WHAT’S UP WITH HOTEL DINING?
Resuscitating genre sees mixed results
Montreal’s first fine-dining restaurant was located in a hotel: none other than the still swanky Ritz-Carlton. Opened in 1912 to indulge the luxurious tastes of the residents in the surrounding Golden Square Mile, the Ritz resto boasted an ornate dining room conceived by hotel impresario César Ritz, and a menu created by the father of French cuisine, Auguste Escoffier.
Other posh hotel restaurants followed at the Windsor, the Mont-Royal and the Berkeley, and later at the Château Champlain, the Sheraton, the original Four Seasons and so on.
Then, around the mid-’90s, hotel restaurants fell out of favour. Prices were high, quality was uneven and service was often lacking. Worse yet, hotel dining rooms just weren’t hip.
I recall reviewing restaurants like Le Castillon in the Bonaventure and the Beaver Club in the Queen E in the early 2000s and sitting in cavernous dining rooms where the only sound was the squeak of the dessert cart moving past the empty tables. With the generational shift, the eating action moved elsewhere, especially to the Main. Hotel restaurants were for your grandparents.
That said, there have been successful attempts to resuscitate the genre, most often with star chefs like Daniel Vézina at Laurie Raphaël in Le Germain, or Daniel Boulud at Maison Boulud in the Ritz. Le Sofitel’s Renoir is one of the better hotel restaurants, and the Queen Elizabeth’s new dining room, Rosélys, shows promise, so let’s not write the hotel restaurant obituary just yet.
And then there’s the Antonopoulos Group, the company behind several hotels and restaurants in Old Montreal. Their Hôtel Place d’Armes once featured a terrific restaurant called Aix, now a Japanese bar called Kyo. The popular upstairs bar has been transformed into a new dining space called Brasserie 701.
I was intrigued, especially as I had seen large ads for the restaurant and the group was featuring reduced-price menus in all its establishments in a highly publicized event called the Happening Gourmand. Despite having so many restaurants in such a touristy part of the city, the Antonopoulos Group’s eateries don’t get a lot of buzz. It had been years since I reviewed their pizza restaurant, Bevo, so I figured it was time to have a look at this brasserie, which is sure to pull in countless tourists in the area.
Brasserie 701’s decor is quite spectacular, with high ceilings and beautiful chandeliers, including a series shaped like birdcages above the bar.
The bar itself is a sight to behold, with a glassed-in wine cellar and oodles of backlit bottles. Upon entering, we were offered a table by the windows, but the music was so loud that I opted for one in the back of the room near the fireplace. This restaurant may be called a brasserie, but it really feels like a bar.
As for the food, the menu lists all the usual suspects, from tartares to a beet/goat cheese salad, with mains like risotto with scallops and an AAA filet mignon. We ordered away, catching the three-course, $27 Happening Gourmand menu in its last few days, as well as à la carte.
The best appetizer was a straightforward sweet potato velouté with sour cream and green onions. It was quite nice and properly seasoned, but was served warm. Hmm.
Temperature was a problem throughout the meal, and a dish of sautéed wild mushrooms on toast had me scratching my head. You’d expect something like that to be made with freshly toasted bread and still-sizzling mushrooms straight out of the frying pan. Not so. Served with dabs of truffled mayonnaise and scattered with handfuls of arugula, the toasts were overflowing with your standard supermarket mushrooms — not wild, nor hot — and topped with a Scotch egg that was also room temperature, leaving little doubt that everything was made in advance.
A salmon tartare fared better, with an appealing texture and good flavour, though nothing besides that would make me recommend it. From the menu, we opted for a chorizo and leek tartlet, which was baked in a commercial pie shell. Again, it all tasted reheated. Thank heavens for the salad underneath, which was fresh and delicious, if sweet.
For main courses, we ended up with three fish dishes and the burger. The burger was OK, though cooked well beyond the requested medium. However, the accompanying basket of fries, made up of lukewarm fry bits, should never have left the kitchen. Considering the $20 charged for that dish, those fries should have been made to order. McDonald’s does a better job for one-third of the price.
My salmon filet arrived with a twirl of fettuccine given the alfredo treatment, and three undercooked asparagus spears described on the menu as coming from Quebec. (Who the heck is growing asparagus locally in deep winter?) I sliced into the filet and watched it break into small flakes over large chunks — a telltale sign of negligent cooking. Ugh. Overcooked salmon is the definition of a missed opportunity.
A plate of pan-seared cod served with mashed potatoes, tomatoes, spinach, and basil sauce was a success because the fish wasn’t cooked beyond its ideal creamy consistency. But all the mushy accompaniments did little to zuzz up the plain cod, as was the case with our walleye. Surrounded by a squash purée and covered with salad greens, the walleye was lost in dreary flavours and textures.
There remained a small window for dessert to save the meal, but that window slammed shut at the first taste of the Gâteau Brasserie 701, two slices of cake whose flavour would best be described as “baking powder.”
Then there was the Délice du Québec, made up of a vanilla ice cream bar glazed with dulce de leche, maple doughnuts, maple fudge and sponge toffee, but unfortunately not a syringe of insulin to offset the barrage of sugar. Finally, we tackled the Gâteau Place d’Armes, a chocolate and hazelnut layered affair that was dull, dry and about as memorable as Justin Timberlake’s Super Bowl halftime performance.
Add smiley but indifferent service and a snooze-fest wine list filled with overpriced, commercial bottles, and this is a business working hard to draw in customers through advertising and promotional events but ultimately delivering the most mediocre of experiences, completely in line — alas— with the vast majority of modern hotel restaurants.