ADD SSENSE AND COLETTE CAFÉS TO YOUR SHOPPING LIST
Deluxe department store dining still has a place in Montreal, Lesley Chesterman says
From the magnificent Harrods Food Hall in London to the impossibly chic Freds at Barneys in New York, department store dining has always been a treat. Montrealers have long enjoyed such noshing. Eaton’s Ninth Floor Restaurant, that still-shuttered art deco palace, is the epitome of the genre, and the classic Woolworth’s lunch counter a distant but fun memory for those of us who watched Laverne & Shirley and bought ice cream at Perrette (ask your parents). Despite the obvious demise of department stores, the ultraposh ones that sell Prada blouses and Crème de la Mer skin care still have a place in our city, and with them come chic restaurants to feed famished fashionistas or perhaps entertain those of us who know Manolos not as our personal footwear choice, but as the stilettos Melania Trump wears to visit hurricane victims.
Here are two cafés, one new, one semi-new. Enjoy some beautiful food, people-watch, or take a break before forking over for that Judith & Charles dress you’ve been longing for.
SSENSE CAFÉ
Located in Old Montreal in the new, and impossibly branché Ssense global flagship store, this sleek café has garnered plenty of buzz since opening in early May thanks to its edgy design and talented operators. The look is all modern-art-meets-concreteand-steel, fronted by the original 1866 façade. Upon entering, you’ll be told to head upstairs. On the second floor, you encounter clothes (think $600 Comme des Garçons skirts and $1,500 Alexander McQueen hoodies). On the third and fourth floor, you’ll find changing rooms and consultants/personal shoppers. Finally, on the fifth floor, you’ll see a series of art books and the rather bunker-like Ssense Café.
Designed by London-based
David Chipperfield Architects (responsible for the entire store, actually), the dark, cementframed space is amazing. There’s seating for 34 at the bar, as well as a central communal concrete table. Visiting on a recent heatwave day, I admired the way the sun played with the lighting scheme, creating stripes through the slim windows in the ceiling. The throbbing heat was definitely battling with the air conditioning, yet I still found the effect captivating.
The menu is equally alluring, thanks to Kabir Kapoor and Jason Morris, the duo behind the deeply creative Le Fantôme restaurant as well as the recently opened ( but not yet reviewed) Pastel. I just love their style, best described as reinvented classics that push even further into the realm of deliciousness. This menu has a bit of that as well, but in a more subtle way, with eight savoury dishes and three desserts. Arriving for lunch, I found a room sparsely populated, with only one waitress on duty. She handed us the menu and let us know that because of a reception the previous evening, several of the dishes weren’t available. Bummer — but we still tasted five and began with two, cold-pressed drinks: a beet, juniper and pomegranate juice, and a carrot, orange and coconut juice. Served on ice, the juices were very good, though the carrot juice would have been less bitter had they peeled the carrots (for $8, are peeled carrots too much to ask?).
We ordered three dishes: a radicchio salad, a shrimp salad and a shakshuka, which unfortunately took about half an hour to make an appearance. Our waitress was also on juice duty, which means service lagged throughout the meal. Considering six people were in the dining room, that sort of long wait at lunch time was a downer. On a brighter note, the dishes were exquisite looking and generally appealing.
Served in a round, the shrimp salad featured sliced shrimp, peas, celery and sprouts in a sort of light mayonnaise sauce. Everything from the look and the seasoning to the technique on display in this dish was perfect. The radicchio salad was made up of full radicchio leaves mixed with pomegranate seeds and baby spinach, the whole flavoured with white balsamic vinegar and coffee grounds. I’m a fan of bitter flavours, but halfway through this salad, the bitterness of the radicchio was overwhelming.
Sadly, the shakshuka didn’t really fly. Served on a large square of soft bread, the composition included a red tomato sauce and a green tomatillo sauce along with two slow-cooked eggs. I like a little kick in shakshuka, and I also like some drippy egg yolks to meld into the sauces and enrich all those acidic flavours. This version was blah. I saw a single coriander leaf floating around in there and wondered, why not more?
Coffee and desserts — a tiny cheesecake and a rice puddingfilled choux bun — brightened my spirits as both were excellent. Made in a cannelé mould, the cheesecake was sprinkled with pulverized, freeze-dried fruit that tasted like Jell- O powder (and that’s a good thing). As for the choux bun, though obviously not made fresh that day, its dense texture was saved by its delicious coconut/cinnamon flavour.
My sense on Ssense Café is that it’s not quite there yet, because of the service issues and some unexpected blandness in the food. Hopefully, this talented team can soon make the food as swoon-worthy as the setting.
COLETTE GRAND CAFÉ (IN HOLTRENFREW)
In 2005, Holt Renfrew, the chic Montreal department store known for featuring top-notch imported fashion, added a new name to its roster of designers: Paris’s most famous bread, Poilâne. With that acquisition came a new menu at the Holt Café, featuring open-faced toasted sandwiches known as tartines. I liked this new incarnation, yet over time the tartine concept seemed to fade away as quietly as their in-store specialty food section. A shame, but then again, importing loaves of bread at $14 per quarter loaf might be de trop even for Holt’s, especially in a city filled with fabulous bakers like ours.
Post Poilâne, I had zero impression of the place other than it felt like an oasis for fashionistas on a lunch break.
But last December, I received a news release announcing Holt Renfrew was partnering with the Toronto-based Chase Hospitality Group to replace Holt Cafés across Canada with the new “Colette Grand Café.” The restaurant would be “Frenchinspired” and the photos with the release featured a sort of French country design.
Upon arrival last week, instead of French country, we got … the old Holt’s Café. When the restaurant was reopened as Colette in March, the art on the walls was the only change made to the decor. The bigger renos will come when Holt moves into the Ogilvy space sometime in 2020.
The menu is new, though, and offers a sort of greatest hits mishmash without falling into poutine and mac ‘n’ cheese territory (this is Holt’s after all). There’s steak/frites, poulet rôti, omelette and salade Niçoise, but there’s also kale salad, a burger, rigatoni, panzanella and the inevitable avocado toast. So much for the Gallic overhaul. I guess this is the definition of a French-inspired menu from — cough, cough — Toronto.
As for drinks, there’s a small, commercial selection of wines with steep prices, and six $15 cocktails, several of which were not available when we were there due to missing ingredients. This isn’t so much wine list as hospitality group beverage program. We opted for two salads, a panini and a dessert. Sipping a lovely non-alcoholic basil/ lime/cucumber cooler, I plowed my fork into my friend’s chef ’s salad with smoked bacon, apple, avocado, grapes, quinoa and walnuts. That may all sound a little too healthy, but it was laced with just enough blue cheese dressing to tie it all together. Highly recommended.
I also enjoyed my plate of roasted pears with hazelnut and arugula, flavoured with lemon vinaigrette.
A little goat’s cheese would have been welcome, but it was enjoyable just the same. Following that came a panini with chicken, fior di latte, tomato confit and a pesto aioli that hit all the right notes. Frankly, the ingredients used are aimed to please and the results, although in no way edgy or surprising, are satisfying nonetheless.
To end, we chose the rhubarb crumble topped with ice cream topped with more crumble. Very nice, but there is such a thing as too much crumble.
After settling our bill quickly, thanks to the friendly and efficient wait staff, we exited back up the stairs into the sunlight, while new shoppers descended for a snack, to organize the goods, look over some bills and decide whether to call it a day or head upstairs for more.