TV judge’s restaurant is hard to swallow
Copetin
1/2 (out of 4)
Address: 107 King St. E. (at Church St.), 416-603-8009, copetin.ca
Chef: Claudio Aprile
Hours: Lunch, Monday to Friday, noon to 2 p.m. Dinner, Tuesday to Saturday, 6 to 10 p.m.
Reservations: Yes
Wheelchair access: Yes
Price: Dinner for two with wine, tax and tip: $300
We expect a lot from Claudio Aprile.
Aprile, 48, is the creative chef and seasoned restaurateur behind Colborne Lane and the Origin minichain, all now closed.
He’s also a judge on MasterChef Canada, a nationally televised contest for home cooks now entering its fifth season on CTV.
This fact alone, apart from his 20plus years dazzling Toronto diners with modernist cuisine, implies the highest kitchen standards.
So, how come Copetin, Aprile’s latest restaurant, is such a hot mess? It toggles between brilliant invention and technical mistakes, often on the same plate. Aprile opened Copetin (pronounced co-peh-TEEN, it’s Spanish for aperitif ) on July 13 with Henry Wu, the hotelier who showcased Aprile at Senses restaurant 15 years ago.
The duo tweaked the Origin space on King St. E. The decor now includes a Stikki Peaches portrait of jazz icon Miles Davis dolled up like a walk-on from The Rocky Horror Picture Show. It’s Aprile’s only restaurant.
Consistency is a problem in the laid-back main dining room, where $300 buys two people an uneven meal of complicated fusion food.
The genius is there in the beef tartare ($17) with its rich yet balanced vinaigrette and smoked egg yolk garnish. Ditto the harmonious beet salad ($15) pierced by shards of dried beet juice that typify Aprile’s multilayered approach to ingredients.
Tomato soup ($12) is elaborately garnished with powdered tomato skins, homemade kefir, sprouted black quinoa and peeled cherry tomatoes, the spheres vacuum-cooked in olive oil to intensify their flavour. Warm Parker House rolls made a nice breadbasket upgrade.
But Aprile’s trademark tea-smoked squab ($39) — a tour de force of farmed baby pigeon given a Chinese cast of plum juice, baby bok choy and meaty shiitakes — is dry and chewy one night.
I look for Aprile in the open kitchen but don’t see him.
The same dish, ordered another night, is far better. The juicy bird now merits its iconic status. The curled claw attached to the squab leg remains a shock — but not as much as the kitchen’s inconsistency.
“Cooking isn’t robotic. It’s not the same every time. I stand by my staff,” Aprile says in a phone interview.
“We’re a new restaurant, a work in progress.”
Copetin produces a frustrating mixture of good and bad on two visits. (A third research meal, taken on the now-closed seasonal patio, involved a different menu. It, too, failed to impress.)
For every zippy lobster ceviche ($27) the kitchen gooses with jalapeños comes a bland lamb loin ($45) dependent on the supplied harissa for liveliness.
Properly cooked scallops ($39) are overwhelmed by a fried taro garnish that resembles a crown of thorns; it doesn’t help that the green curry sauce on the plate stopped being exciting 20 years ago. And there’s nothing good about a tres leches cake ($13) that looks and tastes like burnt toast.
This from a man who dishes out cooking criticism on MasterChef Canada, rebuking contestants for dry beef and lumpy purées.
Aprile says his judging gig (mentioned on the restaurant’s home page) is “not relevant” and makes him “a soft target.”
“Claudio tries to keep the two worlds separate — the food, cooking and service at Copetin have little to do with the show,” publicist Cassie Proper later elaborates in an email to the Star.
It wouldn’t be an Aprile restaurant without liquid nitrogen. He used it to make tableside ice cream at Origin North, for one.
Copetin uses the freezing material in a $21 dessert called Citrus Moon. Wisps of smoke drift up from a quick-frozen white chocolate dome that, when cracked, reveals a disc of Egyptian orange cake that one night has the mouth feel of cardboard. The thrill is entirely visual.
Servers stumble their way through menu descriptions and wine service. They deliver the Citrus Moon another night while one of us is in the washroom. By the time the dome is shattered, the vapour has dissipated. At least this time the cake is moist.
The dessert makes an apt metaphor for the restaurant: Solid cooking matters, not bells and whistles.
As it is, Copetin is hard to swallow. apataki@thestar.ca, @amypataki