Atelier
540 Rochester St., Ottawa, 613-321-3537,
atelierrestaurant.ca
Open:
For dinner Tuesday through Saturday, closed Sunday and Monday
Prices:
$125 for a 12-course tasting menu
Access:
Steps to front door
Not to brag, but so far in 2020, I’ve already had two fantastic, 12-course, haute-cuisine dinners.
Last Saturday night at the Shaw Centre, there was the opulent, gourmet’s race-against-the-clock that was the grand finale of the 2020 Canadian Culinary Championships. Completist that I am, I hit every station and ate beautiful plate after beautiful plate, savouring delicacy-rich creations from some of Canada’s leading chefs.
And then there was my other fine-dining meal, which was even better.
In mid-January, I had the blind, 12-course menu at Atelier. And as vaunted as the culinary championships’ delights were, dinner at chef-owner Marc Lepine’s cutting-edge restaurant on Rochester Street topped them.
Perhaps that’s not so surprising. Atelier has been consistently lauded since it opened in late 2008, landing on various renowned lists of elite restaurants in Canada and North America. Lepine took home the gold at the 2012 and 2016 Canadian Culinary Championships, which were held in Kelowna, B.C., before the event moved to Ottawa this year. Canada’s principal assessor of restaurants and chefs, the annual Canada’s 100 Best Restaurants magazine, named Lepine the country’s most innovative chef in 2018.
I last had dinner at Atelier in 2011, when four of us marked some birthdays there. It was an evening of wows and irreproachable service, although these are the recollections of a “civilian” diner and not a pro critic — I didn’t start this reviewing gig until 2012.
So in 2020, I was curious to appraise Atelier from my critic’s vantage point, in light of the culinary championships and taking into account developments in Ottawa’s restaurant scene in recent years. Not the least of those was the opening last May of THRU, Lepine’s hyper-exclusive six-seat restaurant (or second-storey private dining room under Atelier’s roof, if you prefer) that serves an entirely different and mind-boggling menu, all the while relying on Atelier’s kitchen and staff.
After more than a decade, the specific restaurant experience Atelier and Lepine offer should be well-known to discerning food lovers in Ottawa and elsewhere. (Lepine even published his lavish and revelatory Atelier: The Cookbook in 2018, which he wrote with my predecessor, Anne DesBrisay.)
DesBrisay herself reviewed Atelier in early 2009, and her glowing take can be distilled to two short sentences: “This is a brilliantly creative place. Tweak the budget and book a table.” I’ll note that then, the tasting menu cost $75, not the $125 of 2020. I’ll also note, to put that price further in context, that eating at Atelier is in fact a bargain compared to the cost of dining at some not dissimilar Michelin-starred restaurants in the U.S. and abroad.
To achieve his brilliance, Lepine has become a national master of what used to be called molecular gastronomy but is now more usually called modernist cuisine, building on the technological and even chemistry-based innovations of such landmark restaurants as El Bulli in Spain and Alinea in Chicago, where Lepine did an unpaid internship.
One feature of modernist cuisine is the transformation of ingredients into chips, powders, gels and more, maximizing the surprises and the assorted visual and flavour-based balancing acts on the plate. Some dismiss modernist cuisine as pretentious and overly artificial, but I’m OK with it, and prefer to view dinner at Atelier as a parade of highly technical dishes that strive for uniqueness in multiple ways while appealing to a guest’s senses of curiosity and playfulness. Another way of looking at Atelier is that it’s simply Lepine’s forum for showing off what he can do with food.
There is a bit of a disconnect between the feel of Atelier and the ambience that some would associate with luxurious, expensive dining. Atelier has always been more minimalist and funky rather than posh and oversized, surrounding guests in the cosy, narrow quarters of a former Little Italy house, amid a stark but not uncomfortable atmosphere of grey, black and white.
Perhaps the goal is to have the creativity of Lepine’s food pop more against such neutrality. For a fine-dining experience, Atelier can even seem on the casual side — or at least, in January, I saw guests dressed as casually for their groundbreaking dinner as they would have been at a fast-food outlet.
Appearances aside, Atelier indisputably operates at a fine-dining level when it comes to service. The tone set by our servers was unfailingly attentive but never intrusive. Lepine serves the kind of novel, at times arcane fare that requires 30-second-long recitations of ingredients and techniques, and our servers were up to those challenges. The flawlessness of service included that extra-mile measure of re-folding a guest’s crumpled napkin when the guest had left the table.
My predecessor’s 2009 review managed the feat of sharing very, very little about what she ate as she didn’t want to give away too many surprises. I will offer some specifics, based on the fact that my friend and I tried not only the night’s tasting menu but also the vegetarian/vegan alternatives.
Our dinner began very strongly with a snack course that put three mind-expanding bites on a whimsically rotating platform. Who, apart from Lepine, knew that snail caviar, parsnip purée and crisp, cedar-tinged puff would be delicious? So, too, was a seaweed crisp topped with crab salad. Just as great was a cube of wagyu beef short rib in sticky soy caramel. We had vegan options, too, which swapped frozen coconut pearls for snail caviar, artichoke salad for crab salad and sweet potato for beef. They were fine, but the carnivore options struck us as the real deal.
A mushroom tom yum dish, garnishing exotic mushrooms with smoked apple dust and more, was fantastic. The vegan version, which left out fish sauce, was just a little less complex and great.
Among other courses, some were very good but short of a wow, especially in this meat-eater’s opinion. But there were highlights enough to make me think the meal was worthwhile, including an elaborate dish finished with perfect cauliflower soup, a scallop croquettes dish, a sablefish course, a quail course, and a strikingly garnished beef tenderloin-and-kimchi course.
Two desserts — one made with coffee, cajeta (Mexican caramel) and goat-cheese ice cream, the other made with chocolate ganache and passionfruit curd — were expertly crafted and stimulating in just the right way after the courses that had preceded them.
Guests are told to allot three hours for dinner at Atelier. We were there for a good extra hour and a half, but the food gave us much to talk about.
We didn’t dig into Atelier’s well-regarded wine list, but we heard the restaurant’s sommelier dispensing good information and we each enjoyed a top-notch cocktail, one boozy and the other alcohol-free.
Having been ahead of the curve for so long, Atelier has seen rivals, more so on the national and international dining scenes, make their own modernist inroads. I do think it’s harder than it was in 2008 or 2009 to be cutting-edge.
That said, based on what I ate at the culinary championships and at Atelier, I’d say Lepine still cooks like a two-time national champion at his restaurant. Only his other restaurant THRU, which somehow doesn’t hamper Atelier’s greatness, and chef-owner Briana Kim’s restaurant Alice are in Atelier’s league, in Ottawa and perhaps even beyond.
ALSO
Macarons et Madeleines announces closure after nine years
Best bets, Feb. 6-12: Dreamy alt-pop by Jasmine Trails, a tropical party at Kichesippi Beer
Why so many in Ottawa are making art about a lesbian couple’s ‘outrageous bravery’