Food Trends 2009

For enRoute, artist Anselmo Swan brings food to still life, including a hunk of mimolette, this year’s trendiest cheese.

The $40 entrée died this year, along with trophy wines and water sommeliers. Gold leaf, which somehow had become a garnish for overpriced hamburgers and overwrought desserts, resumed its rightful place in religious iconography and scrapbooking clubs. What we got instead was thrift, craft and creativity. Back in the day, they used to call it “cooking.”

This was the year that chefs – not just a few but loads of chefs – discovered there’s more to meat than just prime cuts. They variously braised, steamed, pickled and roasted all manner of what used to be called variety meats, and transformed many of them into excellent charcuterie. They found legumes too – remember the humble bean? – and root vegetables and ancient grains like farro, which, as the ancient Romans may or may not have known, goes spectacularly well with Vancouver Island sea asparagus and mimolette cheese. In the wrong hands, this sort of cooking can feel utterly banal. Headcheese? Parsnips? But at its best, it made for some of the most delectable tastes we’ve tried.

The chefs who rose to the challenge were largely young cooks with time – lots of it; cooking this well with such simple ingredients takes work – and desire and fresh perspective. It’s no coincidence that the two best new restaurants in Canada this year are helmed by cooks who’ve never run their own kitchens before. And although their cooking is rooted in tradition – forgotten techniques and long-overlooked foods – they also manage to make it feel brand new.

Wine service also changed for the better. Esoteric and fabulous picks under $50 were common; in some places, they formed the bulk of the list. We learned that Italy produces more than just sangiovese and nebbiolo grapes (Hello, ribolla gialla! Hello, aglianico!) and that Spanish wines, when there’s somebody to point out the good stuff, are almost impossibly delicious. Take Bierzo, which tastes of wildflowers and sweet licorice and is pronounced with a lisping “Z.”

Canada’s chefs worked harder for less money from fewer patrons in 2009; yet the best of them turned out inspired, extraordinarily good cooking. Eating out has never tasted better. 

Cocktail ingredients of the year, courtesy of Maenam (Vancouver) 

Falernum This Barbadian mix of ginger, cloves and lime, freshly made and blended with white rum, pineapple, apple and Thai basil, makes for one of the best multi-culti mashups that ever walked into a bar.

Fresh sour cherries As a foam – an egg foam, not one of those precious nitrogen-dioxide-driven molecular foams. Poured over Peychaud’s bitters and bourbon, the result is a gorgeous and totally fresh-tasting manhattan.   

Kalamansi These South Asian citrus fruits look like limes and taste like a cross between a lemon and a mandarin orange. We’ve read that they’re “good for the kidneys and eliminate urine odour.” But what they’re best for is the Koh Phangan cocktail, where the juice is mixed with tequila, Cointreau and cilantro.

The Ubiquitous Chilewich Placemat 

It’s not that we miss white tablecloths; we’d rather pay for better food than restaurants’ laundry service, and linen often feels too, well, starched. But did they have to replace them with these? Chilewich placemats are stain-resistant and washable, but they’re made from woven vinyl, people. 

Tastiest bastardization of a fresh, seasonal, local ingredient 

The spot prawn corn dogs at Voya (Vancouver) in the Loden hotel. We dare you to stop at a single order.  

Talk about the age of video surveillance 

At DB Bistro Moderne (Vancouver), the management has hidden cameras trained on all the tables, ostensibly so the kitchen will know how the meals are progressing. At the excellent Lot 30 (Charlottetown), it’s the diners who watch the kitchen. A closed-circuit television above the bar offers a bird’s-eye view of the chef’s pass – the steel-topped table where plates are assembled before going out to diners.  

Restaurants you can’t actually go to 

Cabane à sucre Au pied de cochon (Saint-Benoît de Mirabel, Quebec) stays open for just a few weeks every year; dinner is also an incredibly good deal. But getting a reservation while the sap’s still flowing? Best of luck with that. Meanwhile, at La Quercia (Vancouver), everything shut down for two weeks in June this year – June! – so the chefs could go on a research trip to Italy to source ingredients. But Charlie’s Burgers (Toronto) took playing hard-to-get to unplumbed new depths. Charlie’s hires a different chef for a single blowout dinner at an undisclosed Toronto location each month. Prospective diners must fill out a foodie questionnaire before they can even think about reserving. “Once you have sent this back, you may be added to the e-vite list for Charlie’s Burgers events,” the anti-restaurant’s aggressively enigmatic website says. “Or maybe not, it’s not for everyone.” The dinner we didn’t get into featured a 10-course tasting menu by the sous-chef from Colborne Lane and cost $175, cash. Which strikes us as odd, seeing as the last time we checked, we could get the sous-chef from Colborne Lane to cook a 10-course tasting menu for us at Colborne Lane for $148, wine included. And we didn’t need to bow and scrape to get in. 

Wine service we feel should be universal 

There’s almost nothing better than a restaurant with (a) a great wine list and (b) an every-wine-is-available-by-the-glass policy. Le St-Urbain, a friendly and fantastic bistro in Montreal’s Ahuntsic neighbourhood, has both of those. Plus, when you order a glass from a bottle that’s not already open, they bring the whole thing and charge you for how much you drink. This is great when you order wine that comes from a standard bottle. If you happen to order a glass of the white Burgundy from Domaine Jean Fournier, however, you get a magnum of the stuff, plus an ice bucket and an altogether ceremonious uncorking. If you happen to be eating alone, you get a lot of bewildered stares from other diners as well. 

Why water is still the most annoying thing to order 

We’ve all heard servers say it: “Still or sparkling?” The less meek among us often reply, “Tap, please,” but refusing those $8 bottles of imported water can wear a diner down. At Rush (Calgary), we just smiled in resignation and answered, “Sparkling.” A minute later, a bottle of house-filtered, carbonated Eau de Bow arrived. The price? Free. Asked the same question a few weeks later at Pizzeria Libretto (Toronto), and wise to the game now, we smiled and answered, “Sparkling.” The server brought a bottle of house-filtered water, and then another, and then a third, for which we were charged (as we later discovered) $3 a litre.  

Cocktail that’s worth the outing 

Americans have been putting piri piri, the Portuguese chili sauce, in their Bloody Marys for a few years now, and even Emeril Lagasse puts fresh oysters in his shooters. But at Madeline’s (Toronto), they make a piri piri Caesar with a fresh oyster on the side. It’s got to be the most dangerous drink of the year.   

Best bathroom

The urinals and toilets at Rush (Calgary) are done in high-gloss black. That’s right, folks. The toilets are black. We have no idea why that’s as exciting as it is. But you’ve got to see it to believe it. Now if only the urinal pucks would come in something other than DayGlo blue. 

Most creative menu description

“Mushroom carpaccio” in the green salad at DB Bistro Moderne (Vancouver). “Sliced white supermarket mushrooms” would have hit a little closer to the truth.

What should have been in the mushroom carpaccio
The “mountain fire morels” they served in the asparagus soup at RauDZ© Regional Table (Kelowna, B.C.). Forest fires may be bad for mountainside homes, but it turns out they’re amazing for wild morel mushrooms. 

All-points bulletin: the dollar sign

Number of menus, out of 36, that used dollar signs in their pricing: 3
Number of menus, out of 36, that used numerals only, with no dollar signs: 33
Average increase in per-diner spending when restaurants leave the dollar sign off their menus, according to a recent study: 8 percent
Coincidence? We think not.  

Write to us: letters@enroutemag.net