A SWEET SPOT FOR MORE THAN DESSERTS
Bertrand Bazin’s pastry skills are apparent throughout the menu at his namesake café
Being in Westmount, Café Bazin seems well placed for ladies who lunch. Since I am occasionally a lady, and I often have lunch, off I went with another occasional lady who is always a comrade.
The place is named for owner Bertrand Bazin, the renowned pastry chef formerly of Club 357c, who teamed up with coowner Antonio Park to create this sorely needed bistro for the ’hood last summer. Park had already proved able with his eponymous Japanese-based Park restaurant next door, and the Argentine establishment Lavanderia just beyond that. They line up in a row, like delectable ducks.
Café Bazin is a pleasing, mostly white space that gives a lot despite being little. Decorative brass struts rib across the high ceiling like an upside-down hull in a shipyard. Glossy white tiles go up the walls. Along one side, tables are of a richly coloured wood on fancy black pedestals in the style of a Parisian bistro, and the banquette is of honey blond leather. On the other side, counter seating looks upon a workspace, and the black faux-hide stools are studded with brass. Plant arrangements, including stalks of wheat, are tucked up on high cupboards.
To sit facing the wall is usually a boring affair, unless you’re madly in love with your companion. But here, angled mirrors are mounted on the wall at just the right height to give a view of the room behind you.
We perused the tight French menu, with salads, coquilles St-Jacques and Niçoise tartine. A nice selection of wines is available for the more liquid of lunches. Croissants and the like, smoothies and yogurt with granola can be had for breakfast.
We first shared a celery root salad, with slices of gherkin and a touch of lemon — tasty, but a touch more mayonnaisey than necessary. It came with a slice of wonderfully springy country bread. A little sweet, it’s the same bread used in the Niçoise tartine, a beautiful open-faced sandwich of salad, tuna and soft-boiled egg halves that I saw being delivered to a youngish woman nearby. She devoured it before I could get a proper second look. I would eat that bread all day if I could.
We split a satisfying dish of pancakes (half buckwheat flour, half wheat) with smoked salmon and tenderly scrambled eggs, topped with a spoonful of Spanish caviar. The pancakes were
about the size of a man’s palm, fluffy yet sturdy; the salmon was smoked in house, cut appealingly thick.
My friend’s Parisian gnocchi was a revelation. Like their bread that needs no butter, this gnocchi needs no sauce, and is mixed with bacon, onions, zucchini, pine nuts and mushrooms. “Like biting into a cloud,” my friend said, “or a marshmallow.” Reaching for similes aside, they were irrefutably light and soft.
Instead of potato, Parisian gnocchi is made with pastry dough, and our waiter explained the technique. The dough is piped over boiling water in a pot that has a string stretched over it. As the dough is extruded, Bazin nicks off a length of it across the string so it falls right into the pot, and is boiled for half the time needed. Later, the nubbins are finished by frying in butter with the other ingredients.
Our waiter had recommended the quiche as one of his favourites at Bazin, and claimed to not usually like quiche. I received a long, tall rectangle of it with a pile of bitter greens with garlicky dressing, the radicchio and arugula shining strong.
The kitchen’s deft touch with eggs shone in the quiche. The filling was almost pudding-like, the crust a pleasure. We’ve all endured rubbery eggs at subpar diners, but here we were reminded how eggs are the beginning of great things. As British satirist Samuel Butler once said, chickens are just an egg ’s way of making more eggs.
We finished with coffee, and of course had to at least share a dessert, though we were full. My cortado (sort of a truncated latte) was generically old-school French, too darkly roasted and bitter for my taste. Since Montreal has stepped up its game with coffee, particularly over the past five years — and since Bazin is such a sweet spot for some alone time with a pastry or croissant, coffee’s perfect partners — I’ll admit to having wished for better.
Yet our chocolate-coffee tartelette was beautiful, with thick Chantilly cream spiralled tightly on top. Bazin pipes the cream on while the tart spins on a turntable. It was rich and delicately flavoured — very correct.
I brought home some goodies for the kids, who deemed the chocolatine to have a perfect level of flakiness. An almond financier with raspberry gel in the middle was smooth and buttery; a maroni was like a spongy macaroon and satisfyingly chocolatey. My fave was the subtil, an almond chocolate financier with a dark and roasty dab of salted caramel on top. All were fine, rather than rustic.
Though Takeshi Horinoue, the executive chef for all three of Park’s restaurants, gives the final nod, Bazin creates all the dishes, with Charlotte Rambaud in the kitchen, too. I like how Bazin’s pastry-trained heart beats warmly throughout all the recipes, which gives the bistro an extra soufflé-like lift.