Review - Toronto Life Magazine
Wednesday, June 01, 2005

Restaurant Guide / Bar and Pub Battleship grey is the colour for walls, floor, ceiling, bar, booths and banquettes. It’s a dull background for a small lounge that takes sex as its central theme—from blurry projected soft porn to an orgiastic painting to a brass stripper’s pole. Given the cheesy milieu, the food is surprisingly sophisticated. Chef Sam Gassira (Bloom) designed the menu of 10 appetizer-sized savoury dishes ($8–$17) and four desserts ($7–$8), and still watches over its execution. A rich phyllo pouch filled with sweet five-spiced onion is a fine foil for pungent goat cheese and crisp pear dressed in honey. Bacon and radicchio spark a creamy, beautifully textured risotto. A piquant dark chocolate sauce flatters the flavour of juicy baked quail. Pepper and salt dominate many dishes, most obviously in a match of tender veal escalopes with white asparagus and champagne beurre. Desserts play with retro notions—yummy banana split, perhaps, or crème brûlée, its texture jeopardized by an embarrassment of mango. Ten wines come by the glass, half-litre or bottle, but most of the crowd is working its way through cocktails with names like Mid-life Crisis and Playmate. Closed Sunday and Monday.