses, and groups their menu by type of beer (and orders it roughly from lightest-to-strongest), so I did the picking and began the indoctrination.

  • Flight 1:Blanche de Chambly, Bitburger Pils, De Koninck. the Blanche was a hit. The Pils and De Koninck weren’t quite as well received, but they weren’t rejected either.
  • Flight 2:Weihenstephaner Hefe Weiss, Innis & Gunn Oak Aged, Muskoka Mad Tom IPA. The Weihenstephaner was also well received, though not quite as well as the Chambly. The Innis & Gunn went over better than I thought too, probably because of the sweetness. The Mad Tom, however, produced a response best summarized as “Ewwwww!!!” and was quickly given away. We had hit on it: the enemy, then, was hops.
  • Flight 3:Affligem Blonde, Young’s Double Chocolate Stout, Paulaner Salvator. The Affligem sits in the same category as my beloved Maudite, which I happened to be drinking just prior to this round. Since the birthday girl had tried a sip and not liked it, I opted for the other ‘spicy’ beer; luckily the Affligem fared better than La Maudite would have. The Young’s was a gamble, since serving stout to a professed non-beer-drinker seems antithetical, but the chocolate might have just salvaged it. I believe the Salvator was the least popular of this flight, but still wasn’t met with the venom shown to the Mad Tom.

So, if nothing else we showed our friend last night that she doesn’t have to resort to drinking the bad house wine at a pub if they have a weissbeer on tap. Mission tastily accomplished!

Our vacation in New Orleans or: how I came to want to free Sean Payton

Dan Dickinson2 Comments

Well, that was one of our all-time favourite trips. Here’s the play-by-play:

Friday

I’d been dreading our American Airlines flight. The last time I took American (>10 years ago) I told myself I’d never fly with them again, but we didn’t have a choice this time. But it really wasn’t too bad at all…our flight left on time and got us to Dallas in plenty of time to eat a pretzel and tacos, lounge on some recliner-ish airport chairs, and make our connection to New Orleans.

Our hotel, the Avenue Plaza Resort in the Garden District, ended up being bigger than we thought too, and not quite as ugly as the website’s pictures suggested. So the low-expectations part of our trip had both turned out pretty well. So far so good!

It was already pretty late, so our plans that night were simply to try out the Avenue Pub just down St. Charles Avenue. How lucky that our hotel was five blocks from one of the best beer places in North America. CBJ+M — our traveling companions — staked out a little table upstairs, and we drank our fill of excellent beer, ate dump truck fries (waffle fries with pulled pork and cheese) and red-beans-and-rice wontons, admired the cool art and saw our first of many “Free Sean Payton” shirts. If you don’t know who Sean Payton is, this will help.

And then, boom…we crashed.

Saturday

Late to bed, late to rise. We gathered in the morning to test out the Trolley Stop Café, just a few steps from the hotel. It was already busy, and got busier before we left. The place was fairly famous on Tripadvisor for having big portions of yummy, cheap food. And Tripadvisor was not wrong. I had bacon and french toast and country sausage and eggs and grits (for the first time ever) for $6.75. Seriously. We all stuffed ourselves and were well-entertained by our server.

We jumped on the St. Charles Streetcar (don’t call it a trolley, no matter what the cafés tell you) and headed for the Central Business District, and walked from there into the French Quarter. At this point I should point out that Saturday ended up being a near-record high temperature for that time of year in New Orleans. Sunday and (part of) Monday were the same. And I should also point out that all I’d packed were jeans and dark tshirts. So walking around was getting a little toasty. Anyway. We deliberately avoided Bourbon Street; Nellie had never seen it, and we wanted her to experience it in its full glory that night. We did see a bit of Royal Street, Chartres (which is not pronounced how someone might think if they’ve been to Chartres, France…which I have…so I mispronounced it all weekend), Decatur and more. We saw ESPN setting up their analyst studio and walked along Jackson Square before splitting up. Nellie and I walked along the river, cooled down with a pint at the Crescent City Brewhouse and then walked along Royal and Chartres some more and checked out a cool little shop called Idea Factory. If we’d had a little more time we would have checked out Faulkner House Books as well. Both were recommendations from the Rather guide to New Orleans. Seriously, if you’re visiting a city for the first time and want to find interesting places, buy one of these books.

We met back up with CBJ+M for a late lunch at the Napoleon House, a building which, so the story goes, was to be a home for Napoleon if a plot to extricate him to New Orleans had gone off, and has been a bar since prohibition — by the looks of things the decor hasn’t changed much since the 30s. But the food (jambalaya for me, po’boys for everyone else) and drinks (Pimms cups, mainly) were tasty. We sat on the leafy back patio next to the koi pond and thanked the maker for the giant fan blowing directly at us.

