Maison Louis Jadot at The Berlin

I can’t stop writing about Berlin! But this time I mean the restaurant in Kitchener, Ontario, and not the city in Germany. They are now holding the following events:

The Berlin is excited to announce our new dining series “Upstairs at The Berlin” in our second floor gallery. Each dinner we will focus on the unique aspects of wine/beer and food culture to celebrate and be led by the community of chefs, farmers, foragers/producers, wine and beer makers/ambassadors/sommeliers, writers and epicureans who contribute to our ever growing culinary scene here in Kitchener-Waterloo/Ontario/Canada.

Arrival Reception/Meet and Greet to begin at 6:00 p.m, with our casual, fun and interactive dinner to start at 7:00 p.m, where guests will be seated at communal tables for maximum mingling.
Beer Dinners – $85 – 4 courses, 4 Beers
Wine Dinners – $105 – 4 courses, 4 Wines

We signed up for one featuring wines from France’s Louis Jadot winery.

On entry to the upstairs, we were greeted and offered a glass of either the 2014 Chardonnay from Macon Village or the 2014 Gamay / Pinot Noir blend. We split the difference and got to try both—very pleasant wines.

There was also a welcome spread of amazing Raspberry point oysters, goat cheese, and a cut of meat slow-braised to pâté-like consistency. Everyone was just milling about, and we got into a nice conversation with someone I worked with a couple companies and quite few years ago—good memory for faces (on his part, not mine)!

(And we had been hoping that the upstairs would be a little quieter than downstairs, but it wasn’t, so much. So everyone had to speak up.)

We then selected spots at two long communal tables. We hadn’t previously met any of the people we ended up sitting with, but some had interesting ties to the food and wine being served (farmers or fathers of wine reps), others had visited the region of France being featured (which we haven’t), and everyone was quite interesting.

The first pour was a Pouilly-Fussé, which I don’t think of as my favourite wine, but this was a very nice, fresh example. We heard briefly from The Berlin’s sommelier, than the representative from Louis Jadot explained the region, the history of the company, and the particularities of this wine. (Including that it’s actually a Chardonnay. Did you know that? I hadn’t known that.) This particular one is not branded as Louis Jadot, because while they bought this small winery, they decided to leave the original branding and management in place. It traditionally and still has a woman who does the wine-making,

The first course served with it were bay scallops seasoned with dried apricot, cucumber, mustard seed, and hazelnut yogourt. Chef Jonathan Gushu came out to explain that he used the smaller bay scallops instead of the usual showy sea scallops, because they had a more true seafood flavor this time of year. And that was correct. Lovely dish with sharp flavors.

Bay Scallops, Dried Apricot, Mustard Seed — Bay scallops and friends

At this point I should mention that Jean and I chose to take the iXpress bus to the restaurant and a taxi back. So that while it would have been possible to stick with the modest initial pourings of each wine, taste everything, and still be fine to drive home, we were glad that our not driving meant could enjoy the wine top-ups generously provided.

Speaking of which, next on offer was the 2013 Marsannay Clos Du Roy, which is a Pinot Noir, and of the lighter, dry style that is common with this grape. This one also had nice complexity, and I could see it suiting a wide variety of food.

What we got was a classic Pinor Noir pairing of duck—specifically, duck pâté en croute with shallot jam. Jean declared it the best dish of its type ever, and I also can’t recall a better one.

The next wine was the same grape from the same house—except that it could have been from another planet, it was that different from the previous wine. The wine rep explained that, yes, this was what so typical and mystifying about this wine region: That mere kilometres apart, wines could be so very different. And also that some of the plots (like the Beaune ones) are tiny and specialize in the one thing they do best. This was our special wine of the evening, the 2007 (great year in France) Beaune Close Des Ursules Pinot Noir. Rich, delicious, stunning… And yes, we got refills. (It’s not available at LCBO, of course, but the Beaune wines they do have start at $90. I think the $105 for this dinner was a pretty good deal.)

