Six Steps
53-55 Colborne St., Toronto. 416-504-4800. Dinner for two with wine, tax and tip, $150.
Urban seer Jane Jacobs taught us that the best thing you could do for a city is to create a varied environment: a mixture of residential and commercial guarantees humans on the street at all hours, which in turn increases urban safety. All of which would make Saint Jane crow with approval over the restaurant explosion on Colborne Street.
Shazam! Suddenly this small downtown street of glorious brownstone Victoriana is abuzz with pedestrians at night, some from the neighbouring condos and offices, many imported from uptown, thanks in part to the convenient and plenteous parking.
Three weeks ago in this space, I scattered rose petals in the path of Claudio Aprile, chef/owner of the new Colborne Lane resto. But quirky little Colborne Street has three other restaurants. The most ambitious is Six Steps -- which caught my attention because Paul Boehmer (ex Opus) is the consulting chef.
Whatever that means.
I'm old-fashioned about food. To me, the person who is actually cooking the food every night is the person in whom I am putting my trust. I could count on the fingers of one hand the fine chefs in Toronto who have the managerial capacity to cause others to produce food that matches their vision.
Hence my skepticism about the concept of the consulting chef. That's the guy (more often than not) who can't stand the heat any more and wants to have a normal life instead of getting home from work after midnight six days a week. But he doesn't know any other way to make a living. Can he teach the actual chef to cook as he envisions? It doesn't usually work that way.
Take, for example, the grilled marinated octopus. The menu describes it as being served with "tart lettuces, slivered artichokes, toasted almonds, golden raisins, capers and warm bacon vinaigrette." On the upside, the octopus is tender/chewy precisely as it should be, and the dressing is in the splendid Italian agrodolce (sweet 'n' sour) tradition. On the downside, there are no artichokes, toasted almonds, golden raisins, capers or warm bacon vinaigrette anywhere to be found.
Instead, the octopus is garnished with marinated agrodolce red onions and braised endive -- which taste great but aren't what we thought we were getting.
Speaking of thinking, there's some of that missing on the service front. I poke at the endive beside the octopus (still confused by what the menu says) and ask the server what it is. She says it's artichoke. Sure, and I'm Julia Roberts. I find a more polite way to disagree, and ask her again what it is. She then says it's fennel. Again, I disagree politely. She has to take my plate to the kitchen to find out that it's fennel.
Which is the theme of the service at Six Steps: more enthusiastic than expert.
The food continues to be not quite what it promises. Seared foie gras and quail fricassee is a monochromatic brown plate with an eensy piece of foie gras, pleasant quail and no sign of the promised black truffle.
We like the remake of shrimp cocktail (served atop avocado purée and topped with thin shaved marinated fennel), but the menu promised blood oranges, which we can't find. And blood oranges aren't that easy to miss. We also sorta like the chicken noodle soup, although, it being so close to Passover, I should mention that my Boba would not have approved of it. This chicken soup appears to have been made from browned chicken, and Boba always said (and she was right) that the only way to produce sweet chicken soup is to not brown the chicken.
When the mains come, we really start to wonder who's in the driver's seat. Veal osso bucco is correctly tender, long braised meat, but the vidalia onion rings on top of it are overcooked and hard, and search as we might for the promised ratatouille and Tuscan bread salad, we can't find either. Rack of lamb is properly pink and tender. Its baby root veg have been roasted to caramelized sweetness, but the sweet potato rosti under it is soggy like a sponge in the bath.
Roasted pousson (says the menu; Larousse Gastronomique spells it poussin) is a small spring chicken no matter how you spell it. This one has been overcooked and is heinously tough. Its pommes Anna (a.k.a. scalloped potatoes) are also overcooked and dried out. The kitchen is consistent: Yukon gold frites are overcooked too.
Monkfish and cherrystone clam pot-au-feu is another great idea with many a slip 'twixt cup and lip. Cherrystone clams turn brutally tough if you cook them 30 seconds too long, and these have gone all the way there. The monkfish is nicely cooked, as are the little turnips and other winter veg, but the saffron broth is weird in the sense that it's too thick and also tastes heavy from cream.
One is forced again to contemplate the distance from cup to lip at dessert time: We try to order the pistachio and cheese profiteroles that are on the menu, but they don't have them any more. So-called caramelized apple tart isn't. We can't find any caramelizing on the apples, which are buried deep inside a package of tough dough that reminds me texturally of the first pie crust I ever made (and had the good sense to throw out). Drunken pineapple and strawberries in phyllo arrives topped with a lot of cream and a slice of oven-dried pineapple. I ask the server what's in it. She says it's "glazed pineapple" and when I ask what's under it, she repeats several times that it's delicious. Not exactly the info I was seeking.
Consistency is important. On both occasions dining at Six Steps, precisely the same scene unfolded after dinner. We stood at the front awaiting our coats. Both times, a server asked if we wanted our coats (hardly a question that needs asking in Toronto during the winter). We answered in the affirmative, and both times the person asked us to remind her what our coats looked like. On one visit, they brought us somebody else's coats the first time.
Had they been mink, we might have left with them.
Musical chairs: Tarek Aboushakka, the smooth long-time general manager of North 44, has ventured out on his own. He has just bought Oro restaurant on Elm Street. Given Tariq's uber-competence and his great taste (honed by many years working for Mark McEwan at North 44 and Bymark), we can expect great things from Oro.
He's keeping chef Filomena Palozzi, who has been at Oro for 10 years (first as sous-chef under Dario Tomasselli and latterly as chef). Palozzi has shown flashes of Italianate brilliance, but inconsistently. She will no doubt benefit from Tarek's tutelage.
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