At this point it was time to get to our real reason for being in New Orleans: the NCAA finals. Or, more accurately, the semi-finals on that evening. All day we’d seen fans walking around in Kentucky, Louisville, Ohio State and Kansas shirts; on the walk to the Superdome they became the norm and I, wearing a black Crywolf shirt, stood out. It obvious from the mass of humanity headed for the games that the stadium was huge, but I still kind of wasn’t ready for it. I sat down in my seat (after a long, steep climb) and took it all in.

Huge, right? 70,000 people were in those seats by the time the game started. Anyway, the games were fantastic: Kentucky/Louisville is a rivalry that’s hard to explain unless you’ve sat in the middle of it for two hours, while the huge Kansas comeback win over Ohio State was a classic game. At the end of each game, disappointed fans from the losing teams hurled commemorative seat cushions onto the crowd in the lower levels…luckily they hadn’t given out commemorative letter openers, or commemorative D-cell batteries. In retrospect we should have used our seat cushions to smack either the astronomically shrill Kentucky fan behind us (my ears are still ringing a week later) or the drunk Louisville chick in front of CBJ, who insisted on standing for the last seven minutes of the — very tense — game. On the plus side, we sat right behind a guy wearing, of all things, an Expos hat.

Seat cushions or no, our asses were sore after sitting for 6+ hours, so were happy to stand up and walk out of the stadium. We re-joined the mass of humanity and made for the French Quarter. Nellie was very excited to see Bourbon Street; about seconds into our trip down Bourbon Street she was very excited to leave. Seriously, it’s one of the most awful places on earth unless you’re a) an olympic-calibre drunk, b) a bead manufacturer or c) a street preacher.

We fled down Bienville to the corner of Decatur, where we found Industry Bar & Kitchen. It was an oasis in the ridiculous clubland that is the Quarter at night: a calm bar with great beer selection, early 90s alternative music on the speakers (okay, that might be more exciting for me than for others), and pizzas made and sold in the far corner. We stood at a table, drank our craft beers (NOLA Hopitoulas and Delirium Nocturnum for me, if I remember right), watched the hilarity of the quarter unfold outside the bar, and enjoyed the scene of the bartender building a tower plastic of cups on the head of a guy who’d passed out at the bar.

Tossing our beers in go-cups (you can walk around with open liquor, as long as it’s not glass, but even that doesn’t seem to be enforced) we walked over to Canal to catch the streetcar home. When that failed we tried to catch a cab. That wasn’t easy either, but we finally managed to snag one and bombed home.

Sunday

Something we noticed after seeing the omnipresent New Orleans beads strung from every wire and railing on Bourbon Street was that they’re actually strung all over the city…any trees or horizontal edge along a Mardi Gras parade route is strewn with beads.

We didn’t have another giant Trolley Stop breakfast in us, so we grabbed a bite at the nice little Avenue Cafe next door. The food was good, and the wifi password was ‘bestcoffeeever’. I didn’t try the coffee myself, but…cute. Full, we jumped on the streetcar; three of us jumped off at Lee Circle and walked down Andrew Higgins Drive to the National WWII museum. You may recognize Higgins’ name — he was the man who designed the landing craft used during the Normandy landing and throughout WWII. The museum itself was very good: informative, well presented, with a good flow through the sequence of events that led to war, to America’s involvement in Europe and the Pacific, and to the conclusion of each. The end of the Pacific section, with pretty music playing over looping footage of Enola Gay loading and dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, was particularly moving for me. I wish we’d stopped our visit there instead of heading next for Beyond All Boundaries, a 48-minute “4D” film produced by Tom Hanks. It was an interesting concept, what with the fake snow dropped on the audience during the Bastogne scenes, or the guard tower rising from the floor during the prison camp sequence, or the blinding flash of light and rumbling chairs representing the atomic bomb detonation, but…it was also pretty cheesy. Far more jingoistic, too, than the museum proper had been. Museums are meant to educate, not celebrate; the museum did the former, but Beyond All Boundaries felt very much like the latter.

