Saint Germain
119 12 Ave. SW in Hotel Arts, 403-266-4611. Dinner for two with wine, tax and tip, $180.
River Café
200 Barclay Parade SW, 403-261-7670. Brunch for two with wine, tax and tip, $110.
Capo Restaurant
1420 9 Ave. SE, 403-264-2276. Dinner for two with wine, tax and tip, $180.
Giuseppe Di Gennaro of Capo Restaurant, who I'm pretty sure is the best chef in Calgary, pats his tiny belly and says: "I'm from Naples, where the food is great. That's why I am so skinny now. I don't eat so well any more."
Calgary, you see, is a town whose restaurants have not caught up with the new financial reality. You can be drowning in petrodollars and still have bad restaurants. Being able to afford truffles and foie gras doesn't mean you know how to cook -- or serve -- them.
More than a dozen serious restaurants have opened in the city since last fall. There are 1,500 more restaurant seats here than there were a year ago -- and unfortunately not enough skilled staff to do the heavy lifting. Which makes dining out at the high end confusing: There are hits, but also plenty of misses.
Saint Germain, in the newly renovated boutique Hotel Arts, is lionized locally as one of the city's top three restaurants. If that's the best they've got, then Cowtown might as well still be the land of steers 'n' beers. Which it kind of still is.
You meet a lot of cow, bison and elk on the plate in Calgary. And coming from Toronto, where dressing to dine is a competitive sport, we're astonished at what people wear to a $200 dinner -- men in jeans and women in their sartorial equivalent. It's a bit hoedown. Saint Germain is a painfully plain room whose sole grace note is a big, beautiful cut-out wooden screen. Yabu Pushelberg it ain't.
But they have good intentions and good ideas. Saint Germain (and the other luxe restos) have a wonderfully strong commitment to using local ingredients. But the execution is rough and unsophisticated. We can't find the prawns in the prawn ravioli and the pasta -- forget al dente -- is tough. Locally raised duck confit comes with yummy, sweet crisp parsnip frites and pleasant reduced sherry sauce, but who wants confit that's not crisp?
Another fine Saint Germain idea, not often done outside France, is to sauce fish with red wine. Hence monkfish osso bucco (braised in red wine sauce). Unfortunately, it's overcooked.
Sides are erratic. Green beans with tarragon are big, fibrous and tough, with no hint of tarragon. Cassoulet in a cute little iron pot has nicely flavoured shredded duck, but $14 for a side? It's the same problem with the cheese course: $12 buys three small pats (Roquefort, Quebec gouda and a B.C. goat) with three tiny dots of fruit purée and a little melba toast. Cheesy.
Saint Germain's finest opus is local bison short rib, a huge hunk of meat beautifully braised -- sweet, juicy and rich. Ah, Cowtown.
Clearly, when somebody gets the local thing right, it has charm unmatchable in a clogged metropolis such as Toronto. A great location helps too. River Café is on an island in Prince's Island Park. To get there, you walk over a bridge (across the Bow River). On a nice day, you'll want to dine on the terrace, but even indoors it has charm to spare. Walls of windows overlook the park, and the decor is woodsy Canadiana with nary a descent into kitsch: canoe shelves, twig furniture and bottles behind the bar stored in an old boat fitted with shelves.
This may be the best place east of the Rockies for summertime brunch, with fat magpies pecking outside and golden light all around. And that's before they bring the oysters, sweet tiny gems raised on the B.C. coast and winsomely served in small galvanized buckets with fresh horseradish mignonette and house-made chili sauce.
This is Alberta, Canadian home of the perogy. Till River Café, I would have decried the notion of a delicate perogy. They gave me a perogy epiphany, for the chanterelle and walnut perogies are sweet and light, made more so with onion jam, crème fraîche and a tiny bouquet of microgreens (baby arugula and celery).
They put local wild boar prosciutto (gamy and rich) on flatbread with roasted squash purée, arugula and chèvre, to grand effect. Elk bacon benny is perfectly poached eggs on tender smoky elk bacon under hollandaise sauce made with brown butter (which has been slowly heated to caramelize its sugars, rendering it mysteriously sweet). Under it all is a short house-made biscuit. On the side are authentic (not deep-fried) hash browns and complex house-made ketchup. Forget the Stampede -- while away the afternoon at the café.
For dinner, the best in Calgary is at Di Gennaro's Capo, which opened in the spring. Di Gennaro had been chef at Il Sogno in Calgary since its inception in 2001. His new place is a small cool room (only 32 seats) with tall white leather banquettes; overhead, huge robin's egg blue spheres glow with light as night falls. Part of the decor is Di Gennaro at the pass-through, a big window in a wall of tiny brown tiles. Watch the theatre of the chef finishing every plate, his moves intent and calm, always with at least one cook at his elbow helping and learning.
His cooking is exuberantly Italian leavened by the New World. His amuse, for example, is a hat trick of a tiny salad of melon and orange with shrimp, prosciutto rolled round chèvre, and a small crisp ball of deep-fried risotto on gorgonzola cream. With house-made bread he serves brown butter that should be illegal. I am reduced to begging the waiter to remove it.
Di Gennaro is to pasta what Michelangelo was to ceilings. He fills ethereal ravioli with spicy rich Bolognese sauce, uses unknowable alchemy to brown them and keep them tender, and adds tiny, almost crisped, mushrooms and deep-fried sage leaves sprinkled with sea salt. The aroma of black truffle pesto and porcini coulis on my taglierini should be enough to bring the strong men at the next table to their knees.
I've never met a pheasant breast as tender and moist as Di Gennaro's; he roasts it with muscat wine and rosemary. His osso bucco is the classic rich veal -- serving it with creamy mascarpone risotto is almost too much pleasure for one night. Finish with crostata of white chocolate with mascarpone, spiked with Baileys, which goes down like white satin. This is what Calgary's gastronomic future tastes like.
For there is no doubt that when a city gets rich, and when a whole bunch of folks from other places flock there to work, they bring their taste buds and their skills. The fact that Calgary is Canada's fastest-growing city, and that it is welcoming so many new Canadians, bodes well for its food scene. To be fair, the restaurant infrastructure is in its infancy.
Did the spoiled brat restaurant critic from the east fly in mostly to whine? Yup. Today Calgary's gastronomy is all about new money and new restaurants -- it's raw. A couple of years from now the standards will be much higher. It takes time for a city to grow into its restaurant culture. The Calgary restaurant scene feels like Toronto in the early 1970s: It's just about to explode, deliciously.