LOOKING TO SPRUCE UP THE SUBURBS
Dur à Cuire, with an open kitchen behind the bar, looks promising, writes Lesley Chesterman.
The local restaurant scene is so squarely centred on Montreal that few establishments outside of the city receive much critical attention. In summer, with its longer and warmer days, reviewers head out to enjoy restaurants in boskier regions like the Laurentians, the Townships, Gatineau and Outaouais. The restaurants that really get short shrift are the ones in the suburbs. Call it the 450 neglect syndrome.
To be brutally honest, suburban restaurants can be disappointing for the most part. But that’s changing as areas like Laval, Boucherville and StLambert are expanding their restaurant offerings to cater to locals who are tired of the traffic, the bridges, the detours and the downtown parking rates. A stripmall restaurant may not be the sexiest, but there’s no denying the appeal of an on-site parking lot.
On the lookout for restaurants in the burbs, I heard the name Dur à Cuire come up every so often. “They serve the best paella!” my friend Jacques said to me again and again, adding: “And it’s bring-your-own wine!”
Opened in 2013, Dur à Cuire is owned by chef Jérémie Marcille, whose experience includes time spent cooking at Laurent Godbout’s Chez L’Épicier and La Fabrique, as well as the excellent bring-your-own-wine restaurant Les Héritiers. Promising, I thought, before heading to Vieux-Longueuil to give his food atry.
Dur à Cuire is located in a large space, a quarter of which is taken up by an open kitchen behind the bar. When I say “open,” that includes the dish pit, as was made obvious upon arrival by the sound of a few plates crashing to the floor. With such kitchen calamity, as well as high ceilings and plenty of hard surfaces, this restaurant is noisy, yet still appealing. There’s a small terrasse in summer, and solo diners can eat at the bar while watching the kitchen crew in action.
Once seated, our Energizer Bunny of a waitress, Marie, took over, opening wine bottles, filling us in on menu descriptions and generally showing us who’s the boss in the best way. And this sharp lady didn’t let up all night. Impressive.
As for the food, Marcille’s menu features predictable dishes like a charcuterie platter, salmon tartare, oysters galore and mostly meat mains. But look a little closer and you’ll spot all sorts of unusual flavour enhancers. For instance, the glazed short rib is served with perogies made with smoked Gouda enhanced with jalapenos and chimichurri.
My first starter was a beet salad served with snow peas, fried peanuts, dried banana and labneh. I can’t deny cringing when I read the menu description, but the dish was a success. The beets were delicious and perfectly cooked, and the peanut accompaniment was inspired. I never found the banana (probably a good thing), but there were radishes, and we mopped up the last bits of labneh with the excellent homemade bread. Nice.
Other appetizers included blood pudding and seared foie gras. When the boudin arrived, our waitress warned us not to touch the hot handle of the small pan in which it was served. Two bites in, though, and I set my hand on the handle, which wasn’t hot at all. Neither was the boudin, nor the accompanying potato purée — a shame, as the blood pudding had the requisite devil’s-food-cake texture and rich flavour, and the purée was light and silky. The dish was topped with green apple bâtonnets, whose vinegar-spiked dressing gave everything added oomph. Just heat the whole thing up and they’d have a winner.
As for the foie gras, not only was the $19 portion generous, the three thick slices were expertly seared, resulting in the ideal slightly bitter caramelized crust and pudding-like interior. Yum! It’s a dish that could have cost $10 more downtown.
For the main courses, I ordered the recommended paella for two as well as a contrefilet steak. The steak was marked AAA Angus, and indeed had the fine flavour one expects with that grade. But for $39 I would have liked a more tender cut of meat with perhaps a bit of age on it, which would have certainly helped with the chewiness factor. I was also surprised to see a thick orange sauce on the plate instead of the listed Béarnaise. What the heck was that? As for the bits of crisp chicken skin, carrots and deepfried Brussels sprouts, all good, if a bit odd. Chicken skin-meets-steak was definitely a first for me.
And what about the famous paella? Alas, it was a disaster. Paella is usually served in a flat pan, with the rice on the bottom and seafood, as well as chorizo sausage and even pieces of rabbit or chicken meat, snuggled among the grains. This version was served on a long platter and was dominated by large mussels whose shells were filled with rice. As for the rice, that was undercooked, and as for the pieces of fried squid, the rings were fine but the star-like spiders were oily and awful. Add the clams, a few shrimp and some nice spicy chorizo, and you have a dish that reminded me more of a large bowl of mussels in which extra ingredients and rice were added before the whole thing was tossed together like a salad. Frankly, if that’s a paella, I’m Angelina Jolie.
After such a disappointment, I was thrilled to shift my focus to dessert. My favourite was a straight-up chocolate and caramel ice cream sundae with roasted peanuts. No complaints. The second was a take on s’mores, with a homemade marshmallow topped with homemade graham cracker, garnished with chocolate cream and chocolate sauce. Though I’m sure it’s popular, I can’t understand how anyone above the age of 12 can handle so much sugar at the end of a meal. As for the beignets, served with chocolate and caramel dipping sauce, the dish was again super sweet and, in the case of the mini doughnuts, heavy. Like churros, beignets have become a popular dessert item. Surprisingly few impress, and yet there they are, over and over again.
There’s a lot to like about Dur à Cuire, but not enough to recommend driving across town for a meal there, and that’s a shame. I’m all for creativity, but too many twists on this menu aren’t merited. Keep the food focused, delicious and relatively simple, and in a part of town like this where you have customers eager to eat locally, you’ll have a winner. The restaurant may be called Dur à Cuire — an expression that means hard-boiled, tough or badass — but I think they’d do well by taking things a little less “dur” and a little bit easier. You can hear Lesley Chesterman on ICI Radio-Canada Première’s Médium Large (95.1 FM) Tuesdays at 10 a.m., and on CHOM (97.7 FM) Wednesdays at 7:10 a.m.