Wild Boar Bacon & Hudson Bay Pickerel

The Everest Cafe might have been mediocre (see yesterday), but when I ate with other members of the tour, at places picked by people who know more than I do about Toronto, the meals were much better. So much better than I didn't feel like taking notes, which dampens the urge to write in detail later. At Chiado on West College St., I ate fish caught off the coast of Portugal, drank Portuguese wine and noticed that even the sugar packets on the table were imported from Portugal. The art on the walls, I was told, borrowed themes from the old country. Even the name was a Portuguese detail: Chiado is a square in Lisbon. The restaurant of the same name in Toronto is in a Portuguese neighborhood.

I haven't spent nearly enough time in Portugal. None, in fact, unless you count Macao under nominal Portuguese administration. None of the places I've lived have large diaspora populations, either, so my exposure to Portuguese cuisine is fairly limited -- a couple of places in Massachusetts, and that pigeon I ate in Macao. So it was good to go to Canada to experience something Portuguese. Chiado is as excellent as its web site would have you believe.

The next night, all of us ate at Perigee, a place tucked away at The Distillery. And I mean tucked away: the signage might be deliberately meager as part of the restaurant's cachet. Read about it here in more detail than I can muster, but I agree with the reviewer that it's a jim-dandy place. Shoot, it even has a name chef, even though this is his first big gig.

I picked my meal based on how unusual the description sounded. Langoustine as the appetizer: "Seared langoustine topped with wild boar bacon over roasted blue foot chanterelle mushrooms with butter poached asparagus, rhubarb purée and tatsoi greens tossed with preserved Meyer lemon." It had me at wild boar bacon, and my only complaint is that there was only one slice of it.

For the entree, Hudson Bay pickerel: "Roast fillet of pickerel with a salad of Dungeness crab and celery spaghetti over an artichoke purée in a crab bisque." Pickerel isn't something I see much, or ever, on menus, though I understand it isn't a rare fish in certain North American waters. In terms of taste, persentation, etc., it was a fine choice. What got me, though, was its Hudson Bay origin. Remote, enormous, essential to giving Canada -- and North America, for that matter -- its distinctive two-lobe shape.