Power dining
French restaurant pops up at old generating station,
Top restaurateurs transform abandoned control room into pop-up French restaurant How often do I get to say that I’m knocking back oysters in the control room of an abandoned power station?
Arguably this is the place where every food-obsessed nerd wants to eat between now and June 26. Le Pavillion is the fine-dining French restaurant put on by chef Frédéric Morin of Montreal’s Joe Beef and John Bil of seafood restaurant Honest Weight in the Junction.
The restaurant is open inside the control room of the revitalized Hearn Generating Station for Luminato; tickets sold out almost immediately. That left many diners wondering if they’d even get a taste of Morin’s special menu or get to brag they ate in a control room that looks like the lair of a Bond villain.
The short answer is yes.
Each day, 16 seats along the custom-built wooden bar overlooking the makeshift kitchen are open on a first-come, first-served basis. I got there at seven the first night and sat at the bar — the best seat in the house since you get to see the cooks plate the dishes.
The à la carte menu for walk-ins includes raw platters of oysters, scallops, mussels, clams and shrimp; cured ham shaved by a 1933, Toronto-made deli slicer installed in front of the bar; terrines; chocolate mousse with pink pralines in a wine glass and plenty of mimolette and other cheeses to end the meal.
Those with reservations are seated at tables draped with white linens at the four corners of the pale-green room with wall-to-wall, floor-toceiling switches, meters and diodes, where they get a $100-per-head prix-fixe menu meant to be shared.
There are 30 bottles of wine to choose from, including a special Pavillion Blanc from Wellington’s Norman Hardie Winery.
The opening weekend menu included a large can of duck terrine opened tableside and topped with shaved black truffles and wine jelly; tender white asparagus spears from Janssen Farms tinted a pale green from being poached in green asparagus water; and a show-stopping main of poularde de Bresse en vessie — a capon cooked inside a pig’s bladder with vermouth, sherry, truffles and a bit of foie.
The bladder balloons up when submerged in boiling water (think sous vide before sous vide) and Morin simply pops it with a knife in front of guests to unveil the juicy bird inside. It’s an old French dish that Morin had at the restaurant of legendary chef Paul Bocuse. I sat there dumbfounded, not knowing what to expect until I saw the bird inside. I took out my cameraphone just as he finished plating it. “You’re too late,” Morin says with a smirk.
The chef explained there is no printed menu — rather, the offerings are expected to change as the days go on. “Maybe I’ll do beef tartare tableside or people feel like doing a beef bourguignon.”
Like any normal restaurant, the food depends on what ingredients could be procured over the next two weeks and what the kitchen staff feels like cooking.
“We’re not just warming up things made in the spare kitchen in the basement,” Morin said. “The food is made by real chefs working in restaurants.” Among the kitchen crew are a few recognizable faces such as former Black Hoof chef Jesse Grasso and Michael Olson, the culinary instructor and deli slicer collector who lent his vintage slicer to the project so ham could be shaved in front of guests.
The whole endeavour came together in a way that could be called restaurant impossible. Luminato artistic director Jorn Weisbrodt approached Morin last fall with the idea of doing a restaurant inside the Hearn after the chef successfully did a similar pop-up in a train car for Luminato two years ago. Realizing it was an undertaking too big for one person, Morin called up his longtime friend Bil, who helped Morin open Joe Beef years ago.
Bil oversaw the construction of the restaurant, while Morin worked on the food back in Montreal. The control room was covered in dust, had no water, no electricity, nor was there a way to get restaurant equipment up there as the stairs to the upper level of the Hearn were structurally unsound. A waterline had to be run from outside, raccoons had to be scared away, stairs and a service elevator were built to carry fridges and furniture, and health inspectors were kept in the loop about this unconventional restaurant.
“We couldn’t get into the building till a month ago, so we had that much time to build this restaurant,” says Bil.
Staff had just one or two days of training and the cooks had one practice run the day before the restaurant opened. In addition to Grasso and Olson, others in the food industry were eager to help, including chocolatier Brandon Olsen, supplying truffles, charcuterie mas- ter Gilles Vérot (he does the charcuterie at Café Boulud), preparing 25 pounds of pâté en croûte, and Cumbrae’s Stephen Alexander making sausages according to Morin’s recipes.
Inspired by Copain, a French restaurant featured in the ’70s crime thriller The French Connection, the two set out to create an opulent French restaurant. The menu is a throwback to Paul Bocuse and Auguste Escoffier, the chefs who popularized French cooking in the last century and cooked rich and decadent dishes a Mad Men exec would have ordered to woo a client like sabodet, a Lyonnaise sausage of rendered pig’s head, skin and beef cooked in a buttery brioche and topped with escargot.
Eating in a rusted-out control room seems odd, but the chefs have created an intimate, cosy atmosphere by bringing in greenery, vintage knick-knacks, including vases, lamps and silverware displayed on rolling carts, playing down-tempo French pop and rap, and lots of warm LED tea lights to defrost the cold, industrial setting.
“The diodes and the orange warning lights of the space look like candles and I love the French restaurant esthetic, so it made sense,” Morin said.
“The room has to be inviting and not give you a headache.”
The name Pavillion came from the French restaurant of the same name that started off as a pop-up at the 1939 World’s Fair before it was turned a permanent fixture in New York from 1941 to 1966. However, Morin and Bil have no plans to keep Le Pavillion going once Luminato ends.
“After the (festival) it’s all going to disappear. It’s bittersweet but what makes this special is that it will be trapped in this time and it adds an intensity to the whole effort and we can pull in these favours from chefs, so every night is special,” Bil said. “It’s not a festival venue, it’s a real restaurant.” Le Pavillion is open Tuesday to Friday from 5 p.m. to 11 p.m. and weekends 1 p.m. to 11 p.m. until June 26. karonliu@thestar.ca
“It’s not a festival venue, it’s a real restaurant.” JOHN BIL RESTAURATEUR