By this point we were getting hungry, so we continued south from the museum to the corner of Tchoupitoulas where we found Cochon. Or rather, Cochon Butcher, the smaller and takeout-ier sister to Cochon, which was closed. The place was rammed with locals, always a good sign. The ladies stuck to salads, while CBJ and I each got a BBQ pulled pork sandwich (so! good!) with potato salad and a beer. I’ve had a lot of pulled pork sammies in my life, but that might have been my favourite…the quality of the meat was so good they didn’t even have to soak it in sauce, they just stuck some cole slaw in it. And the soft egg bun and the OOOOOOOOOOOKAY I’m drooling. Time to stop reminiscing.

The next step in the day’s plan was to walk back over toward the Quarter, and so we took a long shortcut (longcut?) through the Riverwalk, a cheesy indoor mall designed for cruise ship passengers but whatever…it was air-conditioned. Once we spilled out onto Canal we parted ways again, with CBJ+M heading off in search of some shirts and Nellie and I just wandering to the east. We checked out Bourbon Street again, just to see it in the daylight…yup, still awful. We tried some alternate streets, still heading east, and eventually reached the Marigny neighbourhood. We were close enough to Frenchmen Street to stop by another Beeradvocate-recommended bar: D.B.A.. They were temporarily closed for filming (fair enough, it was 4:00 on a Sunday afternoon) so we checked out the upcoming lineups at neighbouring bars (Kermit Ruffins? John Boutté? Clearly Frenchmen Street was a good place to hear live music; alas, not for us that night) and rested our tired feet in Washington Square before returning. And D.B.A.? Such a cool place. Obviously great beer selection, but good vibe with locals (the guy sitting next to me at the bar was named “Barnaby”, because it was New Orleans and of course he was), and swing-dancing class happening in the next room, and a pregnant bartender, and a sign that said “No Miller, Coors or Bud Lite. Get over it!”, and ‘drinkgoodstuff’ for a wifi password. Again…cute!

We were supposed to be meeting up with CBJ+M again soon, back at the Avenue Pub near our hotel, so Nellie put her remaining beer in a go-cup and we went outside to find a cab. As luck would have it one drove by the second we stepped outside. I ran to climb in, while Nellie — conditioned by years of banned public drinking — chugged her remaining beer and ran to the cab. The cabbie calmly informed us that it was perfectly okay to bring a go-cup into the cab, and Nellie cursed her cautious drinking habits (ha!) as we drove west. Through a funny string of conversation (in which Nellie learned where Kansas is) we ended up chatting with our cabbie quite a bit, who advised us on the best time of year to visit New Orleans (about 2 weeks after Easter, says he) and the ridiculous inconsistency of New Orleans street name pronunciation. He dropped us at the Avenue where we staked out a brilliant spot on the balcony and drank cold beer (my ginger-infused Japanese weissbeer was particularly good) in the heat of the late afternoon, waited for CBJ+M to arrive and tried to figure out a way to stay in that very spot forever.

We got cleaned and spiffied a bit before dinner at Coquette, a wine bar in the Garden District. What a find. We started with drinks (a phenomenal bacon-infused bourbon for me, a champagne/gin/lemon French 75 for Nellie) before getting on with the incredible food. My starter was pickled baby beets with burrata and duck ham (which is exactly as kickass as it sounds) and my main was duck breast with fennel & peas. Nellie, meanwhile, had fried gulf oysters paired with a glass of Chardonnay followed by cochon de lait (aka sucking pig), which my forkful or two (or six) told me was outstanding. I honestly can’t remember what CBJ+M got, except that CBJ got a cocktail called the Mutiny (blackstrap rum, spiced rum, lime, Angostura bitters, hot sauce) which was damned tasty. Our mains were paired with a 2008 Emeritus Pinot Noir from the Russian River. Then came an entirely unnecessary dessert of milk chocolate mousse with salted caramel and peanut butter sorbet. Nellie, preferring to drink her desserts, had a glass of Bordeaux instead. It was an incredible meal, one of the best we’ve had in ages, and it cost less than half of what we would have paid in Toronto. Which somehow made it taste even better.

Monday

We started packing Monday morning, knowing we’d have to get up at 3:45AM the next day (boo! hiss!) and not having much time that evening. But by late morning we were on the St. Charles streetcar one more time, this time jammed in like sardines, heading over to Canal. I stopped at one of the dozens of pop-up stores selling team tshirts and made a rare find: a) a Kentucky tshirt (there were only a few left anywhere) which b) wasn’t the same as the generic shirts being sold all over the city and c) fit me and d) was super-thin (which came in handy on a hot day like that). Score! We grabbed a little lunch and cooled off at Crescent City, then walked east along Decatur and west along Royal, stopping in the odd store and art gallery along the way.

