Chef wheels out one-time drive-thru tasting dinners
Ottawa star chef Marc Lepine will be serving exclusive tasting-menu dinners next Saturday, May 16, from his acclaimed restaurant Atelier as if it were a drive-thru eatery.
In response to the COVID-19 pandemic and like every restaurant in the city, Lepine’s fine-dining destination on Rochester Street shuttered its dining room in mid-March. But while other upscale restaurants have pivoted to offer takeout and delivery orders, the reopened Atelier will serve a five-course menu to cars that drive up to Atelier as if it were a McDonald’s or Starbucks.
“Simply pull up in front of the restaurant for your first course, go for a drive around the block while you eat it, then drive by for your next course,” Lepine, a two-time winner of the Canadian Culinary Championships, wrote when he announced his project on Instagram this week.
Lepine’s dinner, which includes non-alcoholic drink pairings with each course, costs $100 a person. It was capped at 10 cars and sold out within hours.
Atelier, which opened in 2009 and lands on various lists of the best restaurants in Canada and North America, is famed for serving cutting-edge, 12-course tasting menus each night.
Inside the restaurant is a dining room of six seats that Lepine’s calls Thru. Lepine considers Thru to be a separate restaurant that serves a cutting-menu of 50 or so items. Accordingly, Lepine is calling next Saturday’s project his “Drive-Thru” tasting menu.
In an interview, Lepine said the idea for his project wasn’t his own, but rather was suggested to him. “I’m still not clear whether it was meant as a joke or not, but that’s how these things sometimes come to be.”
He added he wasn’t aware of any other fine-dining restaurant attempting something similar. “I very much like the creative challenge,” said Lepine, who in 2018 was named Canada’s most innovative chef by Canada’s 100 Best Restaurants magazine.
Lepine said he has no plans to stage more drive-thru dinners after Saturday, but he is not ruling them out.
For a huge number of restaurants across Canada, the pandemic and its mandatory shutdown are life-threatening. Last month, a survey by the non-profit organization Restaurants Canada suggested that roughly half of Ontario’s independent restaurants don’t expect to survive if the current situation persists into the summer, and if there are no further government measures to prop up the industry.
Asked how well Atelier and Thru were placed to weather the pandemic, Lepine replied: “I imagine we’re in the same position as everyone else — treading water and unsure what the future holds.”