SENSES
328 Wellington St., Toronto. 416-935-0400. Dinner for two with wine, tax and tip, $220. Tasting menu with wine, tax and tip, $350.
Having big shoes to fill can be a terrible thing. If I were a chef and you asked me to take over a kitchen most recently led by Claudio Aprile, I'd rather eat nails, thanks. Aprile did superb work at Senses in the Soho Metropolitan Hotel for six years, and of course has had his path strewn with roses since opening his very own Colborne Lane in February.
Soho Met's owner, Henry Wu, clearly struggled to find the right successor to Aprile: It took till springtime to anoint Patrick Lin as the full-time Senses chef. How can we tell chef Lin is feeling the heat? Anxiety is written all over the poor guy's face the first time he comes into the dining room: "I apologize. I am so sorry," he says. "We have run out of the black cod. May I replace it with grouper?" He comes back again to ask how our dinner is. And again.
Maybe if Chef stayed in the kitchen and left the customer service to the waitstaff, he'd be more on his game. Or maybe not. Senses' waitstaff are not quite up to the standard they're trying to set. One waiter tells us that our plate includes "spotted prawn, sea urchint and fresh chives." Last time I checked, it was B.C. spot prawns and sea urchin, and have you recently met a chive that wasn't fresh?
Everything about the restaurant says Fancy! Formal! Important! They greet you by name on subsequent visits, say goodbye to you by name, and charge the big bucks. The room is tall and elegant and has the best sound absorption in town thanks to one wall that is upholstered in taupe, dark brown and black velour squares. But sound absorption doth not a successful resto make. Especially when they're playing bubble gum music, and headlights from the parking lot across the street occasionally give major glare.
Is Senses a hotel dining room or a crossover - both hotel dining room and independent restaurant? It's tough to cross that line. Truffles in the Four Seasons almost does it, banking on excellence to get there. Senses has its own street-side signage and presence, and a separate entrance from the hotel. But one wonders about the formal ambience, the antithesis of downtown hip. Is this style still marketable in sophisticated Toronto? Maybe not, say the many empty tables on Friday and Saturday nights.
Or maybe it's the food. Senses has always (ever since its first incarnation on Bloor Street) held to the highest standards of service and epicurean innovation. But today's Senses is flaccid; the food is very good, but who needs very good in a town where we take Jamie, Susur, Mark and Keith for granted, and are getting wowed at Cava, Kultura and George?
Credible? Yes. Exciting? No. Chef wraps wondrously sweet fresh Dungeness crab in gravlax packets. He serves nicely seared scallops with a lovely wild mushroom stew and something he calls mushroom cappuccino - little more than ultralight cream sauce. The grouper comes with fresh green soy beans and oven-dried tomato slices and sits in assertive tomato broth. It's accompanying soft-shell crab tempura is properly crisp, but when entrées cost $39, we do expect the waiter to do better than hem and haw when we ask if the crab is 1) still in season and 2) fresh.
Another evening, we order the six-course tasting menu for $108 each. By course three we two practised trencher folk (a.k.a. long-time professional pigs) are starting to worry about being able to take on courses four and five, let alone six. This is not the way tasting menus usually go. Do a tasting menu at Susur, and by course three one is happily titillated, in joyous anticipation of pleasures to follow.
But these tasting plates are too big and not interesting enough to hold the attention; each one resembles half a competent main course. We like the B.C. spot prawn with its uni garnish, although the prawn's duck-skin wrapper has gone soggy. The twin purées (green pea and white bean) work well, but are robust and fill the belly. Trio of foie gras crème brûlées is about as gilded as the lily gets: one of foie gras melted down in cream and topped with crunchy sea salt, one with goat cheese and caramelized pineapple in the foie gras cream, and the third the same cream infused with vanilla and peach. Lots of fun, but too much too rich for a six-course tasting menu - unless they were thimble-sized, which they're not.
Same for halibut topped with browned thin zucchini slices, served with vanilla lemon grass foam and mango curry dots. Charming although not exciting, and too big. When they bring perfectly cooked veal tenderloin in congealing brown sauce with a gorgeous emerald green packet of fresh Dungeness crab in an iceberg leaf, we are desolated: It seems heinous not to finish such a splendid surf 'n' turf, but absent that third leg we have nowhere to put it.
Dessert is a compendium of (finally!) small tastes: deep, dark chocolate tart, both espresso and sour cream ice creams; fine diced strawberries with mint shreds, almond panna cotta, and a shot glass with tiny layers of custard, raspberry marmalade and mango puree. At last, they're thinking small and creative. Less is more.
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