Once we’d had enough shopping we decided to finally check out Bracket Town, part of the NCAA celebrations. We walked over to Poydras Street, then walked all the way back through the Riverwalk thingy, and then the whole length of the convention center (which is, like, half a mile long, goddammit) to Bracket Town. We thought there’d be some stuff in there that we’d enjoy. We were wrong. We regrouped after about 10 minutes, long enough for Nellie and I to toss down a couple of free Coke Zero samples, and then decided to go back to the adult part of town. But, uh, in a cab. We got dropped off at Café du Monde, ate some delicious & messy beignets as all good visitors to New Orleans must, and watched with concern as some storm clouds rose on the horizon.

Knowing we’d eventually have to walk toward the Superdome, and having confirmed that the weather forecast called for severe thunderstorms soon, we began walking back toward Canal. We stopped at our old friend Industry just in time; ten minutes after we arrived the rain started, and then it really started. Then came the lightning and thunder, some of which was so loud and so sharp it sounded like a gunshot. Seriously, the bartender came out of the back room when he heard it, ducked low to avoid flying bullets. We stayed out of the rain, drinking and eating pizza until most of it had let up. Still, it was time to go and the rain hadn’t stopped completely, so we knew were going to get wet. We ran to the Canal streetcar which took us most of the way there, but we still had to run the five blocks to the Superdome and…well, yeah. Wet.

The staff ushered us in through the underground parking ramps, high-fiving us as we ran in. You can imagine the humidity in a concrete parking structure during a thunderstorm in New Orleans, so it was pretty sporty in there. But hey, it was dry. We got to our seats in decent time, took in the pre-game excitement, and watched Kentucky storm out to an enormous lead over Kansas. Kansas made it close down the stretch, but Kentucky held on and took the championship. We watched with 70,000+ other people as fireworks exploded and confetti fell, as the team was interviewed and cut down the net, and (more or less) as they played “One Shining Moment” with the video montage. Pretty. Damn. Cool.

The walk home was nearly as wet as the walk there, so when the opportunity came to jump in a cab we took it. It was all-out piracy in the city by then; mysteriously, every cab meter in the city was malfunctioning and they could charge whatever they wanted. Whatever; we were home, and drier than we otherwise would have been. We packed our remaining stuff (including some very wet clothing, unfortunately), watched the ESPN highlights and commentary and tried, post-game high notwithstanding, to go to sleep for a few hours.

Tuesday

Our alarm went off at approximately stupid o’clock AM and we dragged ourselves into action. We’d pre-arranged a cab…or at least we thought we had. We actually ended up squeezing into an SUV with six other people, all bound for the airport. Turns out a lot of the cabs were making so much money into the wee hours of the previous night that no one was reporting for duty on Tuesday morning. Anyway, we thought leaving for the airport at 4:30 for a 6:00 flight would give us enough time, but as it was we just barely made it. My Nexus/Global Entry pass got us into the expedited security line, and from there we walked up to the gate with maybe five minutes to spare. If we’d been stuck in the (enormous!) standard security line we’d have missed our flight. Our flight to Miami was uneventful, apart from being full of Kentucky fans who look like they’d not bothered to go to sleep the night before. Also: wi-fi! I paid for access on both legs, MSY -> MIA and MIA -> YYZ, and will happily do it again if I ever get the chance.

We had originally been scheduled to return via Dallas; when American changed our flight to a 6AM departure via Miami we were pretty pissed but left with no alternative. However, we were pretty thankful when we arrived home and saw that all flights out of DFW — including CBJ+M’s flight, the one we were originally meant to be on — were canceled due to tornadoes in the area. So suddenly an early flight time didn’t seem like such a big deal.

.:.

We’ve been thinking about and planning this trip since last August when CBJ+M found out they’d won the Final Four tickets. Now that it’s over, we’re already thinking about when we’ll go back to New Orleans. We want to enjoy the city when it’s not full of tens of thousands of basketball fans. The food, the drink, the architecture, the friendliness of the people, the history…it all adds up to give the city so much character, and we want more of it. New Orleans, we’ll see you again soon.

Oh, and…Free Sean Payton!

In Soviet Russia, XBox plays you

Dan Dickinson1 Comment

Seriously, somebody stop us. This has been our past five days:

Wednesday: after a long day in the office we met for tasty deliciousness at Beerbistro. I introduced Nellie to Dieu du Ciel’s Dernière Volonté.

Thursday: I took some co-workers to Fieramosca. It was, as usual, delicious. At some point (probably after the fifth shot of Limoncello) I was a little worried about how I was going to feel the next morning. Especially since I had an 8AM meeting. Also, this was my second visit to Fieramosca in less than a week; the previous Saturday Nellie and I took our friends Kaylea and Matt there to celebrate their engagement.

