Kultura
169 King St. E., Toronto, 416-363-9000. Dinner for two with wine, tax and tip, $150.
I don't get it about trends in dining. Call me old-fashioned, but to me, if something tastes great, then it tastes great. If it tastes bad, it tastes bad. What does that have to do with fashion's fickle hand, or trendsetters pronouncing on where the lemmings ought to flock next? If I thought that the purpose of this column were either to predict, create or follow dining trends, I would fall upon my sword -- which might, of course, make a significant number of Toronto restaurateurs very happy.
My food pronouncements are based on the utterly subjective (and individual) responses of my taste buds to food. Whether something is "in" or "out" hardly determines that, although often the two converge, and not by coincidence.
Take, for example, the health craze that has changed how we dine at both the low and high end. My favourite thing in the world used to be hollandaise sauce, which is no longer in style, and I don't love it any more. It lost its cachet because too many foodies figured out that ingesting a sauce made of butter and egg yolks was likely to reduce our time on the planet; for that precise reason, I trained myself to fall out of love with the grandmother of all French butter sauces. But that's not fashion, it's making choices based on medical research.
Fashion has decreed that we will all eat tapas for dinner.
And fashion is an idiot.
In Spain, where they come from, tapas are not dinner, but only a way station in the early evening. There is a theory that tapas originated when an illness forced Spain's King Alfonso the Wise to take small bites of food with wine between meals. Once recovered, the king decreed that inns were not allowed to serve wine without a bite to eat, so that his poor citizenry would not consume alcohol only.
It may also be that tapas arose to sustain agricultural workers in the fields until their late dinner. Which is very much the function tapas fulfill today in Spain, where people stop at a tapas bar for a quick nibble after work, to tide them over until the country's traditional 9 p.m. dinner. (I've never been able to figure out how Spaniards eat that late and then drag themselves to work in the morning.)
So where then do Toronto trendsetters get the idea that tapas should be dinner? For that is the big idea. All over town, there are restaurants springing up selling small plates for dinner -- Cava, Doku 15, Lai Toh Heen, Lee, MoDo, Torito, not to mention all the more traditional Spanish places. They all tell you that the table is supposed to order a bunch of small plates and share them.
Logic suggests that sharing small plates would be harder than sharing big ones. But that's not the core downside of small-plate dining. It's not relaxing! It feels fragmented and confusing, figuring out how many items to order and then responding to all of them. Dining out ought not to be stressful; indeed, the opposite.
Hence my predisposition against Kultura, with its many mini-plates and its almost funny pretentiousness. The waiter tells us that this is "social dining" and explains soberly that's a play on words. When asked to explain this, he cannot. The menu gushes that chef Roger Mooking's cuisine "embraces cuisine without borders. Food concepts are reinterpreted and redressed . . . ." Puhlease.
Our waiters have been schooled in the same art of overblown rhetoric. When they talk, are they channelling Nietzsche, or perhaps Proust? These guys are all about long sentences and flowery descriptions, but not so much the basics of service. Our first dinner at Kultura, five different servers wait on us -- hardly conducive to continuity and comfort.
If the restaurant were not so damn gorgeous, we would never set foot in the door. But the space formerly occupied by Arts on King is one of Toronto's oldest buildings, gloriously restored. The downstairs bar is dark and sexy, the second-floor dining room has dark wooden floors and tables with brown leather chairs, huge windows, purple backlights and fat white pillar candles in the fireplaces. As for the food, aside from the silly portion sizes and pretentious language, one is hard pressed to do anything but fall in love.
Chef Mooking has an astonishingly deft hand with the big flavours. Caribbean shrimp are plump and perfect, and jumped up with spicy sweet banana sambal. Chicken samosas are crisp little triangles of chicken with asiago and sage, and a side of spiced apple chutney.
Kultura walks on the hot side: Tofu has been barely fried, so its heart is silken and its skin crisp and thin. It sits in a pool of hoisin sauce zinged with Thai hot sauce. Cold white noodles made from Japanese mountain potato come with two sauces: hot mustard and mouth-searing sweet Thai chili sauce. Tuna tartare is also Thai-inflected, tiny green chilies heating it up, with lime, grapefruit and lemon for citric smoothing. Tender chunks of tandoori beef come with sweet/hot tamarind sauce. The only misstep of the meal: store-bought, too-sweet coconut shreds. Still, coconut makes a star appearance in the Jamaican chicken risotto composed of unusually moist jerk chicken breast and risotto spiked with coconut shreds and lemon, a most unusual and delightfully wrought notion.
Lobster appears in ravioli with toasted tops (another unusual idea, and again masterfully pulled off) and sits in a delicate saffron bisque. Chef deconstructs fish and chips, papering the outside of the fish with paper-thin potato slices and then deep frying the "package perfectly." Totally terrific save for the price/quantity ratio: $12 buys three small packages.
The only time chef Mooking's mind games fail is with "savoury cheesecakes" -- pecorino, chèvre and gorgonzola that have been puréed with cream cheese and reformed into facsimiles of their former shapes. The waiter explains that because cheese is so expensive, it's a way to make it cheaper. God help us, when three nasty little cream-cheese aggregates cost $12 and they call that cheap.
Despite the entertaining food, Kultura is not a foodie magnet; it's already getting traction with diners who have different fish to fry. Like owner Hanif Harji's other successful resto-lounge, the uber-cool Blowfish, it's made to be a scenesters' hangout, a happy place for people who are pretty enough to see and be seen.
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