Della Rollins
Up until the drunken buffoon started loudly berating Canadian democracy, Blue Jays fans and non-shouters in general, it had been a lovely meal. When he and his party finally left, after being politely told by the server that it was time to go, the restaurant erupted in applause, which caused him to shout one last invective through the open window. By that time, though, the wheels had already come off the wagon.
What a different scene it was only a few days before, during a quiet lunch hour with the sun streaming in and the subdued grey-on-grey room filled with light. It's quite a civilized little restaurant under such circumstances. Le Canard Mort is the sister restaurant to Le Rossignol, another popular Leslieville bistro just down the street. Like its older sibling, LCM owes much of its charm to the friendly, slightly matronly staff who might just call you "honey."
First-time visitors should start with the stuffed Yorkshire pudding. They appear on a lot of tables and are already becoming a signature item. It's a brave choice on the kitchen's part. Yorkshire pudding is one of those foods, like Texas barbecue and Niçoise salad, that engenders virulent debate. Beyond even whether it should be made in a pan or individual popover style, the very name is something of a hot potato. Patent lawyers in the UK would like to give the puddings protected geographic status, like Parma ham or Champagne, so that only those made in and around Yorkshire and Humberside could even call themselves Yorkshire puddings.
Le Canard Mort's version is decidedly non-traditional. Maybe they should call them Leslieville Puddings. Served mini-popover style and stuffed with shaved striploin (like pudding sliders), they are topped with a squiggle of béarnaise sauce and served with an arugula salad. Heresy, yes, but delicious all the same.
Ever the renegade chef, Craig Madore, who was previously sous-chef at Le Rossignol and spent time in the kitchens of Didier, Canoe and the RCYC, elevates the standard Cobb salad by adding generous chunks and whole claws of butter-poached lobster. He distributes the tender meat among carefully arranged leafs of bibb lettuce, shavings of avocado, whole, wrinkly oven-dried tomatoes, crumbles of crisp pancetta and potent accents of blue cheese. It's a great salad and he smartly makes it available at both lunch and dinner.
If you decide to have it for dinner – especially on an off night when the restaurant gets slammed and a couple of obstreperous chuckleheads apparently try to drink their way through all 150 cocktails on the vast bar menu – the salad might arrive looking a little worse for wear and an awfully long time after you asked for it.
On nights like that, even the toasted, spiced nuts, buttery and salty sweet, take close to half an hour to arrive. After such a long wait, it's hard to feel very generous toward a bowl of mussels that reek like they've been left out in the sun to cook. They haven't, of course, but the problem is they're spawning at this time of year and while they aren't dangerous, the quality of the meat is diminished and the smell can be rancid. How these get out of a kitchen in the first place is a mystery to me, but I've seen it happen more than a few times in restaurants throughout the city.
Send those back and get the crispy fried sweetbreads instead; they're infinitely better, anyway. The luscious, knobbly morsels are given the full buffalo-wing treatment, battered and fried and served with house-made hot sauce and blue cheese aioli. Creamy and mellow inside of their crisp, spicy crust, they are a clever idea beautifully executed.
The kitchen shows its orthodox side when it comes to main courses. There's a pair of thick double-smoked pork chops, carefully butchered and intensely smoky, with some chunky mashed potatoes seasoned with grainy mustard. Piled high with roasted Yukon gold potatoes, caramelized onions and bacon under a squirt of crème fraîche, the savoury tart has the benevolent flavour of the best home cooking. The ultimate comfort food, mac and cheese, is sent to finishing school with the use of three cheeses and shavings of fresh black truffle. It's all a bit heavy for mid-summer, but on an off night it can feel like autumn will arrive before the food does.
Having seen the restaurant at its serene best, and what I can only hope was its absolute rock bottom, I'm optimistic about the place. Sometimes bad things happen to good restaurants and what matters is how they handle that adversity. The staff at Le Canard Mort remained cool, calm and collected and the kitchen did its level best throughout. The wheels may have come off, but they got us all to our destination – shaken and much later than scheduled – but unscathed and well fed. There's life in this old bird yet.