| rev:text
| - Ever have a mystical experience with Maple Syrup? I know, it sounds weird. But when Martin Picard decides to cook up his take on "The Sugar Shack" you best buckle up and prepare for the second coming.
First he flips it all on you and starts you out with desert... a whole tower of deserts, Whippets, maple pop-corn, some kind of croissant thing with maple, maple taffy, some kind of maple iced Ultra Tim-Bit and this maple flavoured Jell-O/Yogurt thing which was insane. I won't go into details on each item because, damn this review would be pages and pages long and Yelp won't let me go beyond 5 001 characters. The tower was supported by Jack Daniel's shooter with maple syrup.
Then came the starters. 4 of them. Each more insane than the other. There was the salad with offal, topped with Oreilles de Christ, the best damn Oreilles de Christ you've ever had. The waiter informed me they take 3 days to make... I didn't get the details because of the hustle and bustle but it's like eating really amazing pork-rinds in the form of airy Cheetos, without the cheese. Bacon in pop-corn form. DING DING. You win a bucket of awesome.
The traditional omelette took a direction most wouldn't expect from a Sugar Shack. The omelette had, of course eggs, and potatoes, pornographically thick cut bacon - probably cooked in maple syrup - which I could eat all day. But then comes the "road less taken" part. It's also got lots of brains... calf brains to be precise. They were prepared more or less like Picard prepares foie gras and they were just as melt in your mouth. It was the first time I've had calf brains and they weren't much unlike the sheep's brain I tasted a few years back. Simply put, the whole thing was foodgasmic.
Further down the traditional sugar shack menu are the omelette and the baked beans. Picard mashes them together to create magic, real magic... The pancake is topped with baked beans which made my own taste like canned crap and I used to be proud of my baked beans and if that weren't enough... he takes you to town. You see there's also foie gras and smoked salmon and cream and a lot flavour and decadence and it leaves you with the feeling that nothing else can be better. But I was wrong, really wrong...
You see, for me there's The Holy Trifecta of Meat. It starts with the most loved of all meats; BACON (check) followed by FOIE GRAS (check) and then comes the DUCK...
Yes DUCK. I have a love affair with duck. And Picard just whored it out like a really expensive escort. Duck confit legs - already perfect - then deep fried and slathered with ooey gooey maple flavoured glaze and some crunchy stuff I didn't have time to identify as I devoured it. So freakin' delicious, I could have eaten a bucket full of those duck legs and then probably would have developed diabetes, but woulda been worth it. Now in my Top 5 courses of all time.
Still reading? Good. I'm about to go into the main. It kinda slows down from here though. There's chicken stuffed with sausage, foie gras and lobster which I'm allergic to so I couldn't eat of it but it looked pretty damn good. There was also a succulent smoked ham with mash potatoes and I thought I was bored out of my mind with ham... but not this one. Basically smoked to the point where's pulled pork, pulled ham maybe? In any case, again, best ham ever. The desert was Maple toffee served in maple ice cream (mindblowing ice cream) followed by a big squishee maple cake. At this point my head was already wobbly from the sugar and I had to call it quits.
As a whole the food is beyond succulent, as you would expect from Martin Picard. The service, just like his restaurant, is professional and friendly. But I have one small caveat though. I was hoping to escape the feed-lot experience from the other sugar shacks where you are led to a table with uncomfortable seating arrangements and made to eat like cattle and be expulsed outside to wander off until you die from overeating. Just once I'd like to go to a sugar shack and sit on a chair and have room to move around and have more than 2 square feet to occupy. The meal was the kind of God-Like meal you dream of, the atmosphere was reminiscent of a high-school cafeteria set in a barn. But then there's the Maple Cotton Candy.
|
![[RDF Data]](/fct/images/sw-rdf-blue.png)
![[cxml]](/fct/images/cxml_doc.png)
![[csv]](/fct/images/csv_doc.png)
![[text]](/fct/images/ntriples_doc.png)
![[turtle]](/fct/images/n3turtle_doc.png)
![[ld+json]](/fct/images/jsonld_doc.png)
![[rdf+json]](/fct/images/json_doc.png)
![[rdf+xml]](/fct/images/xml_doc.png)
![[atom+xml]](/fct/images/atom_doc.png)
![[html]](/fct/images/html_doc.png)