The dainty little gateaux at Nadège Patisserie are so artfully prepared and presented that resistance to buying one is futile.
Madras Pantry
877 Queen St. W., Toronto 416-777-0026 $25 for dinner for two including tax and tip
Nadège
780 Queen St. W., Toronto 416-368-2009 www.nadege-patisserie.com $20 for dessert for two including tax and tip
Stylistically, two new restaurants on opposite sides of Queen Street West couldn't be more different, but put them together and you've got the makings of a great picnic.
Let's start at Madras Pantry, an eatery/retail outlet where indie rock plays at a respectable volume and the shelves are lined with Indian staples: basmati rice, chickpea flour, lime pickles, 20-pound bags of mustard seeds. The decor is the result of a collaboration between owners Hanif Harji (of Kultura and Nyood) and Ryan Fisher and the Queen West design firm Commute Home.
They've gone heavy (and weird) on the graphics, incorporating wall-sized canvas circus posters (porcine Siamese twins, a beefy sword swallower), repeated images of a diaper-wearing Minotaur wrestling a man with a rooster's head (don't ask) and drawings of faceless men with bad haircuts and the kind of mustaches preferred by porn stars of the 1970s. Taken all together, it suggests a retired carnie's rumpus room.
The menu is written on a blackboard behind the open kitchen. It is brief and concise, offering mainly variations on one option, a kind of dosa burrito. Dosas, of course, are crisp Indian crepes made from ground rice and lentils (the ones here are made with brown rice, so they're gluten-free).
Madras fills them with everything from traditional dosa accompaniments (curried potatoes and vegetables with a honey yogurt sauce, butter chicken) to more global ingredients (such as jerk chicken and Szechuan beef) and rolls them up into a burrito shape.
Lighter than burritos - and, with the addition of lettuce, arugula and tomato, healthier - they are fresh, tasty and a lot of fun to eat. I liked all of the versions, but my personal favourite was the tandoor shrimp, with coriander-mint sauce and spicy potatoes. It hit exactly the right balance of spice, sweetness and texture, the shatteringly crisp dosa giving way to soft, saucy potatoes, crunchy vegetables and meaty shrimp.
Until such time as Kingfisher beer is available, your best pairing for the dosas is a bottle of Thums Up cola (with its slight betel-nut flavour) or a gingery Limca (an Indian soft drink similar to Sprite). The three kinds of lassi - strawberry mint, lychee lime and mango - are tasty, but a little too thick to ideally suit the dosas.
A long communal table is available for those who want to eat on the premises, but your best bet now that summer has finally made an appearance in Toronto is to pick up one of the wicker baskets and blankets the shop has on offer and head to nearby Trinity Bellwoods Park for a picnic.
On your way there, you'll have to pass Nadège, a new patisserie that is right across the street - and Madras's aesthetic opposite.
Jazz ballads drift through the minimalist pure-white space garnished only with a couple of subtle pink accents. It is the ideal canvas for displaying the shop's exquisite array of pastries, bonbons and mignardise, which are housed in spotless refrigerated glass vitrines.
So artfully presented and tempting are the displays that it is almost inconceivable someone could walk in here and leave without a purchase. The charming staffers in their "Oui Madame" T-shirts patiently explain the composition of each item. "This is lemon and cassis," says one in a lilting French accent. "It is an almond biscuit with violet and lemon cream, an almond crunch in the middle and a cassis and black currant mousse. The logo on the side of the cake is also chocolate and there is white chocolate on top with mint and candied violet."
Costing $6.50, it is an exceptionally dainty little sweet with an outsized flavour that belies its compact form. The velvety mousse barely approaches sweet, sharing that responsibility with the floral lemon cream. The patterned chocolate sides and bejewelled top are so thin and delicate that they begin to melt as soon as they enter your mouth, while the crystallized almond crunch provides oomph and texture.
Of a voluptuous heart-shaped chocolate with gold leaf on top (also $6.50), the clerk says: "It's a 72-per-cent-pure chocolate mousse with a sable Breton [a traditional biscuit from Brittany]on the bottom, a chocolate wafer in the middle and a chocolate glaze on the outside."
Again, the kitchen turns what could be an insubstantial bonbon into something intriguing and deeply satisfying by combining creamy, crunchy, dense and yielding textures with a complex flavour that is at once sweet and dark. The literal gilding of the chocolate sends the whole thing into some kind of alternate dessert dimension.
Elaborate delicacies may be Nadège's showpieces, but simpler, more familiar treats also get a creative makeover. Homemade marshmallows, displayed in clear cylinders, are ready to up the s'more ante in flavours of orange, cassis, lemon and gin-and-tonic. Macaroons, those addictive, brightly coloured little almond cakes with ganache filling, come in olive oil, rose, poppy and cappuccino flavours.
A few tables - white with white Eames fibreglass chairs - are available, but the store will gladly package things up in little origami-style containers to take with you to the picnic.
In addition to sweets, Nadège has a small but impressive selection of savoury items that rely on local ingredients and include an ever-changing array of sandwiches on homemade buns (walnut raisin with saucisson one day, apricot and rosemary with feta and cherry tomatoes another). The smoked salmon and dill cream cheese dome is richer than many of the desserts.
Madras has an even smaller selection of desserts, but there is kulfi (a kind of Indian frozen dessert made with milk) in three flavours: strawberry, pistachio and mango. Kulfi is renowned for not really melting easily and that makes it a bit tricky to eat with a plastic spoon, but the flavour is good. I think I'd prefer if it were served lollipop-style, as it often is in India.
Either way, the delectable combination of South Indian, Szechuan, Caribbean, Ontarian and Parisian experiences available across the street from one another feels very Toronto and very now.