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| - [TLDR: It needs to dream a little bigger, but it is worth a try.]
The Beast's grasp is strong ... but it could use more reach.
This is a fine restaurant by any conventional measure, but as a place with obviously high aspirations, Beast needs to push a little -- suffering more in imagination than in execution. Many restaurants suffer from overdesign, but here many of the dishes could actually use a few more flourishes, a little more dexterity, a few more strong flavours.
The "snacks," including dirty rice balls, homefried BBQ chips with blue cheese dip, and potato wedges were satisfying, but, with the exception of the perfectly executed deep fried pickle slices, pretty pedestrian.
As for the mains, the veggie dishes were the highlight. Deep frying the brussel sprouts gave them an almost nori-like crispiness. The beet(root) with fennel, dill, and feta was excellent -- beets & dill always a winning combination as far as I'm concerned. The mushrooms on toast were infused with a distinct and very pleasant hot chocolate aroma.
Given they're ostensibly the main attraction here, I was disappointed with the meat dishes. The poutine was unstructured. Each ingredient was good, but the combination didn't constitute any kind of riff on the idea of poutine, nor was there any standout piquant flavour. I could barely taste the paprika in the bone marrow, although it was nice with a little fragment of flat-leaf parsley. The crispy lamb ribs -- really just cubes of crisped strands of lamb -- were tasty. I liked the salsa verde, although it was really more of a mint chimichurri. With a bit of anchovy and a sharp of grapefruit, it was quite a nice little bite.
The pastrami sandwich was a pastrami sandwich.
I have to suspend comment on the sticky toffee pudding because it's pretty hard for me to be objective about a deep bowl of molten caramel :)
Nice wine list. I enjoyed the Stratus Tollhouse Red. The french press coffees were good too.
Service excellent.
Nice roomy space (tables a little worn), decent decor -- the psychedelic reclining-rooster-as-Bacchus and dreaming cow/calf paintings are bound to polarize your party as much as they did mine.
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