Tel. 499-2084. Every day, 6 p.m. to 11 p.m. Closed noon except for groups with reservations. $95 for two before wine, taxes and service.
 will invest soon in an infra-red spy camera. My friend who invited me to Toqué on a warm Wednesday evening in May did not want me to take any flash pictures during the dinner. Since he paid the bill, a cool $1,300 for six, tip not included, I was not going to resist. I returned the next day with my camera when the restaurant was empty, but was firmly told that pictures were not permitted, not even after I explained that my friend had sold his car to pay for our dinner.
If you are from Montreal, then you have surely heard of Toqué, which was for a long time rumoured to be the best restaurant in town.
Reservations were required weeks in advance, but not so this year. We found a half-empty place, with a courteous but slow service: our meal lasted from 7:30 p.m. until 11 p.m. So, my first advice is to take storytellers with you, or a scrabble game, or a pocket Nintendo. We were lucky to have at our table one of Israel's funniest raconteurs. Longing for the good old days when Montreal was crawling with KGB agents, I was delighted to find myself safely seated next to two real but cameraless Russians, one a smiling version of Putin, and the other a grizzly-sized 35-year old Muscovite who could have crippled any of our French waiters with one good handshake.
There is an à la carte menu with mostly French fare. The appetizers are in the $9-25 range (gratin de chevre, $14 and foie gras, $23), and main dishes cost from $24-38 (example: red snapper ($36). We selected a "menu de dégustation" at $88, wine not included.
It consists of six small dishes that change periodically. Well, that is a lie—the dishes were large, but the food was huddling fearfully near the centers of the plates.
We started with a small piece of perfectly executed paté de foie gras. It was the largest single connected piece of food we would see for the next three hours.
For our second dish, one (1) poor stuffed, stressed-out ravioli was all by itself on its plate, hiding underneath a creamy sauce. Grizzly looked at me with an evil eye, as if I had anything to do with chef Normand Laprise's ravioli. Maybe he was used to the giant raviolis that Siberian babouschkas have been making for him all his life, or maybe he was expecting at least two (2) Western-sized raviolis. In any case, he gulped the piece of pasta in one mouthful, looking more stressed than Mr. Ravioli.
We moved on to an appetizer based on razor clams in a lemon sauce. It turns out that these clams are harvested on the Pacific Coast and near the Bering Sea off the coasts of Alaska and Siberia. The four (4) clams on my plate could easily have fit inside the ravioli, but at least, the ravioli now had company in my stomach, which was getting stuffed with bread and wine while we waited and waited. I cite from the ADFG Wildbook: "Occasionally, a small pink or white leech-like animal may be found attached to the inside of the siphon (of the clam). This is a nematodean worm that lives commensurately with the razor clam.” (The worm is easily removed and does not in any way make the clam unfit to use as food. I decided not to tell Putin or Grizzly about the razor clam worms.)
The main dish consisted of five (5) succulent slices of magret de canard (duck), accompanied as it often is, by elements of fruit. I am used to having to supplement meals with bread, but I think those with big appetites and travelling Russians should have the option to order potatoes in one form or another with any meal. Russian restaurants like Troika always accommodate their Russian customers with potatoes.
With the potato famine at Toqué now obvious, I was afraid that Putin or Grizzly would call the Russian consul on his cell phone.
The selection of cheeses arrived just in time. We were shown a grand selection of Quebec-grown cheeses, but we had no luck—that was just the demo tray. The real cheese tray was a miniaturized specimen, with each of us getting about the volume of three (3) diced cubes.
At this point, to avoid an Israeli-Soviet-French diplomatic incident, my friend quickly ordered up some more wine, and I steered the conversation away from food. The dessert—actually a selection of various desserts—was not memorable, but volume-wise, it was the only "normal" part of our dinner.
So, that was it: one paté de foie + one ravioli + three cubes of cheese + four razor clams + five slices of duck. Put the numbers together, 11345, or 1 bill of $1,345. Maybe we discovered why the restaurant was half-empty. I am convinced that the Toqué dynasty is over, and I will tell the Russian consul myself. Bring on the tsar of La Chronique. — RestoSpy
|