Blow your socks off Pinot Noire ... Yes! that good. — No leftovers of this one

We also got food with this. 🙂 That would be the smoked beef strip loin, courtesy of the farmers opposite us, who raise in them in the best possible conditions, all grass fed and whatnot. Served with leek and shallot puree. And while beef will never be my favourite item, the smoking made it more interesting, and it was nice cut of meat.

Keeping her eye on the prize while Jonathan talks! — Chef Jonathan Gushu behind me. His cooking philosophy is to work wih the best ingredients and allow their own character through.

For dessert we got to stretch, as they laid out a buffet of various cheeses along with sweets such as creme brulée, macaroons, strawberries, and caramel popcorn. Both the savoury fan (Jean) and the sweet fan (me of course; for who is sweeter than I? 🙂 were pleased with our options. The creme caramel was, in Gushu style, just perfect texture cream, sugar, and eggs, with no exotic flavors to mess with that basis. And the macaroons and popcorn… I had to go back for more of both.

Too Much of Everything ... but particularly cheese :) — We loaded up but still needed refills

Our wine with that was the Chateau des Jacques 2011 Moulin a Vent, which is a Gamay, and is available from LCBO (for about $34).

All in all a lovely evening. I hope this series continues.

Dining in Berlin

The Hackescher Markt area of Berlin is the one end we ended up dining in the most. We went there first on the Monday, aiming for an Italian restaurant named Muret La Barba. We knew it was wise to try to arrive before the peak dining timing of 8:00 pm, but we were still figuring out the transit system then and weren’t able to meet that deadline. And therefore weren’t able to get a table.

For the next night, we made a reservation. That was tricky, as they were pretty busy that night as well, but we did nab one for 6:30 pm. When we arrived we were offered a table we’d have to vacate by 8:00, or we could sit in the bar area by the window and stay as long as we’d like. Jean selected the window because he thought it was a better spot anyway—he has trouble with accents and hadn’t caught that it also allowed us to eat at leisure.

A few things we gradually learned about dining out in Berlin:

They just don’t bring you your bill until you ask for it.
Berliners tend to like to linger over their meals, so if the place is full at 7:30, you’re likely not getting in at all that day.
Your server will speak at least some English, but don’t count on an English menu being available. Might be, might not.
The Google Translate app allows you to use phone’s camera to translate Germans “on the fly” into English.
Getting credit cards accepted is not so much a problem as it used to be. But, there is no tip option. You have to tell the server in advance how much tip to add to the credit card bill. (Typical tip rates there are 5 to 10%.)
If tipping in cash, you don’t just leave it on the table. You give it to the server.

We hadn’t figured all of that out by Tuesday, however, and were still wondering why the constant delay in getting our bill, and ended up not leaving a tip despite the fine service. Oops.

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Berlin, mon amour

Tuesday morning. It’s cold. It’s raining. The museum lineup has slowed to a crawl, as groups of school children gain entry ahead of us. Jean has lapsed into a grumpy silence. My mood is darkening accordingly.

“Good Lord,” I think. “This is going to be a long week.”

Continue reading →

More Sonos

Sonos, you might recall, is an app-controlled, multi-room, wireless speaker system. I got my first speaker, a Play 5, for Christmas, and installed in the kitchen.

I was happy enough with it overall to expand the system as my birthday present this year. We got a single Play 1 speaker for the bedroom, and a Sonos Connect for the living room stereo system. So now I could finally try the multi-room feature.

Generally, it’s pretty easy to set up and use. Whenever you want to play the same music in more than one room, you “group” the speakers. This doesn’t work only with the native queues, but with whatever you’re choosing to play through Sonos: a radio station or a line-in application. It took a little while to figure how differing queues behaved with the grouping and ungrouping, but I think I get that now.

So the only big gap in that functionality—for us, anyway—is that you can’t set Sonos alarms as a group. So even though we set both bedroom and kitchen to start CBC Radio at the same time each morning, they’re never completely in sync. So in parts of the house where you can hear both, you get these weird echoes. Can be fixed by manually grouping the speakers, but it’s a bother having to do that daily.

