Do try the straciatella soup at Ciao Wine Bar in Toronto’s Yorkville district – if the hostess gets around to seating you.
Normally I don't pay too much attention to the greeting a restaurant gives because there's such a narrow band of variation. In the vast majority of restaurants, they say hello as soon as you show up, muster a smile and walk you to your table. It seems pretty simple. I was thus astonished by how differently it went at the spiffy new Ciao Wine Bar on Yorkville.
We stood at the maitre d' station being ignored for about two minutes, which feels like much longer than it sounds when you're being ignored. Another woman walked by and I tried to get her attention. She ignored me, too. I thought to myself that she must be another customer but it turned out, later in the meal, that this was not the case.
Then the woman at the maitre d' station looked up and said "Oh," sounding surprised, as if it was unusual for two people to be standing there at dinnertime. She then led us at a dead run to a table. We only lost her once.
The other thing you're not really supposed to pay attention to in a restaurant is the state of the washroom, this too because its decency is assumed. But here too it wasn't business as usual: In the ladies room both toilet paper holders are empty and one has to forage to find a new roll. There are two wads of dirty paper towel on the floor. When we go again two hours later, the toilet paper holders are still empty.
In the intervening two hours we have been subjected to some of the most unfortunate food we've met in some time - and yet the joint is jumpin'. And with an entertaining mix of people. There are the expectable Yorkville types, a few tourists and a surprising number of families with kids - thanks no doubt to the large and inexpensive - for Yorkville - menu (the grated cheese 'n' chillies on every table, in old-school shakers, telegraph pizza and pasta parlour).
Style-wise, Ciao is a gorgeous three-level designer confection, with thick butcher block tables and great leather chairs, lots of glass and very cool lighting. It's a happy place. You want to like it. It slightly resembles our beloved Noodles of yesteryear in its clever combo or warmth and cool, its jazzy reflective surfaces broken up by stairways.
But the minestrone tastes like canned tomato purée with plain boiled veg in it. No depth, no complexity, no character. How could they do this to one of my all-time favourite foods in the world? Straciatella, Italy's answer to egg drop soup and another great love of mine, is significantly better than the minestrone. It has taste! Okay, so it's not the pure chicken stock taste that one might hope for; maybe there's some MSG and/or industrial chicken stock in there, but at least there's taste.
Linguine with clams in white wine sauce, another of my lifelong favourite foods, is also a travesty at Ciao. Traditionally made with small fresh clams and a lot of garlic and parsley in the sauce, it's usually pungent but not oily. Ciao's version features fresh clams that have been overcooked enough to lose their sweetness and resemble the canned clams that are also present - in great number. The sauce is pretty much all oil. If there's garlic and parsley, both flavours are MIA. Not so much fun unless you like to drink your oil with a spoon.
Similarly afflicted are the farfalle with fresh tuna. I once watched a friend barbecue a $50 chunk of fresh tuna, overcook it and threaten to fall upon his sword. Ciao's chef appears not to have such tender sensibilities: The tuna on this dish has been sliced so painfully thin that the heat from the pasta literally cooks what looks rare when it comes into beige banality in less than two minutes. Which goes fine with the white wine sauce, which has no taste.
Since Ciao claims to offer real southern Italian stuff, such as lasagna, that was what they'd do best, I thought one evening. Wrong. For the lasagne, they throw on great lashings of their fab tomato sauce, which is robust, garlicky and complex. That's a good thing. But not good enough to fix gummy overcooked lasagne noodles. And it wasn't good enough to make us ignore the soggy grilled bread served with unimpressive shrimp.
Pasta and fagioli, another of Italy's great soups, was similarly sad, even pathetic. Done properly, it's a complex soup, thick from beans and redolent of pancetta, with a final benediction of fragrant olive oil. But this pasta fagioli tastes just like the unfortunate minestrone, as if they took those canned tomatoes from the blender and threw in a few beans. End of story. It was as unfortunate as the salade nicoise made with tomatoes so pale and hard you need a knife to cut them, dried out anchovies and pitted black olives with very little taste.
For dessert we ate pleasant chocolate pudding and cannoli made with thick crepes too hard to cut with a fork. And at 9 p.m., inappropriately throbbing music gets turned up loud, a reminder that Ciao is brought to us by Liberty Entertainment Group, which owns Rosewater, Spice Route and Tattoo Rock Parlour. 'Nuff said.
This is Joanne Kates's last On the Menu column for the summer. She will return in September.