Having had a great lunch at Banu earlier in the day and a lengthy nap in the afternoon, Damir and I celebrated my birthday at Amuse-Bouche, a fabulous little restaurant in our neighbourhood that opened last year on the spot of Susur Lee’s former Lotus restaurant by Jason Inniss and Bertrand Alepee, both formerly at The Fifth.

We’ve only been to Amuse-Bouche once before, and on that occasion we each ordered a starter and a main; since they specialize in small, perfectly-prepared dishes, we ended up stopping at the pub on the way home so that Damir could eat another course or two. This time, we decided to order the 7-course chef’s tasting menu, or what Damir referred to as the “Fear Factor menu”.

The food was outstanding. First was the amuse-bouche, which was not part of the tasting menu but is served to everyone: a lobster panna cotta with a small pile of chopped lobster meat on top, served in ceramic Chinese soup spoon. Just two bites, but a great hint of what lay ahead. We ordered a half bottle of the Vitteault-Alberti Cremant de Bourgogne sparkling wine to get things kicked off, and toasted my birthday.

The tasting menu started with the chilled fennel consommé with a thin (but quite large) slice of white tuna, topped with a tapenade crisp with olive oil and chipotle emulsion. This would have been much better on a hot summer evening than the chilly rainy one that we had; I liked it but found it incompatible with the weather, and Damir wasn’t keen on the broth and left some behind.

After this inauspicious start, we moved on to venison tartar “millefeuille”: raw minced venison with an ultra-thin potato crisp on top, accompanied by truffled mustard “ice cream” and cornichon beignet. The venison was perfect: velvety and tasty, and the smoky mustard blended with it nicely. The tempura-friend cornichon was a bit odd, and too greasy for both of our tastes, but otherwise this was Damir’s favourite of the appetizers.

The third appetizer of the night was perfectly pan-seared Quebec foie gras, served with the tiniest wedge of a ginger-infused French toast, a spot of white port jelly, and other tasty dots of flavour on the plate. Like the other plates, the decorative dots and swirls turned out to be incredibly tasty garnishes. I love foie gras, and this was my fave appetizer.

The fourth and last appetizer was a large scallop — listed as a bay scallop, although large enough to be a small sea scallop — wrapped in smoked duck and pan-seared, and dressed with a morel emulsion. The duck tasted like a very rich and salty bacon, and complemented the scallop well although I found the dish a bit salty overall.

As a palate cleanser between the appetizers and the main, we were served a tiny ball of blueberry and lavender ice: two flavours that I wouldn’t have thought to put together, but really worked.

By now, we’d moved on to a bottle of a 2003 New Zealand Pinot Noir, the name of which I have totally forgotten but it started with an “A” and was 6 or 7 letters long…you wouldn’t think it would be that hard to find, but I haven’t so far. Nice taste of black cherry, complementing the variety of dishes nicely. There’s still something vaguely disturbing, however, about having a waiter in a fine restaurant remove the screwcap of your wine with a flourish.

Our main course was roasted breast of duck with a soursop puree and coffee and cardamom reduction. Beautifully cooked, still rare on the inside, and definitely a winner with both of us.

The cheese course remains a mystery, since I didn’t catch the name of the cheese, but it was tasty: a small round of a quite salty cheese in a thin layer of puff pastry, served warm so that the cheese was quite soft and runny inside.

Last was dessert, the only course that differed between the two of us. Damir had a delicious little crème brulée with fruit garnishes, and I had a rich, dark chocolate mousse/ganache.

After almost three hours and 9 courses (if you count the amuse-bouche and palate cleanser), we definitely didn’t need to visit the pub for a top-up.

As a wonderful complement to the food, the service was sublime. In a tiny space — 10 tables? — there were at least 4 wait-staff, and any one of them might be dropping by the table to top up the wine, clear the plates, bring the next course, fill the water glasses, or fold your napkin if you left the table. We never felt rushed, and had a generous amount of time between courses, but didn’t feel like we were waiting around. The restaurant itself is a lesson in space management: a tiny patio in front (rained out the night we were there), the small number of tables inside, a tiny serving bar along one wall for the staff to open wine or pour drinks, and a kitchen that was no bigger than the small one in my condo. The tables are close-packed, but the result is more cozy than cramped.

Saturday, I turned 46, and had the good fortune of being surrounded by friends and family who like to feed me. After seeing a review for Banu last week and passing it on to Pat, she and Betty decided to take me out for lunch there. The restaurant bills itself as an Iranian Kebob Vodka Bar, and we were not disappointed in any of those respects.

We started with Nan o Paneer, an appetizer plate of sesame flat bread, a sheep’s milk cheese that I had never tasted before, fresh herbs, walnuts and watermelon slices. This was the only dish that I took time to photograph, and only then after we’d demolished most of it; the others were so good that we tucked them back before I even thought of the camera again.

