My best friend lives in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. Despite meeting her over Zoom every Saturday since 2018, I’ve only seen her in person a handful of times. So when she came to visit me this Spring we decided to do something deeply silly to celebrate. Ottawa is not known for its high sophistication, but we do, apparently, have a restaurant that serves 44-course dinners. The four-hour seating sounded perfect for a thorough catch-up.
I’ve walked past Atelier nearly every day for years thinking it was a condemned house. It’s just across from the Booth Street complex, the old Canadian government geology district that is being razed, and it had a grated window, no sign, and kind of a rusty staircase railing. Rough-blasted boulders form the yard. You have to know it’s there, is what I’m saying.
Inside it felt more like a brunch place. I chose the mocktail pairing, she the full wine pairing, and we sat down to it. Can you all just clear your minds and be present in social occasions? I had a work assignment on my mind and it took a full hour to stop talking about it. Anyway, the food.
I do not have a refined palate. I’m just as happy to eat something with one or two ingredients as twelve, and I don’t have a big need for variety. But what I realized that night was that taste can be intellectually challenging. Eating at home, or at a habitual café, you basically know what to expect before you even take a sip or a bite. Going out to a regular restaurant, you might have two or three surprises—the first bite of your main course, the first sip of a drink, and maybe a dessert.
But when there are 44 dishes and a dozen drinks, the novelty accumulates until your brain realizes it’s in an environment where it has to learn. It snaps into a receptive state of consciousness. Visuals are no guide to taste in this type of restaurant; nor are the elaborate, storied descriptions the waiters come with (“The pesto and sundried tomatoes are an ode to the 1990s”). I’ve never closed my eyes so much – it was a natural thing to do, I needed to block out distraction.
Some of the dishes felt a bit like stunts. You had to extrude apple sauce into liquid nitrogen until it became a type of frozen noodle and then put it in your butternut squash soup, where it quickly became apple sauce again. When it came to the after-dessert fruit-leather balloon that you had to breathe in, I was convinced there would be some kind of charming vapor-based flavor to take with me into the night air. Instead it was helium. Still, nothing as silly as the dessert course my father once experienced in Italy, where he donned a cellophane glove and the dessert was sprayed into his hand.
By the time the last ‘wave’ (courses 39-43) arrived, I was horribly weighted down. The last thing I wanted was some kind of rich chocolate truffle and ice cream. I started to see the wisdom in the vomitoria of the Roman orgy and got briefly side-tracked over whether the residual bile on the tastebuds could be incorporated into the subsequent cuisine. All I needed was some more room and I could complete my education for the night, but as it was, I knew I was making myself a bit ill.
Overall, the night brought me round to the value of tasting menus. It felt a bit like walking out of a session at TED, with a brain full of ideas worth sharing. On that note, here at the Last Word on Nothing, we have a whole photo album from occasions when members of our far-flung contributor network have briefly coincided in space and time. Nobody has made it to my place—mostly because I lived in the sub-Arctic for a decade of my LWON tenure—but if any of them do find themselves here in Ottawa, I know where I’m going to take them.