One of two huge salvaged-wood chandeliers punctuates the chic yet unpretentious dining room at Böhmer, where the message is reclaimed, post-industrial and local.
Böhmer is the tall, white loft of my dreams, a room so beautiful - and yet unpretentious - that it lends its gloss to all who tarry there. So blessed are we by Böhmer's good looks that we, too, feel cool, hip and trendy when we spill out onto the sidewalk after dinner, strolling the Ossington strip, past galleries and vintage clothing shops, among others billowing forth from other bars and restaurants. It's as fun a streetscape as New York's Lower East Side. Fie on city councillor Joe Pantalone for trying to stop this urban happening.
Böhmer was a year - well spent - in the building. At the entrance, a fat tree trunk holds up the maître d' station. Two huge chandeliers punctuate the dining room. Before sunset, they're undulating wood strips hung with necklaces of little crystals. After night falls and bleeds light from the tall front window, each chandelier becomes the root system of a tree dripping with glittering mini-lights. There's more wood in the form of a huge reclaimed-wood bench along the long, central communal table and, in the customer holding area by the bar, fat tree stumps turned into tables. The floor is concrete. The only floral material is ivy cascading from wall-mounted vases.
The message is reclaimed, post-industrial and local; chef/owner Paul Boehmer's menu extends the metaphor. He sources seasonal and local ingredients and follows his early mentor, Michael Stadtlander into cooking that lives off the land. Consommé made from woodland shiitake and oyster mushrooms, for example, is oh-so-pure, afloat with impeccable local mushrooms (although it wants both sweetness and depth).
Over all, Boehmer's cooking comes with the most honourable intentions (and some clever ideas), but errs toward heaviness at times. Gravlax tinged red at the edge with beets is pretty, but we had imagined its potato cake base as a delicately crisp, fresh-from-hot-oil rosti; instead it's a heavy potato cake served at room temperature. Similarly unfortunate is well-intentioned Jerusalem artichoke soup that probably started out great but is made heavy and less than flavourful because of too much cream.
A surfeit of cream is Boehmer's bête noire. When he doesn't use it, his food takes flight. His venison tartare topped with quail egg is carnivore dream food, piquant and tender. He sources fabulous local chèvre for the beet and arugula salad, and does a nice sauté of foie gras (although he needs to lose the too-sweet maple-syrup sauce under it).
The restaurant is clearly Boehmer's masterwork: One can only guess how much effort went into imagining the saddle of rabbit, which is unusually tender, thanks perhaps to hours in a brine bath. The rabbit is stuffed with light blood sausage and wrapped in crisped smoky bacon. For a recent sauce, he toasted hazelnuts and barely boiled Brussels sprouts in rich meat reduction. But when the first fiddleheads of spring popped up, he started using them instead of winter's Brussels sprouts.
Boehmer's passion appears to be meat: His braised veal cheeks are soft like butter, moist, perfumed with ultrafresh wild mushrooms and made more dangerous by silken potato purée. But the sauce? Gluey.
Same deal with his sole shellfish item: The scallops are impeccable and we remain eternally grateful to the kitchen slave who removed sweet chunks of Dungeness crab from its shell, but even fresh tarragon can't rescue the heavy old-school cream sauce. That same cream-based stodginess drags down the sauce on otherwise charming chicken fricassee with a bouquet of young spring veg. For my taste, the chicken might also have been cooked a little less. As could the New York striploin, an unimpeachable piece of flesh that we ordered very rare and arrived, unfortunately, cooked medium. Even worse, the accompanying fries are cut large and are not crisp.
But chef's take on fresh Lake Nipissing pickerel is nicely iconoclastic - it comes with bright red horseradish-inflected beet jus. No cream, nice and light, oh joy. The same restraint applied to braised red cabbage produces delicate sweet and sour flavouring for the cabbage.
The heaviness that drags down some of chef's savouries does not afflict his sweets. His diplomat pudding studded with tiny apple and hazelnut chunks is ethereal. His lemon meringue tart is fine lemon curd with just-browned meringue in a fragile biscuity tart. But lemon grass and passion fruit panna cotta takes the cake, its tropical flavours in fine balance.
In the open kitchen at the back of the restaurant, you can see Boehmer sweating the small stuff. You can feel his heart and soul in every element of this restaurant - each one so obviously planned, from the asymmetrical soup bowls and designer flatware to the double-height bathroom doors. His occasional lapses of judgment are perhaps attributable to how low the culinary bar was at his last posting, Rosewater Supper Club. Boehmer may find that the citizens of Ossington have finer taste buds than that; when he renovates his sauces and deletes the cream, his menu will deserve its spectacular setting.