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| - When planning my recent trip to Toronto for a conference, the one consistent piece of advice I got was that the Black Hoof was a "can't miss" food experience. Knowing that they don't take reservations and prepared for a wait, I showed up with two friends who are equally enthusiastic about good food - particularly good food made of animal - and prepared to be amazed. While I thought they had a very interesting menu, I was disappointed with the food.
Service was OK, but nobody really went above and beyond. We put our names on the list and were told we could try waiting at the cocktail bar across the street - which was also packed, so we hung out on a bench outside. We were all trying to be careful about avoiding astronomical fees for international cell phone usage, but the hostess wasn't too keen on the idea of letting us run over to the restaurant without answering the call to tell us our table was ready. Weird, but whatever. A little more off-putting was her attitude when I checked to make sure she'd be able to send a text to us. "We have this really impressive technology in Canada that lets us do that." Considering that I had to explicitly call my provider and request a plan that would allow me to send texts to international numbers, I thought it was a fair question. Whatever, girl sounded pretty confident that she wasn't going to be looking at a 60-cent-per-text charge for contacting us that way. In terms of service at our table, we weren't neglected but service was a little slow and we could go quite a while with unfilled water glasses.
The menu was more interesting than satisfying. We started with bread, pickles, and bone marrow. The bone marrow was delicious and a very generous portion. The pickled veggies had great flavor and there was a lot of variety, although the portion was very small (although most things were sized well for sharing, a second plate of pickles would not have gone amiss). The albacore tuna crudo had very intense flavor - so much that we all took a single bite. I'm glad I tried it, but the intensity might work best as a bite-sized amuse bouche than a full entree. We also had a dish with n'duja and leeks that was served with fried chicken skin - again, interesting flavor but very intense and a bite or two was quite enough. I also thought the dish was overly salty. We finished the meal with the pork carnitas - which were the least innovative thing we tried, but also the most delicious and satisfying. This led us to conclude that we might not be the target audience for this restaurant. Overall the three of us consider ourselves to be adventurous eaters - I have never shied away from trying a new food and usually love new flavors and textures. Black Hoof took the "tip to tail" concept just a bit too far for me.
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