Friday: Nellie had after-work drinks with co-workers, which meant I had a night to myself. “Solo Dan eve” involved shooting a lot of XBox Russians (<– not a euphemism, by the way, dirty!), eating pizza and blasting The Dandy Warhols.

Saturday: errands, errands and more errands, followed by a few hours in the office, but it took a decidedly more positive turn when Nellie and her fancy new haircut met me on the way to visit our friends CBJ+M. We picked up barbeque from The Stockyards, watched basketball and did some New Orleans trip strategizing.

Sunday: it was too gorgeous to do anything but get outside, so we walked to Gilead Cafe, checked out some new furniture in the Distillery District, ogled a Montauk sofa, did some clothes shopping (!) and had a few glasses of wine and a prosciutto pizza at Paese. We came home and opened our windows for the first time in months, got the smell of spring in the place, and eventually picked out two bottles of wine with which to finish the day: a 2008 Hidden Bench Felseck Vineyard Chardonnay from Niagara, and a 2008 Pirramimma Petit Verdot from McLaren Vale to pair with our Cumbrae’s steak. Both were fantastic.

So as fun as that all sounds, I would just like…I don’t know, a salad or some quinoa or something.

Eeleveneven

Dan Dickinson2 Comments

“Hell with it,” we thought last Thursday evening, “why not try some place new?”

So, the next day, we did.

E11even, not far from our place, is a newish restaurant that I keep forgetting about. It’s next to the Air Canada Centre, under the new Le Germain hotel and near Aria, but it never found its way on to my to-go list. But then I read Bruce Wallner’s review on Winefox, and it was still fresh in my head that evening when we booked in.

As soon as we walked in we could see there was a lot to like: the decor is great, the ceiling is a dark-stained wood which makes the whole room seem warm, and the bar at the front of the room looked pretty inviting. We also had a lot of fun playing with the iPad-based drinks list. I wanted one for home; my Google Spreadsheet wine inventory seems rather mundane now.

Our food was really terrific. Hot, tasty bread with herbed butter will never go uneaten at my table. Nellie had the crab cake starter, which we both found tasty…and I don’t even like crab cake. My prosciutto and buffalo mozzarella starter was great, but HUGE…I think it was meant for more than one person. We both ordered steaks from the grill: Nellie the petit filet and I the dry aged ribeye, both medium rare. I think they caught one corner of mine a little more than they meant to (it was medium to medium-well) but most of it was very tasty indeed. We did admit, though, that after having the Wagyu and Jacobs & Co a few weeks ago all other steaks seem to pale in comparison.

If we had one big complaint about the place it was the timing. We’d ordered a glass of wine (Carmenère for me, Prosecco for her) when we sat down, just while we settled in and perused the menu. Our starters (and accompaning glasses of wine) came out almost immediately after we ordered them, while we still had more than half our original drinks left. It’s hard to fault the kitchen for being speedy, but it made for a bit of glass-juggling. Speaking of wine, we’d asked the sommelier to suggest pairings for our starters (which he did: a Chablis for Nellie, a Pinot for me) and to pick a bottle of red to match our mains. He said he’d be back with options for the bottle of red. But we waited, and ate our starters, and waited again, and were still waiting when our steaks hit the table. No sign of our friend the sommelier. When our server returned he noticed the lack of red wine and flagged down the sommelier; who returned a few minutes later. The bottle he brought us — a 2009 Charles Melton Nine Popes GSM — wasn’t bad, but a) it hadn’t had any time to breathe and still tasted tight, and b) it was marginally over the upper limit of the price point I’d given him. It certainly seemed to us that he’d just forgotten about us and grabbed something quickly under pressure. So…not a huge deal, but when we’re spending over $100 on a bottle because we want it to match our food nicely, we were kind of expecting a little more care.

I mentioned our server, Shane — he really did save the evening. He was helpful, attentive, funny and apologetic when he noticed the sommelier’s oversight. Moreover, he quickly appeared with a decanter so our wine could open up faster. He gave us whisky suggestions at the end of the evening, which somehow led to discussions about Cape Breton and PEI and Alberta and how much better Calgary’s mayor is than ours.

So, not a great outing, but there was enough good there that it probably warrants another try. Maybe we’ll just sit at the bar. Or if we do have a full dinner, I’ll probably do something I’ve never done before, and ask to sit in a particular server’s section. You should too if you try it.