Atelier
540 Rochester St., Ottawa, 613-321-3537,
atelierrestaurant.ca
,
instagram.com/atelierottawa
,
thru.tickit.ca
Open:
Dining room closed due to COVID-19, but the restaurant is staging drive-thru dinners on Saturdays and Sundays
Price:
$100 plus tax per person for a five-course blind tasting menu with non-alcoholic drink pairings; reservations are capped at 10 cars each night
Before the coming of the COVID-19 crisis, grabbing a drive-thru snack was one of this restaurant critic’s guilty pleasures, usually involving a late-night impulse purchase of fries that would gobbled down only to precede a few fitful hours of sleep.
But on Saturday night, we put on our best going-outside clothes and buckled our seat belts in anticipation of fine dining fare, served drive-through style.
Marc Lepine, chef-owner of Atelier on Rochester Street and two-time winner of the Canadian Culinary Championships, had closed his acclaimed restaurant’s dining room in mid-March, in keeping with governmental mandates. But in early May, Lepine announced on Instagram that he would re-open, not to offer takeout or delivery orders as other upscale restaurants have done, but to serve a five-course tasting menu plus non-alcoholic drink pairings to gastronomes willing to eat in their cars.
Leave it to Lepine, who was chosen in 2018 as the country’s most innovative chef by Canada’s 100 Best Restaurants magazine, to propose this whimsical re-think of what fine dining could be during a global pandemic that has made physical distancing necessary. Following last Saturday’s inaugural go, he will be offering drive-thru Atelier dinners for the foreseeable future on Saturdays and Sundays, via tickets that even at $100 are likely to sell out quickly online.
In January, back when life was normal, I had the usual at Atelier in its cozy but stark dining room, meaning an anything-but-usual 12-course dinner of surprising, cutting-edge creations brought to our table by polished servers who could discuss the intricacies of Lepine’s food.
In front of Atelier on Saturday, we were among a lineup of 10 cars filled with people wondering how the Atelier experience would translate to in-vehicle eating.
Each of us received a bag filled with plastic cutlery, napkins and straws, and then the first of five courses in premium takeout containers we could later return to our server for recycling. Our masked and gloved server, who also prepared our drinks, handed us each course in turn with a cheery description. Then we ambled to the parking lot beside Atelier, parked, and enjoyed.
Dinner inside Atelier typically began with a course of three amuse-bouche snacks. For the drive-thru, Lepine pulled off an impressive equivalent, which consisted of a refined mini-souffle with a burst of crab and citrus flavours, a deftly seasoned chunk of wild boar belly paired with anise foam, and, most abstractly of all, a square of pea and tarragon topped with walnut and celeriac puree.
After our snacks, around the block we went, pulling up to Atelier for the second course of sockeye salmon cured with sesame and chili oil, garnished with grains of “mushroom fried” puffed rice, pickled daikon and two purees, edamame and coconut-cashew. The meltingly tender fish was practically ideal, and its accompaniments spoke to the kitchen’s deft technique and artful plating, plastic container notwithstanding.
Our third course was vegetable-heavy, showcasing asparagus, crisp strands of potato, tomatoes, bits of mushroom and a just-coagulated sous-vide-cooked egg yolk. The final savoury course featured slices of beef brisket, which had just a bit more chew to it than we would have liked but also a huge amount of charred, delectable flavour due to its glaze. A carrot-jus reduction bolstered the meat, and some roasted carrots were extraordinarily good.
Before the dessert, there was a bit of cleverness that, not to disclose too much, involved a squeegee kid who wasn’t a squeegee kid and a parking ticket that wasn’t a parking ticket, both riffing on the dinner’s drive-thru aspect. Dessert, which even required a masked Lepine to administer some liquid nitrogen, I think, to make some instant ice cream, looked like a brown mish-mash but was a chocolate-y treat teeming with textures and novelties.
Normally, I’d be tempted by the wine pairings at Atelier. The drive-thru’s non-alcoholic beverages ranged from a sparkling matcha tea on ice with yuzu and ginger to a sugar-forward rooibos and lime strawberry shrub to a cross between a tomato juice and martini to a Vietnamese sweet tea with condensed milk, sour cherry and masala chai simple syrup.
We were done eating in about 90 minutes, roughly half the time of a pre-pandemic dinner at Atelier. We were also quite full.
Given how much hardship COVID-19 has caused, it can seem privileged in the extreme to bemoan the loss of fine dining to the pandemic.
But there are reasons just the same to be glad about what Atelier has pulled off. The restaurant’s drive-thru experiment demonstrated that Lepine, like us, is up to the challenge of making the best of things in trying times, while the remarkableness of his dinner showed that even while in quarantine, we could be delighted.