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| - My brother and I ate at Toqué! a while ago (apologies for the delay), and we both ordered the chef's tasting menu. (The quality of the food was wildly inconsistent, so I've rated each dish individually.) Bottom line: Chef Laprise and his staff may have talent, training, and high-quality ingredients, but they could care less about your experience, your good opinion, or your second visit.
MEAL NOTES
(#0) Amuse-bouche: sweet corn and celery-rabe mousse. {****} The amuse was served as a soup: several mouthfuls of foamy liquid that had to be spooned out of a large bowl. Topped with a daub of melted butter, the amuse was essentially several spoonfuls of liquid, salty, delicately creamy-sweet popcorn.
(#1) Tuna-wrapped crostini with lime mayonnaise. {*} This dish was a big disappointment: the chili and pepper overwhelmed the tuna, and the dish was flat out under-salted. Using a prosciutto instead of tuna may have been more predictable, but it certainly would have tasted better. This dish was also a little embarrassing to eat, because it's impossible to snip tuna fat with your teeth. Each bite engendered a tug-of-war between the crositini and my mouth, with the fish strung out between. Did the chef actually try to eat this before asking us to pay for it?
(#2) Scallop, cheese, and bacon tartelette. {*****} Grizzled old culinary rule: never combine seafood and cheese. M. Laprise exploded this rule with flavour and flair. In this thoughtful, playful, and scrumptious reinterpretation an an Alsatian classic, potatoes replace the crust of the tartelette, which is then filled with in a bacon, cheese, and scallops. The potatoes, astonishingly, add air and lightness. High cuisine at its very best.
(#3) Mackerel and summer vegetables. {*} A slender half-fillet of mackerel on a capacious plate, dressed with an understated sweet soy sauce, and surrounded by a carnival of fruits and vegetables. We counted no fewer than 17 (!) distinct components on the plate, including 2 pinches of different chili powders and a smear of pesto. It was impossible to grasp how the chef thought the dish should be eaten. What goes with what? Serving a plate of bewildering options to your patrons is about as amateurish as it gets.
(#4) Charcuterie plate with sausage, stewed rabbit, pancetta, and black trumpet mushrooms. {**} Another visual and gustatory train-wreck. Everything on this plate was forgettably adequate except the sausage--dressed with what we think was a strawberry and balsamic reduction--which was divine. Those two small bites of sausage were two of the most transcendentally perfect mouthfuls I've ever had. (This dish gets one star for each bite of that sausage.) Everything else on the plate just got in the way of that transcendent perfection. Especially the bones: I found one in my rabbit, and my brother one in his pancetta. Now, bones are not supposed to leave the kitchen, but it can happen. You let the kitchen know about it, the chef (or sous-chef) apologizes, and everyone gets on with the meal. We found two of them. Our server apologized perfunctorily, but we never heard anything from the kitchen or from management. Nothing. WTF.
(#5) Seared Kobe beef with a baby leek. {*} This was the first dish ever served to me at a fine dining establishment that I sent back to the kitchen unfinished. (My brother sent his back as well.) The steak and leek were dressed with an excellent veal-stock reduction featuring (we think) blueberries and beets. The baby leek was so forgettable even my notes can't remember it. The beef was improperly cooked: excessively charred on the outside so that it tasted strongly of charcoal (not just a hint--strongly) and underdone on the inside (I like my steak bloody, but this meat was stringy). The steak was not only inexcusably over-salted, but also served without a steak knife. M. Laprise apparently thinks that "Kobe" is Japanese for "contempt."
(#6) Lightly melted cheese over summer vegetables. {***} Sweet yellow tomatoes and summer squash under a blanket of slightly melted cheese, dressed with fresh herbs and blueberry vinegar. Unremarkable except for the blueberry vinegar, which was utterly extraordinary. Another instance in which the best item on the plate got lost in the effort to impress the diner with packaging.
(#7) Dessert: Raspberry tart and blackberry sorbet. {**} The tart was composed as a tower raspberries, whipped cream, and pancake crisps. The accompanying blackberry sorbet was competent, but unimaginative. One welcome surprise was the presence of tiny clippings of fresh, fragrant herbs beneath and over the whipped cream, each of which provided a startling little burst of flavor in a fancy-looking presentation of raspberries, whipped cream, and pancakes. Fresh berries are wonderful, but I expect a great chef to use his skills to improve his ingredients--not simply re-label them.
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