CAFÉ 668
885 Dundas St. W., Toronto. 416-703-0668. Dinner for two with wine, tax and tip, $80.
I am often astonished by how food-obsessed people are. It has come to the point that I avoid big parties because it's all going to be about food. Not the stuff they're serving, but the subject everyone I meet wants to plumb ... and plumb and plumb ... and plumb. Even a generously proportioned ego such as my own finds it a bit much that everyone I meet really wants to talk to me. Is it my girlish good looks, my fab face and even more fab figure? Only if they're on really good drugs. Otherwise, it's that restaurant column thing. Again.
They say an army marches on its stomach. Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs taught us how critical food is as a precondition to higher functions. But we're not talking starvation here. Why is almost everyone so obsessed with food and dining out? Aside from the obvious use of food and dining as a means to define our social position, could it be that the Me Generation (which clearly owns this trend, along with lululemon, therapy and many other pioneering acts of self-absorption) has replaced love, sex and other intimacies with food, the original Freudian oral fixation?
If food and dining are as important as we make them, then it is no accident that pundits are basing social analysis on restaurant culture. I can do that too. Let's look at the incredible proliferation of pan-Asian restaurants, and more specifically reflect on the function they fill for the general dining public. A decade ago, people went out for Chinese (or maybe Thai) when they wanted a cheap dinner.
Today, there are literally hundreds of pan-Asian restos in Toronto and they've gone moderately upscale. Everybody goes to them all the time, or they wouldn't be flourishing or multiplying at such a ferocious rate.
Their success is obviously thanks partly to Toronto's enormous influx of Asian immigrants, but also to how profoundly the eating habits of the majority have changed in the past decade. That which was once exotic (Asian food) is now commonplace. Pho, stir fries, hot and sour soup and salad rolls are now about as ethnic as a hamburger.
Which explains why Toronto was more than ready for the new Café 668, which is a vegetarian pan-Asian resto. Here, we see the confluence of two formerly counterculture trends - Asian and vegetarian. A decade ago. this place would have been half-empty and patronized only by hard-core Birkenstock people.
Today, it's busy every night, with significant lineups on weekends. (Note: They don't take reservations.)
If I am the canary in the coal mine, then my lack of sullenness at Café 668 is instructive. Used to be, a meal without meat was, to me, hardly a square deal. I still adore meat, but most of us have learned to reduce the part it plays in our diet, for both health and environmental reasons.
For me, there's no need for the ersatz meat that Café 668 offers in about a quarter of their dishes. Even though the preparation of "mock meat" dishes is an ancient Buddhist tradition and is considered a Chinese specialty by chefs who have spent their careers perfecting the technique, wheat gluten is about as much like a chicken breast as my Siberian husky (may she rest in peace) was like a boyfriend.
All the stuff they do that references meat is just plain silly - like the lemon grass veggie "chicken" which is thinnish slices of dirty brown wheat gluten in an otherwise delightful stir fry of veg with pineapple. The wheat gluten, a.k.a. veggie chicken, has no taste and has the texture of an overcooked rubber tire. Feh. Same for the "veggie beef" and other unfortunate moments when wheat gluten is asked to be something it's not.
But we adore the unabashedly vegetarian food. Café 668's kitchen manages to pack more than the usual amount of flavour into non-meat items. Summer rolls are rice-paper-wrapped round mushrooms, deep-fried tofu matchsticks, julienne of green beans, carrots, celery and cabbage, with Thai basil and aggressively toasted peanuts. The result is deep flavour. House dipping sauce of sweet soy with rice vinegar doesn't hurt. Fresh salad rolls sing a similar tune, as do non-greasy spring rolls. Gossamer pan-fried dumplings stuffed with mixed veg are equally charming. Who needs meat?
It's disingenuous of them to use the term "veggie duck" to describe bean curd sheets that have been pan-fried to a delightful crisp in a "cake" and served with sweet/sour sauce. I often find veg food in restaurants bland, but add the Asian element and all is well. Both hot and sour soups (Vietnamese and Cantonese) are hot, sweet and sour; the absence of meat costs them nothing.
But both won ton and corn soups are terminally bland, proving that there are some things you can't do without chicken stock.
All else goes very well: House special fried rice is a symphony of veg with wheat gluten being itself (almost crispy little wheat critters) and oodles of flavour. Same for noodle based stir-fries (thanks in part to Thai basil) and veg pho, which is as great as its meat-based counterpart.
Moral of the story: Better an honest veg than wheat masquerading as meat.
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