Coca
783 Queen St. W., Toronto. 416-703-0783. Dinner for two with wine, tax and tip, $120.
It's easy to understand why Coca is the flavour du jour downtown. Scion of Czehoski, the darling of Queen Street West, Coca has the same clever combo of informal retro decor and up-to-the minute food. Which in the case of Coca, of course, means tapas.
At Czehoski, they respectfully restored an abandoned Czech butcher shop from the 1940s and kept the original weathered wooden sign out front. Coca is a similarly respectful restoration; the ground floor is a cozy bar 'n' tapas hangout cramped with babes 'n' boys. Upstairs on the second floor, they've made an attractive dining room topped with snaking heating ducts supported by slender beams.
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About Czehoski's insta-popularity, I said, "Go figure." Maybe the cool vibe went over my head, but the taste of things there was deeply mediocre. Thus goeth Coca -- already popular, but surely not for the food. There's many a slip 'twixt the cup and the lip.
The menu is composed of clever tapas, cocas (Catalan flatbreads baked at high temperature with various fun garnishes) and small meal plates called raciones. We love the sound of organic chicken wings with cabrales dipping sauce, but the wings are clad in greasy batter. Olive-oil-packed grilled eggplant reads piquant but schmecks bland, underpowered in the seasoning department. White bean and Serrano ham soup is a weird combo of too-salty Serrano ham atop soup with all the snap, crackle and pop of unseasoned puréed white beans.
But the lowest low is almond oil confit salt cod with spinach and olive oil velouté and bric nests. I like salt cod a lot, but salt cod must be soaked overnight in cold water to pull out the salt with which it's preserved. Otherwise, it tastes like the salt cod at Coca: so salty as to be inedible. Under and around the inedible cod, they've pooled spinach emulsified with olive oil, another bad call because when you intensify the flavour of spinach (which this technique has done), it's too strong. On the side are bric nests. Bric is a phyllo-like dough. In this instance, the nest of naked bric has the approximate texture and flavour of uncooked rice noodles. Not exactly a culinary hit.
Some of Coca's opus is pleasantly mediocre: Quail is nicely cooked, filled with figgy bread stuffing and served atop tiny pieces of cauliflower in lemony broth, to moderately good effect. Rice inflected with mushrooms (which they call mushroom paella) has a pleasant goat cheese cream on top. Wild prawns in garlic, Espelette pepper and olive oil are nicely cooked but a tad oversalty.
Coca's kitchen hits the high notes with those crisp, thin Catalan cocas. For $10, add a salad and there's a grand Spanish bar meal. They make the dough, roll it out very thin, add Mahon cheese, which has a good strong bite (Spain's answer to Asiago?), and your chosen garnish, and bake it hot. Onions, Moroccan olives and preserved tomatoes bring the coca closest to pizza. White anchovy and eggplant is most interesting, thanks to the delicate citric savour of white anchovies. But grilled sardines are the best thing this kitchen does: Perfectly fresh, they're sensitively grilled and sweetly meaty. I am also happy with pequillo peppers with sherry glazed baby onions and capravina cheese, the small bite of the peppers providing fine counterpoint for sweet onions and goaty cheese. Devilled quail's eggs and crispy pork belly are a hit of fun.
The menu invites diners to "overcome your fear of horse with a small taste of horse sirloin," but no can do. As the mother of a daughter with a passion for horseback riding, I am incapable of eating the critters.
At dessert time, the kitchen once again disappoints. Rice pudding is bland and not creamy. Chocolate bread pudding is dry, a heinous thing for bread pudding. Fried milk custard (another of my favourite things) is greasy. Crème Catalan, which they translate as vanilla mousse, isn't. Having gorged on this confection in Catalan, I am sad to report that Coca's version is neither authentic nor good. Crema Catalana is eggy custard (sometimes thickened with cornstarch) and topped with caramelized sugar à la crème brûlée -- which explains why Catalonians tend to insist that their crème came first and was copied by those gastronomical johnny-come-latelies, the French. Italians say the same thing. Either way, Coca's crème has no caramel roof, and it is full of balls of hard stuff, as if perhaps someone had added minute tapioca that didn't quite melt.
The only Coca dessert worth eating is the orange custard pie with pine-nut crust. Orange custard is subtle and smooth and pine-nut crust is a clever, crispy variation. But who needs a menu that you have to cherry-pick that carefully? The cool people do, that's who.
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