Via Allegro
1750 The Queensway, Toronto, 416-622-6677. Dinner for two with wine, tax and tip, $150.
Things begin badly. Then they get worse.
I call Via Allegro on Wednesday for a Saturday-night reservation and ask for a table for four people at 7 p.m. This seems reasonable to me. No, they say, you can only have 6:30. So I ask what happens if we book for 6:30 and show up at 6:45. "We only hold tables for 10 minutes." Well, pardon me. I guess they must be very important.
I phone the restaurant Saturday morning to tell them we are now five people, and to ask whether this is okay. They say yes, sure, no problem. But when we five arrive (on time, terrified of being late), the front-desk dude looks shocked, sounds upset and says we are supposed to be four. He recovers, apologizes abjectly and says he has no option for us but a table for four.
Into this we cram ourselves for what we hope will be an evening of edible splendour, as sayeth those who have been touting Via Allegro as suburbia's gift to epicures, an Italian restaurant that can show the downtown joints how to grate their reggiano.
The restaurant is big, exuberant and gorgeous. Real flames flicker in wrought iron candelabras, big-name wines rest in beautiful cabinets and wrought-iron sconces decorate the walls. Pretty things assembled with fine taste are everywhere.
The operative word here is "big." We are disappointed not to check out the "heads or tails" appetizer of half a roasted pig head with fancy fixin's, but our server says it takes 40 minutes. Not such great timing for an appetizer.
But one is hardly likely to starve at Via Allegro, thanks to the Texan proportions of many of its dishes. Deep-fried calamari with taro, sweet- and white-potato fries is a plate of enough calamari to content two of me for dinner. Although the fries are fine, what the calamari offer in quantity, they lack in quality: They are uncrisp, too big and slightly rubbery.
We like the ceremony of pouring the mushroom soup into the bowl at the table, and the self-referential cuteness of labelling items with their date of development and version. This mushroom soup dates from 1996 and is the ninth version, but it is, despite the PR, boring. As are "sea delights," an appetizer of tuna carpaccio with octopus salad. The tuna works fine, but both octopus salad and jicama slaw have that made-in-the-afternoon tired taste that is no favour to salad.
We like the cured Quebec duck breast, although by any other name it would be jerky. As for capriolo e polenta, the house-made venison sausage is merely pleasant and the sweetbreads atop the polenta are overcooked. The only appetizer worth its salt is goat-cheese duet, which is splendidly creamy goat cheese panna cotta topped with intense red-onion marmalade, and a crisp phyllo purse of good chèvre.
During the appetizer round, we navigate the wine list, which is thicker than the Bible and includes hundreds of bottles selling in the $2,000 range. Daunted and oenophilically challenged, we take refuge in the ordinary. Neither sommelier nor server bother pouring our wine or water after the second round, so we are left to pour for ourselves. We wonder: Had we ordered a big-ticket bottle, would they have poured for us?
This is a kitchen in love with meat. Big expensive juicy hunks of red meat. A thick beauty of a veal chop comes perfectly pink, partnered prettily with a silken shallot and pear custard. Duet of lamb is a juicy red rack crusted with garlic, mustard seed and horseradish, served with pulled lamb shank, moist, long-cooked and mimicking Southern pulled pork.
Again, big is beautiful here. After mains are delivered, two servers arrive, portaging a pepper mill that is six-feet long! No jokes about phallic symbols, please. One server dangles the business end of the monster over a plate while the other turns it up at the top.
This silliness brings the already illogical ceremony of the pepper grinder to a new low: Why do so many restaurants want to grind pepper on your food before you taste it? This is not done in Europe because they get that either the chef seasoned the thing correctly and you don't need more pepper or that you can decide for youself whether you want more and add the requisite amount. When restaurant staff swoop down with a pepper grinder (regular size or ridiculous) before diners have a chance to taste the food, they remove the ability to choose extra seasoning based on taste.
Less than man-size and non-meat items get less lovin' from the kitchen: Spaghettini with clams is a gummy pile of stuck-together noodles in too salty parsley pesto with baby clams that may have been flown in daily from Italy (as the menu asserts), but have been cooked too long to benefit from such precious provenance.
As for quail amarone risotto, wrapping the quail with bacon and stuffing it with honey and chestnut bread pudding does not help the little bird. The quail's juices prevent the bacon from being crisp and somehow, with all the tchotchkes in and around it, the tad overcooked quail meat tastes blah. The risotto has enough amarone in it to make us blow over, which is to say it's too boozy to taste right, although it is texturally correct.
We hear that entrepreneurs are begging Via Allegro's owners to open a downtown branch. Word to the wise: Don't.
Season's Eatings: Too few are the restaurants that serve lunch, and too many are the diners looking for a Christmastime lunch venue. My favourite Yuletide lunch is always at Boba (90 Avenue Rd., Toronto, 416-961-2622), which is open for lunch Dec. 9 to 24.