Restaurant Les 400 Coups makes creative use of local ingredients
Les 400 Coups’ chef finds innovative ways to exploit local ingredients in kitchen
Montreal restaurants open and close, but what’s more interesting is when a new chef takes over the kitchen of an already successful restaurant. This happens often, and the results are understandably hit and miss.
Imagine having to take over a part in a play written for another actor. How does a dancer feel slipping on the tutu of the ballerina who made the role famous?
I thought about this when dining at Les 400 Coups in Old Montreal last week. This gem of a restaurant was an immediate hit when it opened in 2011 with chef MarcAndré Jetté behind the stoves, chef Patrice Demers at the pastry station and sommelier Marie-Josée Beaudoin on wine and dining room duty. The food was fresh and edgy, and the wine list was superb.
Then, in 2014, news came that Jetté was leaving (to later open Hoogan and Beaufort), along with Demers and Beaudoin (who married and opened Patrice Pâtissier).
The departures were disappointing, yet the duo who took their place — chef Guillaume Cantin and pastry chef Brian Verstraten — did a bang up job of keeping the excellent reviews coming. And these boys didn’t succeed by playing it safe. Cantin made big efforts to feature authentic Québécois cuisine made with often obscure ingredients from around the province. I loved it.
Last spring, news arrived that Cantin and Verstraten were leaving, and the new chef would be Jonathan Rassi — a veteran of Montreal restaurants Kitchen Galerie, Garde Manger, Park and Quartier Général. He also staged at top Napa Valley restaurant Meadowood, and participated in Seasons 3 and 5 of Radio-Canada’s culinary competition Les Chefs.
It’s clear Rassi knows a thing or two about not only haute cuisine, but exploiting the best local products. At Les 400 Coups, that’s his agenda.
I arrived at the restaurant to a half-full dining room on a cold Tuesday, slipped into one of the cushy window-side banquettes and re-admired this room with its high ceilings, handsome bar and huge pictures of Blvd. St- Germain in Paris.
Coats were taken, menus were offered, cocktails were chosen. There was a bit of a lull before orders were taken, but menu descriptions were knowledgeable and our waiter and the sommelier, though not the most confident of servers, were doing their best.
I cannot deny that though I find the devotion to producing a strictly local cuisine commendable, there’s an element of Babette’s Feast before the feast that makes me question whether this is the best approach this time of year. Fresh local produce isn’t coming anytime before the end of May. I love a good root, but by late March, I’m all rooted out.
I’ll give it to Rassi, though: He really works hard at making carrots, parsnips and turnips sing — with varying success, mind you, but he still gets an A for effort.
As the dishes arrived we all oohed and aahed, even more so when we learned many of the ceramic plates and bowls on which the food is served were made by Rassi himself (he later told us he fires all his pots in a kiln in his apartment).
It was immediately apparent that this chef has a rare talent for artistic plate presentations. His imagination runs deep. Not all the food won me over, but what did really did. As for the plates that didn’t, heck — they still looked terrific.
There’s a lot going on here — a big mix of flavours and textures — with extremes on either end. A good example was the parsnip plate, or make that a parsnip shell, hollowed out and filled with a micro salad made with 14 Arpents cheese, apple, celery and kohlrabi. Rassi served this plate in person, instructing us to mash it all together. I liked the flavours and the ideas, but the stem part of the parsnip was thick and hard to eat without fear of splitting a molar.
Another dish featuring endive with a sort of hummus made with sunflower seeds, honey and savoury was equally gorgeous, with two-toned endive fanned out in a small bowl. I was kind of expecting a salad, but I enjoyed this creation with my delectable bourbon and apple cocktail.
Across the table came two more plates: sashimi of sea bream with plums, labneh, cucumber and juniper, as well as a turnip dish with king mushrooms, mactre de Stimpson clams and beurre blanc. The sashimi was rolled up alongside the other ingredients and assembled on buckwheat crackers, which we munched through with pleasure.
The turnip dish was less successful. Everything was cut into shreds like pasta, with no strong flavours coming to the fore. All four of us at the table gave it a taste, but even after going around the table a few times the dish wasn’t finished.
I far preferred the smoked venison, pickles, dahlia root and horseradish, which Rassi divided into four portions, giving us each a little deer dumpling served in a potent sauce which we lapped up with the Hof Kelsten rye bread. Nice.
As for the larger plates, the veal gravlax — mixed with Bleu d’Elizabeth cheese, meringue shards, walnuts, shallots, and mustard greens — was not only the dish of the night, but one of the best I’ve tasted this year. It was visually stunning, but what impressed me most was the layers of flavour, with slices of veal beautifully enhanced with the blue cheese and bitter greens, and the bits of meringue adding crunch. Fantastic.
I also enjoyed a main course featuring beef loin with marinated carrot, and a quenelle of black apple and garlic purée. The only problem with this plate is that the vinegary carrots annihilated
our wine — a lovely, bio-dynamic Marcel Richaud Côtes-du-Rhône.
Alas, the next two dishes — one with cod, the other with sweetbreads — fell flat. The cod dish suffered from too many mushy textures and an overwhelming miso foam. The sweetbread plate, too, had mushy textures and mismatched flavours.
Dare I say it, after that veal masterpiece, the rest of our dinner seemed pretty dull.
Of the three desserts on offer, my favourite was the most traditional — chocolate cake with concord grape sorbet, white chocolate cream and chocolate tuiles sprinkled with caraway.
The squash with goat’s cheese dish and Rassi’s take on key lime pie, made with apples and verjus, were pretty and interesting, but nothing I yearn to eat again.
As much as I admire Rassi’s obvious talent for innovation, I felt he went that much too far, favouring experimental flavours over satisfying ones. I’m all for a little fun with my food, but chefs should incorporate more familiar flavours to avoid alienating paying customers who in the end are in a restaurant to eat, not to feel like participants in an experiment.
As I departed mumbling about whether or not I enjoyed my dinner, two people at my table spoke up in the chef’s defence: my parents, ages 82 and 79. They loved it. Their only caveat was that perhaps the setting and the style of food were not in sync, and I agree.
It goes to show open-mindedness has no age.
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.