TASTING MENU HAS IT ALL
Mousso’s has set dishes, set wines
Imagine the scene. A chef tells his friends that he wants to open a restaurant. He meets with them to discuss his ideas and they wait in anticipation to hear what exactly he has in mind. The possibilities are endless: bistro, café, wine bar, brasserie, trattoria, izakaya, food truck, roadside cassecroûte and more. Then the future restaurateur says something like this: “I’m going to open a gastronomic restaurant that serves but one tasting menu. There will be 34 seats, the decor will be minimalist, the wines will be natural, and the background music will be pulsing and moody.” The friends listen and immediately begin to fret, thinking, “dude, for real?” Right now, tasting menus are scarce, portions are large, and artistic has taken a back seat to ironic. If the friends are indeed good friends, chances are they will take the chef aside and say, “Risky man, real risky.”
Well, if that scenario is even close to what happened when chef Antonin Mousseau-Rivard told his friends, fans and family what he had in mind when he opened Le Mousso some two months ago, I’ll bet he just smiled at and nodded to any doubters. And are Montrealers are ever lucky he did, because Le Mousso is one of the best new restaurants this city has seen in a long time, and Mousseau-Rivard is one heck of a talent. At a time when every new restaurant opening in this city seems to be a bar with food, or a pizza place, or a noodle bar, or a ripoff of one of the city’s signature restaurants, how great to experience something seriously new. And not just modern or innovative cooking for the sake of being progressive, but very personal cuisine prepared with a sharp technique and a wide array of cool ingredients and ideas.
Mousseau-Rivard is the son of Québécois singing legend Michel Rivard of Beau Dommage fame and now a solo artist. MousseauRivard entered the restaurant game as the former chef at the Contemporain, the restaurant at Montreal’s Musée d’art contemporain. Interestingly enough, his grandfather, Jean-Paul Mousseau, was an artist, and two of his sketches are displayed on the back wall of the restaurant. Otherwise the room is devoid of much in the way of adornment.
Located in a space that originally housed a printing shop in 1867, Le Mousso is situated over three levels: a street-level room that holds mostly communal tables, a mezzanine with a bar and tables, and the large, open kitchen down a few stairs. The tables are bare and each place is set with a beige linen napkin and a menu. And don’t look for any white square plates here. Every dish is assembled in a beautiful handmade plate or bowl. Also, don’t bother asking for a wine list. Besides a few cocktails (I especially recommend the one with vodka and yellow pepper), all wines served are by the glass and chosen specifically to pair with each dish on the menu, so no bottles, and no other by the glass options.
Right about now, the experienced chefs who may be reading this will be thinking: “Set menu plus set wines equals no flurry of dishes or wine list/inventory to manage. Not impressed.” True, serving everyone the same thing and not mixing the menu up that often is playing things pretty safe (I have seen the plates I tasted on Mousseau-Rivard’s Instagram feed and on a ton of blogger posts on social media for weeks now). And yet the experience itself is great because Mousseau-Rivard’s food is just so beautiful and delicious. That said, I see no reason to return until he changes the menu. So in a way, I’d consider dinner at Le Mousso less about an eating experience and more about an artistic experience. And why not?
To begin, we were served an amuse-bouche consisting of a financier cake topped with horseradish cream and New Brunswick caviar. Just three elements in one bite, but the contrast of textures (spongy, creamy and pearly) and flavours (sweet, hot and pleasantly fishy) was just dreamy. Talk about your palate warmeruppers. And the seven dishes that followed played the same diverse-texture-meets-funkyflavour game.
A pouf of celery root mousse arrived in a dark bowl atop shreds of smoked trout and trout roe, the whole sprinkled with cinder dust. Adding crackle to the pop of the eggs, the velveteen of the fish flesh and the foaminess of the mousse were little bits of crisped trout skin. I lapped it up in four bites, enjoying that final hit of bitterness provided by the cinder dust. What a fun dish, and the Petit Chablis it was paired with was bang on.
When the next plate hit the table, it occurred to me how much we were all concentrating on every flavour and every mouth feel while discussing every detail as we munched away. And this dish was my favourite. Starring carrots, cooked confit-style and pickled, the assembly included a savoury sponge cake flavoured with ginger and garam masala, a cloud of goat’s cheese cream and apple molasses beneath it all. How great, also, that this very orange mix was served with an orange wine — and a good one, too, from the house of Denavolo. What I like here was the sweetness and chewy texture of the carrots, the tang of the cream, the fruit in the molasses, the gentle hit of spice. And the plate presentation? As beautiful as the tastes.
The next two plates were a notch less fabulous, proving, perhaps, that Mousseau-Rivard is human after all. The first featured caramelized leeks and mussels with a mussel foam, a brown butter crumble and a scattering of edible flower petals. I loved the leeks, and the crumble was interesting, if a bit sweet. But the mussels didn’t taste of much, so the dish never took off. And then came a promising dish that included a cod filet with matsutake mushrooms and guinea hen jus-soaked braised grains (barley, wheat and rye). Topped with yellow shavings that looked like Parmesan but turned out to be dried, hard-boiled guinea hen egg, the dish counted one great idea after another yet, was sadly over-salted and overwhelmingly rich. Quel drag.
Happily, the next dishes bounced right back into greatness, starting with a pairing of lamb tartare showered with green peas (some of them dried most of them fresh) and grated goat cheddar. Sticklers would argue that it’s not pea season, yet the window for pea season is so short that I’ll cut them some slack for using frozen, because the sweet green flavour of the peas alongside the potent flavour of the lamb was just swell.
As for the final savoury dish? A showstopper — as was the Côtes-du-Rhône Domaine Viret Renaissance served with it. Here Mousseau-Rivard takes beef, slow-cooks it for 72 hours, tops it with peppery nasturtium leaves and flowers as well as slightly charred onions filled with runny sour cream. I think there’s one element missing here to really make this dish earth-shattering (maybe more sauce?), yet I admire this chef ’s less-is-more approach.
After all those highs, I figured dessert would be a letdown. Not so; it might even have been my favourite dish. Served in a rough, black bowl, the dessert included a mix of buttermilk ice cream, Oxalis leaves, thin pear slices and peppered meringue shards. And what a perfect end to this meal, providing — again — such a stimulating mix of flavours, temperatures, textures and techniques. And that ice cream was so mind-boggling that I licked the bowl clean.
Service was well-paced and friendly without being in any way palsy-walsy. The wine choices were beyond reproach and kudos to them for finding excellent natural wines that played nicely with Mousseau-Rivard’s eclectic flavour combinations.
I exited Le Mousso elated, not only because my dinner was s-o stimulating but because I was just so thrilled to be eating seriously sophisticated food in Montreal again. At a time when even our most talented chefs tend to play it casual, how great to see others like MousseauRivard taking the riskier artistic route. The chef told me that when he was at Le Contemporain, people used to run out at the end of dinner to catch the show. Now, he says, they linger. Because at Le Mousso, dinner is the show.