I have e heard so much about this place, which is on midtown yonge street - an area known for it's good restaurants. I came here for winterlicious and was really excited to try out their menu. Much to my disappointment, Five Doors North was a big flop.
I started off with the beet salad, which unfortunately lacked flavour. It was very bland and I wished that they could at least provide salt and pepper to help this dish a little. My friend had polenta with goats cheese. This one was better for sure.
As main I chose the pumpkin seed crusted salmon with mango and smoked red pepper salad. Salmon was very tasty and nicely seasoned. However it was supposed to be served with a salad of mango AND smoked pepper. Once again it let me down since there was pretty much no pepper in this salad at all! In total i found one sad little tiny tiny slice of smoked red pepper. As I'm sure you can imagine, mango is very sweet on its own and needs something to balance the sweetness if it's served as a side dish. Frankly the dish was not as advertised! So this did not do it for me. My friend had ordered the pork tenderloin with sweet peas and it was good, but nothing amazing.
To finish off this dinner we ordered banana chocolate chip bread pudding and vanilla creme brule. The bread pudding was pretty much a slice of plain bread with no flavor at all other than a tiny bit of banana flavoured sauce drizzled over it. It felt like we were eating plain bread pretty much. It lacked bananas and sweetness. The creme brulee had a little bit of vanilla flavour but it was spotty - i.e. one spoon had vanilla flavor, the next one was tasteless - very inconsistent!
To sum up, 4 out of 6 dishes were disappointing. For a restaurant to deserve another visit you have to do better than this. This was my first and sadly the last time I went to Five Doors North. If you want a good winterlicious menu I would recommend The Carbon Bar, which I rated 5 stars for the amazing food and service.
- Food not as advertised
- Bland tasteless food more often than good
- Pricy (unless you go for winterlicious)
- Loud despite the restaurant being almost empty