Dinner at Scaramouche

Site and as-ever-annoying PDF menu here.

Also apologies for the photographs, we ony had a Canon powershot SX110 with us, and it's probably the worst camera we could have brought. It has excellent zoom, but loves to throw in lots of colour noise, and need to be told to go macro-mode when trying to take a picture of some food right in front of you. At which point it's shake-sensitive like no camera you ever used. Still, much lighter than bringing a Nikon D300 with a 12mm wide angle lens, so it got the job done.

Pre-appetiser: oysters

It's very hard to go wrong with oysters. The day's special was Washington State oysters, with grated horse radish and finely chopped raw red beet. Delicious, although the radish was fairly useless (too dry, only releasing flavour through mastication. Not something traditionally associated with oysters). The beet was a nice touch, though, with plenty of texture and flavour, without being overpowering.

Appetisers

When Pomax and Arty hit up a French restaurant, there are two things that need to be evaluated. 1) Steak tartare, and 2) creme brulée. Sadly, we still only know a single restaurant that does excellent Steak Tartare, and that's Le Crocodile in Vancouver — While a decent attempt at it, the steak was minced a little too coarsely, and the traditional egg yolk was missing. Also, not enough toast-equivalent to consume all the steak with a bready crunch. It was alright, but not worth ordering again. The other appetiser was Novia Scotia lobster tails with sour cream and a citrucy, crunchy garnish. More like langoustine or crawfish, to people used to tender steamed lobster, it seemed tougher than it could have been, but generally worth ordering again.

Main courses

M'lady went for the partidge main, which came with seared foie gras and mushrooms, and an unexpectedly sweet rösti potato pancake. Not unpleasant, but knowing it was sweet going into the dish would have helped. The mushrooms were delicious (can't go wrong with wild mushrooms) and the mix in textures between the foie gras and rösti was very nice, so we'd order this again. Bonus: quick-pickled cherries. Excellent addition.

I went for the elk medallions, of which there were three. Which is quite a lot of elk, and in general the dishes are surprisingly large for a French inspired restaurant (This is, of course, not a complaint! Don't let those fancy critics convince you of their lie: being full after a good French meal is infinitely preferable to still being slightly hungry). I loved the plating —it reminded me of a forest floor, with elk. If your plating does that, you win the food-equivalent of an internet— and the mushroom flan was pretty close to perfect. The elk is also not as gamy as the more "traditional" Canadian Bison medallions, so if you don't care for very gamy meat while wanting to try something different from steak for a change, this was a great dish and worth ordering again.

Desert

Yes, that plate reads "happy anniversary". No, our anniversary is in April. Also we've not been married for nine, or eleven —we have no idea how it was supposed to be read— years. After asking, no one had ordered a special creme brulée, so there was no serving mix-up either. Very odd, but inconsequential to the actual dish: the creme was nicely bruléed, but wasn't set as firmly as I would have liked. Decent, but room for improvement.

For cheeses there were five options, of which I decided to have four, which came with spicy tomato chutney and fruits and nut crostini. As it turns out, I ended up leaving out the wrong one. Bottom to top, we have red Leicester (crude cow), Monforte Toscano (pasteurised sheep), Maytag Blue (blue cow), and a goat Picobello (crude goat). The red Leicester is as expected, the Montforte Toscano mild but not so mild you're wondering where the sheep went, the Maytag Blue is insane and I want to have more of it right now, and the disappointment of the evening was the goat Picobello, which has virtually no goat to the flavour, and had a texture akin to dried out gouda. Being Dutch, that's about as shitty a cheese texture you can provide. And it's a Dutch cheese, so I blame it twice. The missed out option was a La Sauvagine from Quebec (pasteurised cow), which I'm pretty sure would have been more enjoyable.

Drinks

I'm a G&T man, and to be honest, the gin tonic served at Scaramouche is not interesting. The amount of plain beefeater gin and royal club tonic you can get for the same price is ludicrous enough to make you wonder whether you weren't at least a little cheated. Their gin is quite nice, but you don't mix a 26yo Ben Nevis with coke, and you don't mix exquisite gin with tonic, so the gin's character is lost in the mix. They also had a ginger beer on offer which was decent, and certainly better than most ginger beers we've found in the various supermarkets in Canada, but it's not as spicy as we're used to (Grace foods' ginger beer wins, although if "Old Jamaica" is sold anywhere, that would win, hands down). Tasty, but not worth repeating given the other delicious things they have (like their virgin snapdragon cocktail - deliciously pear-laden).

Some wine was consumed, but the names elude me. I had a glass of a Côte du Rhône with the steak tartare but the vinyard and grape elude me, as it came from a bottle that someone else had ordered as half bottle, so I didn't see the label. I can describe it, but that won't do us any good since it can't be tied to a specific bottle. Similarly, I had a glass of a Zinfandel of unknown vinyard to go with the elk, so again a description would be relatively useless. Suffice to say that neither red was genuinely impressive, lacking initial impact. While both were nicely full bodied in the mouth, with complex aftertastes, the lack of an initial impact makes a wine boring. Like tuning into a song half way, and discovering that there just is no first half at all. What happened??

Conclusions

Of the list of French restaurants in Toronto we'd come back to, this makes the top so far (highest on the list of never-to-go-back-to: Loire). It's higher price than most, but weighed against the amount of food served, this is perfectly acceptable: pay more, get more food. Rather than pay more, get less food, plated in ways that don't actually improve enjoyment of the dish. Worth recommending? Certainly, although you probably want to plan ahead. Unless you live on cruise ships, Scaramouche is not a "let's go out for French" spontaneous restaurant choice.

For a surprisingly decent very affordable French, try le Saint Tropez on King and John. Their marlin was excellent, any restaurant with brie croquettes wins, and there's an open-but-not back patio. If you've walked past it on your way to Moz from a subway, we can recommend stopping by for a lunch or early dinner. voici

Now we just need to find out how much better, if at all, Auberge du Pommier is.

— Pomax