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| - It can be a challenge finding a good place to eat on a Monday night, since so many fine dining restaurants are closed. We had hoped to try Toqué! but they were closed both nights we were in town. Europea was open and we were able to get reservations, so we decided to give it a try. The restaurant has an elegant interior, and the night we were there it was mostly a business crowd, so we felt slightly underdressed. We both got the chef's tasting menu with wine pairings. The menu is inspired by Québec's fresh produce. Presentation was excellent on all of the dishes; if I hadn't been to a place like this before I would have been more impressed, but we were a little underwhelmed as we've had better in LA (most recently at Gordon Ramsay), especially for the price. But it was still very good. As best as I can remember, our courses were as follows:
Amuse bouche: goat cheese mousse with risotto and bacon
Lobster cream cappuccino with truffle oil
Princess scallops, prepared in the shell with morel mushroom milk, sea water emulsion, parsnip purée
Duo of pan seared and torchon foie gras
Light C02 foam prepared with César salad
Surf & turf (medallion of milk fed veal with a crust of herbs pesto, langoustine ravioli with confit tomatoes, sautéed girolles mushrooms
Cheese plate
2 dessert courses
The desserts were extremely elaborate. Our first dessert course included panna cotta and a huge 3-tiered tray of bite-sized desserts, including maple marshmallow, chocolate-covered orange rind, chocolate-covered strawberries, apricot jelly pistachio tart, etc. Our second dessert course included a chocolate pot de crème with espresso foam and butterscotch ice cream.
Probably my favorite dishes were the scallops and the langoustines, and my least favorite was the veal, which was slightly overcooked for our more bloody tastes. Foam was used in several dishes (it is molecular gastronomy after all), which may be a little gimmicky but I'm not complaining - actually the caesar salad foam dish was fairly interesting, and the foam that came with the scallops was an excellent complement. For our cheese course a large table of cheeses was brought out, from which we got to choose 4, so we chose all of the local Québec cheeses that they offered. The wine pairings were somewhat uninspired in our opinion, but we did enjoy the Barolo that was served with our surf & turf course, and I appreciated that they served a local Canadian sweet wine with the foie gras course rather than the traditional Sauternes. There were only 4 wines served with the 9 courses, which on the one hand comes across as not enough, but on the other hand it was nice to still be fairly sober at the end of the meal.
Personally I don't need to go back anytime soon, but it was a good dinner overall, and it seemed like a good place for a business dinner or a date if you've got money to spend.
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