Tati Bistro
124 Harbord St., 416-962-8284
$129 for dinner for two with wine, tax and tip
I go to the trainer. My friends go to trainers. What are we training for? Last time I checked, it wasn't the Olympics. Clearly we're training to beat aging. Though none of us likes to admit it, we, the Me Generation, the greatest narcissists ever, are training because we can't tolerate being on the downside of middle age. Sweating and panting, looking tightened and toned (thanks to spandex), we're chasing our lost youth down the dark tunnel.
But there are rude awakenings. Take dinner at Tati Bistro. This new Annex hot spot, which replaced the beloved Kensington Kitchen on Harbord Street, serves the French food of my lost youth.
Of course, the dinner we adored 30 years ago inspires paranoia today. La grande cuisine française is no longer the food our palates crave, since we've been retrained by the twin juggernauts of Italian and Asian cuisine. The latter uses neither butter nor cream and the former precious little of both. Having been taught to fear both animal fat and the deep fryer, we approach a French bistro meal with less than unbridled enthusiasm.
Which is sad, because Tati Bistro (named for Jacques Tati, the great French comic of the Monsieur Hulot films) dishes superlative cooking with ideal ambience. Save for the front table (which is visited by the north wind every time the restaurant door opens), Tati is utterly charming, even though the remake from Kensington Kitchen was apparently done on a shoestring. The owners kept the 1950s Arborite and chrome tables and added red plush banquettes and some mustard and indigo paint. Turn the lights down low and - shazam - it's a French bistro.
Laurent Brion, from Poitiers, France, is chef/patron. Clearly this guy was saving his best for his own shop, because his previous postings, at Eight Restolounge and Teatro, were undistinguished.
Most of the good stuff on the menu is the handiwork of a traditional French chef, an unrepentant butterfat addict run amok. Brion's wild mushroom feuilleté is wild mushrooms cut julienne (the better to create more surface area) stewed in heavy cream with triangles of credible puff pastry atop and below. There is nothing as French as puff pastry soaking up over-the-top creamy mushroom sauce. One almost wants to start singing La Marseillaise.
Same deal with his frisée aux lardons et roquefort: Curly lettuce is zinged with substantial chunks of crisped pork fat and meat and sweet little nuggets of fine French blue cheese. Calling this baby a salad is like saying a lean steak is good for you.
But it is Brion's duck terrine that really tells us he can cut the mustard. This is an unusual loaf, the anti-smooth terrine: Tender chunks of duck meat - not purée - are held together who knows how, studded with pistachio nuts and garnished with pickled onions, cornichons and seedy mustard to grand effect.
Less grandeur comes from that old cliché French onion soup. This blast from the past could be valid if it were perfectly done, but unfortunately it appears that Brion may have taken a shortcut and used commercial beef base, leading to indelicate broth.
He has kept to higher moral ground in the composition of his bouillabaisse, wherein his robust and yet fine tomato-inflected fish soup is brimful of perfectly cooked shellfish and fish. It is also presented correctly à la française, with toasted baguette and rouille to rub on it.
His other mains are equally delightful. Rabbit dijonnaise, a bistro classic, features tender meaty rabbit in creamy sauce generously spiked with Dijon mustard. Many people are afraid to eat rabbit, which in its domestic form (the only kind we get here) is, in terms of flavour and texture, kissin' cousin to chicken. In Brion's hands, Peter Rabbit's invasion of Mr. McGregor's garden becomes felicitous.
Roast chicken is plump and moist, and to most palates would not be overcooked; its accompanying gravy is loaded with flavour and of good clarity. But his best entree is black cod with roasted garlic and truffle mashed potatoes. What better cheer on a frigid winter's eve than the combo of perfectly cooked cod beside a great deal of garlic that has been slowly roasted to bring out its sweetness?
As if there were not enough great Gallic butterfat in the savouries, Brion's sweets are a minefield.
One would be a fool to resist his lemon tart: Delicate shortbread crust is filled with impossibly light lemon curd - a citric cloud to melt in the mouth. His chocolate terrine (served cold and thus more appropriately called a semifreddo) is impeccably chocolaty; his crème brûlée is big and silken.
Who even remembers crepes Suzette? But here they are, tangy with orange and lemon, unctuous with butter, a dear old friend rediscovered.
It turns out my affair with butterfat never really ended, it just went underground.