Restaurant review: Table One is an occasion when food becomes art
Credit to Author: Mia Stainsby| Date: Wed, 11 Dec 2019 19:00:09 +0000
Where: Boulevard Kitchen & Oyster Bar, 845 Burrard Street, 604-642-2900
When: Every two months
Cooking can be art and Table One, I’d say, is just that.
The intimate dinner for eight at Boulevard Kitchen happens every couple of months with top-tier corporate chef Alex Chen and a guest chef. It’s performance art that struts its hour (or three) upon the stage and then is gone.
The culinary journey of 10 to 12 courses progresses with commentary and it’s meant to be a gobsmacking experience with wine matches by J.P. Potters, general manager and sommelier.
Roger Ma, left, and Alex Chen, restaurant chef and corporate chef at Boulevard Kitchen & Oyster Bar. Photo: Leila Kwok.
But first, the cost. It’s $500 per person. A larger group would amortize costs but Chen wants a bespoke experience.
“It’s about building relationships with customers, with groups that are small enough to tell stories about what we’re cooking and take them on a journey,” says Chen. “It’s about pushing myself to the next level, reinventing myself.”
I attended a Table One dinner last month with Chen and the Boulevard restaurant chef Roger Ma cooking. (A Daniel Boulud alum.) Each presented five dishes in a progression and pastry chef Kenta Takahashi ended the meal with two spectacular desserts. Eight of us sat at the restaurant’s raw bar, transfixed. During Table One, it’s more like an awe bar.
After a cocktails and hors d’oeuvres, Ma served a dish that won him gold this year at The Great Canadian Kitchen Party competition — honey mussel gratinée with sea urchin custard, Yukon gold potato, scallion terrine in clam and mussel nectar broth.
Then a parade of little beauties: Chen’s Dungeness crab with bonita crème fraîche and persimmon. “Crab gets tasty with super umami when it gets cold,” he said. Lovely. Then onward: habachi-grilled otoro plated with a creamy shiso bavarois and yuzu oroshi (think snow); terrine of beef tongue, foie gras, hamachi and sunchoke, a sophisticated execution with braised tongue, lightly torched, cured hamachi and foie gras.
Ma elevated potato gnocchi to luxury status with Nova Scotia lobster, mascarpone and white Alba truffles; Chen’s chicken wing stuffed with bacon and black truffles with porcino oil-infused mayo dip; and Ma’s confit of squid stuffed with merguez sausage with lebneh za’atar, couscous croquette and pepper ketchup.
Chen transformed halibut, lightly curing and poaching in duck fat at a low, slow cook, and it was uncommonly tender plated with an umami-filled sauce of razor, Manila and geoduck clams with verjus, white wine, fennel pollen, and cream for “oceanic umami.”
Poularde Albufera: black truffle mousse, braised leg stuffed pasta from Table One. Photo: Leila Kwok.
Then Ma’s poularde Albufera (chicken with Albufera sauce, a veloute with meat glaze) served with braised leg-stuffed pasta, black winter truffle mousse, swiss chard gratin — bright and clean in presentation and flavours.
Meanwhile, Chen’s babying what looks like balloons with big belly buttons, slow cooking in a pot on low simmer. It’s celeriac en vessie which will be part of his white truffles and blanquette de veau dish. Celeriac was gently cooking inside inflated pig bladders, a French technique for slow, moist cooking.
Says Chen: “My wife and I went to Eleven Madison Park (three Michelin star restaurant in New York) and they did it there with green asparagus. I thought if it’s good enough for Eleven Madiso … I came fully jacked and needed to do en vessie. I thought it’s important to share my appreciation for classic cuisine or it’s going to be lost.” Talk about a show stopper.
Pastry chef Kenta Takahashi then appeared to plate two desserts and soon, guests realized he’s a rising star if not completely risen and shining. (He previously worked at Thierry Patisserie after arriving from Japan.)
Pastry chef Kenta Takahashi’s handmade glasslike plate with delicate sugar-blown pear. Photo: Leila Kwok.
The dessert that blew minds featured a handmade glasslike plate and a delicate sugar-blown pear (both edible) made by the pastry chef made with sugar, liquid glucose and isomalt. On the plate, poached pear, “ginger ale” ( ginger syrup sparkling from citric acid and baking soda), and tonka bean ice cream. And the kicker — that blown sugar pear with pop rocks inside.
“I’ve seen pear sugar work before but I wanted to make it more delicate and shiny,” Takahashi says. He couldn’t fill it with a creamy filling without risk of dissolution so he put dry pop rocks at the bottom.
“This is just for Table One,” he says. “It’s how to make people feel special. I try to bring new ideas every time.”
He was inspired to make the sugar works after a visit to a glass museum in Japan, he says. “I didn’t think at the time it would work.” Isomalt, he says, keeps the structure from getting sticky and dissolving with humidity.
Pastry chef Kenta Takahashi’s jasmine tea cream inside a sculptural white chocolate piece, topped with mango chips, poached lychee and mango sauce. Photo: Leila Kwok
He made jasmine tea cream in a sculptural white chocolate piece and topped it with mango chips, poached lychee and mango sauce for a second dessert. . The beauty’s in the convergence of flavours and his manipulation of the prime grade tea from Taiwan.
The tea’s delicate floral aroma of rose and lavender needs fat to translate into stronger mouth flavour, he says. “I infused jasmine tea into cream and let it sit overnight. I whipped it with white chocolate,” he says.
And to finish the meal, some mignardise — so often unsung as the fullness of such a meal sets in.
Chen plans to keep Table One going once every couple of months. (Check the website for upcoming ones.)
“Eventually I can see an evolution where it could be in Alaska or somewhere on a beach and portable but until that next phase, we’re strictly in the raw bar using the best ingredients, the best techniques and being on point. We’ll tell stories and connect.”
Adam Pegg of La Quercia will be teaming up with him for one of them. “He’s one of the best pasta chefs in Canada, his stuff is so amazing. I have mad respect for him,” says Chen.
So much respect that Chen, as a fully fledged chef, did a stage in Pegg’s kitchen before taking the job at Boulevard.
And, he says, ducks are being lined up for another Boulevard-like project.