Whistler’s Il Caminetto sizzles
It means fireplace, and at Il Caminetto, the legendary Whistler Italian restaurant, it was missing. Now it isn’t. Toptable Group bought the restaurant last year, installed one and there is logic.
Toptable also gave the restaurant a reboot, upgrading the kitchen and moving from classic Tuscan interior to lighter, brighter and modern. Previous owner Umberto Menghi had swatted away other offers bent on redevelopment but happily sold when Toptable, owned by the Aquilini Group (note: an Italian family) wanted in. (Toptable also runs Blue Water Cafe, Araxi, West, Bar Oso and a Yaletown steak house soon to open.) Menghi still operates Trattoria di Umberto in Whistler, and Giardino in Vancouver.
Il Caminetto reopened on Dec. 29 with name intact.
“It’s a good name,” says food whisperer chef James Walt. “We felt confident we could separate ourselves. It was a good move. We’ve been crazy busy since the opening. We were out of the gate like a greyhound.”
The last time I encountered his food was at a memorable annual Longtable al fresco dinner in Pemberton. That he and staff can serve such gorgeous food for hundreds from a portable kitchen just slays me. Walt hasn’t completely left former responsibilities at Araxi or Bar Oso and still works in one or other kitchen at least once a week.
I was eager to inhale his Italian food, a pivot from his 20 years of haute farm-to-table Araxi cuisine. Il Caminetto, too, buys from local farms and producers and turns to Italy for the irreplaceables like olive oils, salumi, wheels of Parmigiano Reggiano or San Marzano tomatoes.
“I can’t get enough of Taleggio cheese. It’s so damn good,” Walt swoons. He isn’t a total newbie to Italian food, having once worked as executive chef for the Canadian embassy in Rome, in the Italian groove of simple cooking with seasonal ingredients doing the strutting.
There was but one menu request from the Aquilini family and that was for lasagna.
“I’m not a big lasagna guy, maybe it’s the humbleness of it, but we did tastings and everyone was on board. It’s off the charts (in sales),” says Walt. Small wonder, given the number of families I saw at the restaurant.
The biggest change in the food is the DIY approach. All pastas are made in-house — the stuffed, the noodles, the sheets — thanks to an Italian pasta extruding machine. The breads, too, are made in-house.
Although not mentioned on the menu, you can order pasta half portions. A butternut squash tortelloni with toasted hazelnuts and browned butter and crispy sage ($18.53 for half portion; $28.50 for full) was tenderly constructed, with pasta rolled thin enough to see through.
Casarecce with pesto, rapino, confit garlic and pecorino Romano ($17.88 for half portion; $27.50 for full) was more rustic; casarecce, like a loosely constructed gemelli, is a clingy noodle and a magnet for the sauce and melted cheese. The rigatoni with wagyu beef bolognese is selling like crazy, Walt says.
Under mains, a grilled lamb sirloin ($32.50) was served with fregola risotto, rapini and almond pesto. (Fregola is a Sardinian pasta, somewhat like Israeli couscous.) The lamb was beautifully cooked.
Arctic char ($38.50) with orange, fennel and arancini featured lovely char, cooked on point, but I can’t say it was outof-the-ballpark-great as the flavours all murmured. The orange segments weren’t enough to give it liftoff. The mains are a little more rustic than at Araxi.
Desserts are simple, not the painterly works of Araxi pastry chef Aaron Heat, but that sits fine with me. I find desserts often lose their way in twee presentations.
“I’m making things I’d made in Italy — simple but focused,” says Walt.
Torta caprese, a flourless
chocolate cake with Amarena cherries ($12.50) was indeed simple but elegantly flavoured; a latticed apricot tart with B.C. stone fruits and vanilla glaze ($12.50) was intense with apricot (dried apricots, perhaps?); the crust was flaky, and the side of gelato, delicious.
Walt says top-sellers are a burrata, beet and pistachio salad; porcini chestnut soup (“people keep coming back for it”); the pastas, grilled lamb, and polo saltimbocca with local organic chicken.
“I’ve never sold so much chicken,” he says.
The wine list trumpets a deep, deep cellar with a standout selection of Italian wines listed by region, some of them quite obscure.
“It was a complete build,” says Walt. With this acquisition, Toptable’s grip on Whistler’s top restaurants tightens.