At that point, we moved on to the vodka. There are several varieties on the menu, and they’re served very cold and on ice so that you can sip them with your meal. I had the Wokka Saki from the UK, which is a grain-based vodka flavoured with Japanese sake (LCBO #602573): a distinctive taste of sake, and very smooth. Betty and Pat both had the Zubrowka Bison Grass vodka from Poland, pale greenish-yellow in colour and a really lovely aroma and taste (LCBO #35840). We also had the tiny glasses of fresh juice: sour cherry for Betty and I (yum!) and pomegranate for Pat.

For the main course, I had Koobideh, which was the most delicious minced beef, formed into kebabs, grilled and rolled with herbs in lawash flatbread. All of their meats are from the Healthy Butcher, an organic butcher in my ‘hood, and I don’t know how much of the taste was from the high-quality and organic nature of the meat versus the preparation, but it had an amazing rich taste, and very lean. In addition to a side dish of diced cucumber, tomato and onions in a light herb vinegar dressing, there was a little dish of powdered sumac to sprinkle on the grilled meat. The evening before, I had been walking with Ingrid near her sailing club when the weather turned too rough to sail, and we were looking at the now-ripe sumac and I commented that it was edible but had never eaten it. Now I have, and can say that it imparts a slight citrusy flavour as well as (so I’m told) being a good source of Vitamin C.

Betty had a dish of saffron-infused grilled chicken breast chunks, which I can’t find on the Banu menu online — the lunch menu is slightly different from the dinner one shown there. Very distinctive taste of saffron, as opposed to it just being used as a colouring agent.

Pat, always a “balls to the wall” eater, had Dom Balan, the lamb testicles, which were marinated in vodka before grilling, and served with a tasty pickle side dish. The testicles themselves were reminiscent in flavour to sweetbreads, although a bit too mushy in texture for my liking.

To accompany all of this, we shared an order of Adasi (lentil salad) and Mast o Moseer (yogurt with shallots, served with more lawash flatbread).

At the end of all this, the server delivered some tiny squares of a baklava-like dessert: definitely flavoured with orange-blossom water like a middle-eastern baklava (as opposed to the Greek variety that uses honey), but it seemed to have a layer of crushed nuts in the middle rather than just layers of pastry, and sported a tiny little puffed pillow of pastry on top. Not sure if this is standard practice or because of the birthday cards on the table, but definitely a nice finish to the meal.

The decor is really lovely: all Mediterranean blues and whites, with a small waterfall fountain near our table by the front, and music that could be Iranian pop/jazz or something else entirely. Unfortunately, because of the rain, we didn’t have a chance to smoke the hookah on the patio; I remember smoking a mild, apple-flavoured tobacco through a 3-foot-high hookah in Dubai and was looking forward to repeating the experience, even though I don’t smoke.

Discovered via blogTO.

Some beautiful long-exposure photos of the rides at the CNE by night — you can feel the motion! Via blogTO.

I have a love/hate relationship with Bell Sympatico (DSL, for those of you not in Canada). Most of the time, it just works. When it doesn’t, however, I’ve learned not to call because the customer support people really seem to have no clue about how to troubleshoot problems: their first plan of attack is to have me disassemble my home network, connect my PC directly to the DSL modem instead of the router, and install their bloated and misbehaving Access Manager software to connect. I think not, because I’m usually pretty sure that it’s not my own networking equipment before I call them. Much easier to just latch onto a neighbour’s unsecured wifi for a few hours and wait for Sympatico to sort itself out.

I did have occasion to email their customer support earlier this week with the following question after I couldn’t make things happen the way that I wanted on the web:

My boyfriend recently moved in with me, so cancelled his own Sympatico account. Can we have his Sympatico email address, xxxx@sympatico.ca, associated with my account as a secondary address? I tried to create it as a secondary address but it refused, so I assume that it is reserved for some period after his account was cancelled.

A couple of days later, a response arrived:

Hello Ms. Kemsley,

You have reached Bell Internet Services, my name is Jean-Francois and I appreciate the opportunity to respond in regards to your cancellation request.

Eeeek! Not at all what I asked for!

The message continues with lengthy instructions on all of the information that I need to provide in order to cancel my account, which luckily I am not deemed to have provided even though I emailed to them from inside a logged-in area on their website.

The message finished up with the one bit of information that I actually wanted:

As for your the email address, it cannot be used for another Sympatico account since it will remain in a locked state for a minimum period of six months.

This makes absolutely no sense to me. If I have a Sympatico email address (which I do, but I never use because I don’t like being tied to an ISP’s email system), why shouldn’t I be able to move that email address over to another Sympatico account if I move in with someone who already has Sympatico? Luckily, I had talked Damir into getting his own domain and using that email rather than Sympatico some months ago, so he thinks that he already weaned everyone off the Sympatico address, but if we hadn’t done that, he would have been screwed.