Aloette charts its own tasty course
ALOETTE
1/2 (out of 4) Address: 163 Spadina Ave. (at Queen St. W.), 416-2603444, https://aloetterestaurant.com/ Chef: Matthew Betsch Hours: Monday to Friday, 11:30 a.m. to 10:30 p.m.; Saturday, 4:30 to 10:30 p.m. Reservations: No Wheelchair access: No Price: Dinner for two with cocktails, tax and tip: $120 Where to go when you’re already at the top?
For chef Patrick Kriss, whose two-year-old finedining restaurant Alo is one of the city’s best, the only place was down.
Down, as in downstairs. Kriss opened low-key offshoot Aloette on the ground floor of the Spadina Ave. building where Alo thrives on the third floor. By thrive, I mean Alo gets 10,000 reservation requests a month for 1,200 seats.
(For those despairing of ever getting a table, Alo is switching to a new online reservation system to streamline requests. Guests will leave a $50 deposit.)
Kriss also went downscale with Aloette. Don’t expect Alo’s multiple sommeliers and $125 tasting menus. The new 38-seat room, open since Oct. 16, is built like a diner and offers an all-day menu of comfort food, such as wedge salads and milkshakes.
“It’s meant to bring you back a bit,” says Kriss, the sole owner.
So it does, while simultaneously charting its own course to contemporary tastiness.
Adding aged beef fat to the cheeseburger ($18) is a prime example of Aloette’s idiosyncrasies. It helps create a patty of epic meatiness, the grind of which is like chopped steak. Mozzarella and funky Beaufort cheese — think saganaki for texture — go on top. Add in mayonnaise laced with cheddar, and this burger goes well beyond the standard greasy spoon’s.
With it comes the option of a milkshake. It is a chocolate malted made from Death In Venice gelato and topped with crumbled Whoppers malted milk balls. The only complaint about the shake, besides its $8 price, is that it’s too thick to drink until it melts a bit. (On the other hand, the $12 Bramble milkshake, pink from raspberries and spiked with gin, is almost too easy to drink. Be warned.)
That’s not to say Aloette is otherwise faultless. The burger is cooked inconsistently. (Kriss says his team is working on this.) Lemon meringue pie ($10) should be tarter; it is the rare bit of ordinary from a crew that tests recipes even more exhaustively than Christopher Kimball of Milk Street Kitchen.
So much of Aloette’s food is also messy, such as the oversized broccoli florets ($9) deluged with fried shallots and peanuts; the inevitable spillage stains the leather-topped eating counter. Scallop tostadas ($14) shatter at first bite. Mayonnaise drips from the burger like a melting icicle, staining sleeves and hands. It’s all deliberate, I later learn in a phone interview. “I want you to lick your fingers,” Kriss says. Where he and I agree to disagree is on the salmon fillet ($23). This is a quality piece of fish, beautifully cooked and served atop buttered leeks. But it’s too rich. Kriss explains balance in the overall meal is what matters. I think lemon juice would help.
So, Aloette subverts expectations. (Spelling-wise, too. Canadians are used to alouette with a “u.”)
It cooks steak on a flat-top griddle like an old-school diner, but uses top-drawer USDA Prime rib-eye ($28). Staff wear, with their bow-tie uniforms, Nike Cortez shoes but offer polished service.
Food is served on blue plates (get it?), but diners don’t usually serve raw oysters ($11) or fried smelts ($10). They certainly don’t put out bread baskets of cheese brioche with toasted yeast brown butter.
The drip coffee ($3.50) is, in true diner style, strong enough to make you sit up straight. But the apple pie sundae ($10) is a dessert of a whole other magnitude. It layers vanilla gelato, caramel, buttery streusel and warm pie filling — pastry chef Kevin Jung was inspired by a similar dessert at Tickets in Barcelona — in a tall glass. It doesn’t matter how many elements you dredge up with your longhandled spoon, each mouthful delivers big flavours.
The sundae will be changing, perhaps to a chocolate or berry version. Changes are part of Kriss’s process and the menu evolves regularly; he at one time thought Aloette would be a pizzeria.
“Quite frankly, we have yet to figure out what Aloette is supposed to be,” Kriss says.
Until then, consider Aloette a modern diner where the emphasis is on fun and tastiness. apataki@thestar.ca, @amypataki