More Scarpettas please.
The original rock star chef was Auguste Escoffier who with hotelier Cesar Ritz created the first star hotel/restaurant combo. in the late l9th century, the pair took London’s Savoy Hotel to dizzying heights. Escoffier was an animateur of cooking, folding it into social and artistic life. After seeing the soprano Nellie Melba in Lohengrin, he was so bowled over by the swan that he dashed back to the kitchen to create Peche Melba, a fantasy of peaches, raspberry sauce, vanilla ice-cream enfolded in the wings of swan carved from ice.
On a more practical level, even a modest hotel/resto combo - by virtue of its steady supply of diners- is a great training ground. In Toronto, Susur Lee started out in the kitchen of pioneering chef Gunter Gugelmeier at the Westbury Hotel. Jamie Kennedy, Marc Thuet, Gordon Mackie, all did time at Three Small Rooms in the Windsor Arms Hotel, where Joanne Kates had a gig before becoming restaurant critic for the Globe and Mail. Even so, until Scott Conant’s Scarpetta opened recently at the Thompson Hotel, Toronto never had the kind of star combo comparable to say, Jean-Georges Vongerichten at New York’s Trump Hotel, Helene Durrozes at London’s Connaught Hotel, Alain Ducasse at Paris’ Plaza Athenee – hotels designed for gastronomes.
For the most part, Toronto is dominated by the international businessman-driven chain – gosh how great, the Hilton’s got a Ruth’s Chris! – with serviceable food. I put this to the test by going to Signatures at the Intercontinental Hotel on Bloor W. Visitors paying up to $3,500 a night would, I thought, insure a good restaurant – businessmen being among the keenest diners out. The result surprised me.
The Intercontinental has the kind of faux elegance of a mall. I enter the almost empty ginger-marble lobby and sniff the air – floral Glade over disinfectant. The atmosphere is “as restful as an undiscovered tomb” as Henry Higgins sang in My Fair Lady – Glacial silence continues into the almost empty Signatures, no welcoming maitre d’ in sight, a curious two-level dining room overlooking the charming courtyard (great lunching place). Without help, I spot my friends who sit in splendid isolation. Menu intriguingly off kilter. What is a Euro Bass? No it’s not the rock group but one of the many many fish called bass. And I see olive rocks are advertised with the salad.
We divide our order, one from the regular menu, the others from the prix fixe, the $35 Sound of Music Menu designed for diners headed across Bloor W. to the popular Telus Centre.
The prix fixe appetizers are good: lemongrass,coconut and ginger soup with chicken, lime, coriander is pungent and hearty. Grilled asparagus is fresh and the Niagara prosciutto chewable but why wasn’t it plated in languid slices?
First surprise: the regular menu’s $10 baby lettuce salad. My gastric juices race in anticipation of lettuce as limpid as the aristocracy, little leaves dissolving delicately in mouth. Oh no, what arrives is a large plate of coarse greased weeds. The techno-emotional tricks, lime sheets, lime juice and gelatin pressed into a sheet, and Olive rocks, tapioca flour and EVOO , disappoint. Th e Lime sheets look like shrimp puffs and are as tasteless. Olive rocks turn out to be olivey breadcrumbs.
The prix fixers are delighted with their entrees. Six ounces of medium rare Angus beef sirloin is judged perfect and so are the smoked pureed potatoes, bacon, onions, mushrooms and sauteed grapes. A filet of herbed Charmulla (a spicy mix) Euro Bass is poised atop a gallimaufry of summer vegetables including purple potatoes.
Second surprise: I’m eating the vegetarian dish $18, a tower of layered eggplant, courgettes, slabs of undercooked red, green,yellow pepper almost drowned in a bath of watercress sauce and accompanied by a large barely cooked tomato on the vine.
Tiring of our exclusive tomb, we take our desserts outside where there is a jolly buzz (no music).Who’s managing this joint? Common sense advises that customers be urged to eat outside where the atmosphere is so much pleasanter. Dense chocolate layered rum cake is trumped by cafe au lait blancmange, a heavier panna cotta. The Rice crispy and caramel Maple Tower $9 has the not unpleasing consistency of shaving cream but anyone with shaky teeth shouldn’t attempt the sticky base.
Thoughts: Why the startling disparity between prix fixe and regular menu? Scarpetta’s arrived none too soon. Hope it gooses Signatures which is about as inert a restaurant as can be imagined.
1 1/2 *Signatures at the Intercontinental hotel 220 Bloor St W. 416-960-5200
wheelchair accessible. Dinner for two, food plus tax $76.
