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| Epicurious |
"It’s perfect for an elderly anniversary," Hilary whispered, as we looked around the room. I was afraid to ask her what she considered elderly, but it’s true that the decor, menu and service at the 32-seat Epicurious Morsels all have a formal feel. The floor looks like original hardwood, there are big mirrors on the walls and large vases hold arrangements of twigs. On the glass-topped tables are fresh flowers and oil lamps, and a wall of windows affords a view out onto the street.
The menu is quite large, with 22 choices among appetizers, soups and salads, and after several minutes of deliberation, I told our waiter we were ready to order apps.
"Chef prefers that you order your entire meal at once," he said. Our waiter, Daniel, obviously knows the menu here, but at times he seemed a bit, I was going to say flustered, but that’s not quite right. For a while, I thought he was affected by serving three attractive young women, but it may just be impossible to look comfortable while performing this style of service, which includes handing out cutlery one piece at a time.
OK, appetizers. Kathleen’s crab cakes — "oven-baked and lightly spiced" — had a pleasingly crisp thin crust and were very tasty, but a house-made tartar sauce had an overwhelmingly strong flavour of dill, and was left behind.
Cobb salad included generous chunks of perfectly ripe avocado and wonderfully pungent blue cheese, and incorporated mixed greens rather than romaine, but turkey advertised as smoked just seemed processed.
Between courses, we enjoyed two baskets of a fresh, crunchy baguette and, wrapped in mint leaf, scoops of a rich raspberry sorbet, closer to gelato than snow cone in texture.
Two entrees stood out: a breast of duck with honey and coriander sauce was the tenderest piece of duck I can remember, and the earthy taste of coriander combined with the sweetness of the honey worked perfectly with the duck and a cylinder of Szechuan noodles.
Also excellent was Tessa’s Mediterranean linguine, tossed with sun-dried cranberries, olives, pecans, feta, onions, mushrooms, grapes and sweet peppers. There’s certainly a lot going on in this dish, but the result is a vibrant, bright, fresh taste.
Not quite hitting the mark were the seafood chowder and a pepper steak, which needed the strong sauce to impart any flavour to the meat, and came with very dry duchesse potatoes.
Hits and misses among desserts, too. Boca negra chocolate cake, which literally means "black mouth," and which is made with bourbon at Epicurious Morsels, is a darkly, delicious treat. White mocha mousse is airy and truly excellent, while an open-faced apple pie was just so-so and a creme brulee needed more time under the blowtorch.
There’s no Nova Scotia wine here, not even any Canadian wine, so we stuck to water. Plus the girls are all a year away from being able to order a glass of wine. Three-course meals for four, including tax and tip, totalled $179. I’d take my mother to Epicurious Morsels, but probably not teenagers.
