DINING OUT
The Chase serves up luxe fare to Bay St. players,
The Chase is a high-priced, high-gloss bubble of privilege that caters — reasonably well by the standards of corporate fine-dining — to Bay St. players and anyone else who cares to spend $71 on a roast chicken.
It has luxe chandeliers, hot-and-cold running waiters and $22 glasses of Santenay white Burgundy (misspelled on the wine list). The food is rich and unthreatening. But to call it “approachable,” a word management uses repeatedly in a phone interview to describe their efforts, is preposterous.
This is not a place for the average joe. It’s for the average joe’s rich cousin’s broker. Without an expense account, The Chase shimmers like a truffle-scented mirage of entitlement.
The multimillion restaurant opened Aug. 12 in the Victorian Dineen Building on Temperance St. It aims to “redefine hospitality in this city,” says owner Steven Salm, former manager of e11even.
Salm, 29, and a native New Yorker, partnered with local entrepreneur Michael Kimel to open both The Chase on the fifth floor and the more casual, seafood-focused The Chase Fish & Oysters on street level. (This review, for reasons of budget and space, excludes the downstairs restaurant.)
To get there, you walk down the stone path lit with (battery-powered) candles, turn left at the kitchen window and enter a discretely marked door. Three hostesses smile and greet you in unison, like a beauty pageant Cerberus.
They point you towards a dedicated elevator. The window-lined space at the top morphs from cramped bar to narrow lounge to proper dining room, swank with dark carpet and curving banquettes.
Informality is conveyed by placemats, not tablecloths, and the womp-womp of electronica. Yet the restaurant slides each bottle of Fiji water into a silver sleeve.
Clean-cut servers in pinstripe shirts and beige aprons bustle about. Food runners line up at the kitchen to bring out truffled focaccia. Half a dozen plain clothes staff check on tables to the point of intrusiveness. The service, while thoroughly accommodating on two separate occasions, is more earnest than polished six weeks after opening.
Executive chef Michael Steh, 35, used to cook for the same customers at Bay St. hangouts Reds and Canoe. His menu elevates old favourites (stuffed avocado, anyone?) with luxury ingredients.
Chopped salad ($14) contains little of interest save marble-sized radishes. Rib-eye is a $52 disappoint- ment, the Cumbrae Farms meat is tougher than it should be.
Steh combines tuna tartare ($18) and Caesar salad by dicing impeccable yellowfin loin into avocado, tomatoes and croutons, then topping the pulpy disk with an emulsion of anchovies and parmesan. It would work better without the overwhelming acidity of pickled shallots.
That stuffed avocado ($19) is a surprise: thin slices tiled on shrimp salad, like a dragon roll from the 1950s. It is wonderfully rich and naturally sweet from corn and B.C. humpback shrimp.
On-trend octopus ($23) competently blends the flavours of Spain and Morocco. Three grilled scallops ($29) are similarly trendy, with peas both puréed and whole (soon to be replaced with cauliflower), nutty red quinoa (half of which is fried for crunch), sunflower shoots and smoked ham hock (also fried for crunch). Softcooked egg drips through the fork tines, its purpose unclear. Steh later tells me I was supposed to mix everything together.
Desserts, as designed by pastry chef Leslie Steh, are safer. Fruit salad ($11) is a reassuring mix of ripe berries, sliced apples and tart Chinese gooseberries in camomile syrup; dollops of buffalo milk yogurt are as wild as it gets. A seemingly simple chocolate mousse cake ($12) gets some drama when the food runner pours out warm hazelnut fudge from a silver vessel; the cake caves in.
Then there’s the $71 chicken, an ordinary bird with four-and-a-half ounces of foie gras stuffed under its deeply bronzed breast. I try it, cooked to order (Steh wouldn’t say how) and presented in a chafing dish with a feather duster of green herbs poking out of the back end; it’s encircled by roast lemon halves, half a head of garlic and corn on the cob. All that disappears once the bird is carved and returned boneless to the table, a lengthy process.
The skin from the leg is stripped and fried into bacon-like strips, the meat chopped into the accompanying creamed peas and corn. But it’s all about the breast. The foie gras liquifies during cooking, decadently basting the breast and moistening the mix of brioche crumbs, diced apricots and crunchy pistachios under the skin. The meat is juicy, the flavour alluring.
The chicken is supposed to feed two people. At this price, it should be the best chicken ever. It’s not. The wings are bloody at the joint. The leg meat is lost in cream. I prefer my husband’s beer-can chicken.
Still, 20 tables order it each night, the poultry equivalent of a lap dance.
“When you take out a client who is making you millions every year, you say to them, ‘Have the chicken.’ It’s a sign of appreciation. Or, if you’re making your firm millions a year, you think, ‘I deserve a $71 chicken,” a former Bay St. hedgefund specialist explains.
Let’s cut to The Chase: For expense accounts only. apataki@thestar.ca twitter.com/amypataki