Jean had also discovered, at some point, that with a paid Google Play Music account, you can send music right from that Google Play Music app to Sonos, without having to go through the Sonos app. This is a feature I’ve become quite fond of—it’s just faster to do that (for anything I don’t already have queued), plus the MusixMatch lyrics then works in automated mode!

google-play-music

That definitely gave Google Play another edge Spotify as the music service I’m willing to pay a monthly fee for—that, and its free cloud storage of my own music (even though that doesn’t work perfectly). Now, Spotify does have more and better playlists, nicer social functionality, and sometimes gets new music just a little faster than Google does. But I still wasn’t quite convinced to pay monthly for both, especially as you can do quite a bit with free Spotify (though playing it through Sonos isn’t one of those things).

As for the fact that Sonos doesn’t give access to play counts and dates—that’s bothering me less than I thought it would. The geeky solutions I looked up were a little too geeky for me, so I just do a little manual kludging to get an approximation of my previously automated “smart” playlists. But with the streaming, I also simply have a lot more ways to listen to new music than I used to.

I recently filled in a Sonos survey rating their current features and noting what else I’d like. At the end was the more demographic stuff—age, gender, education, the usual—then a series of questions I wasn’t expecting. How much do the following statements describe me?

I like to travel to learn about new cultures
I enjoy trying different types of foods and cuisines
Healthy and nutritious eating is important
Music is a major part of my life

So, OK,, that describes me a lot.

But would you have guessed that being an adventurous / nutritious eater who likes travel makes you more likely to want an app-controlled wireless speaker for your house? Like, how are those things connected?

music-food_wide-4a80c157cf170cad2ec0ec96151473d90c5d9794-s700-c85

Dinner party

As we’ve established, planning a party is hard. No, it’s not hard to say BYOB and order a few pizzas, but when it comes to any parties larger than that–dinner parties, holiday parties, weddings–there are a lot of moving pieces. There are guest lists and menus and seating arrangements and invitations and possibly staff, all weighed against the ultimate stress of any party: money. So every party, generally, is a balance of all those things. It’s an experience that makes the most people possible happy without the hosts going broke.

Uncommon Courtesy Blog

So, I don’t do it all that often, the planning of a dinner party.

Well, that’s not really true. Planning them—at least to the extent of musing about having one—I do pretty regularly. Actually carrying through on those plans is what’s rare.

But last weekend, such a unicorn occurred. I had been thinking of trying to reprise some of the more “gourmet” dishes we try out at new year’s for a larger group people. And about the fact that we had some friends that we’d never had over for dinner before—some had never even seen our house. And we mixed those folks with some people we hadn’t seen in a while.

That added up to six guests, plus the two of us, which is really two more people than fit around our dining room table. So we had to do a table addendum:

In terms of food, I went mostly with tapas-style items. This gave variety, and most items could be largely prepared ahead. Downside was a variety of dishes to prepare, which took up a fair chunk of the weekend:

Vegetarian spring rolls
Edamame with sea salt
Lamb skewers with mint pesto
Seared tuna with avocado and orange
Wild rice with fruit and nuts

The wild rice was the one item we’d never prepared before, added so we’d have enough food, basically. It was probably least successful. It was a bit mushy, a bit too sweet. (No, none of the guests complained. That’s my assessment.) Everything else was quite good, though. People went back for more.

For wines, we just opened a nice Ontario Riesling, a French Beaujolais (light red), and an Ontario Sangiovese, followed by a French Vacqueyras, so people could take what they would. The music playlist was a Sonos-assembled, timed segue: “high-energy” songs to start the evening, pre-dinner; “thoughtful” (quirky pop) music during the main course, then “romance” for dessert, coffee, and post-dinner relaxation.

As for dessert, that was dark or white chocolate bark with fruit and nuts (dark was much better), chocolate souffle, and grapes—frozen and not. Frozen grapes is something Jean has gotten into that was a novelty for most. Also made for some interesting conversation, adding to the very wide range of topics discussed all evening.

So, I think that was successful. But I’m not quite ready to start musing about the next one.

Pictures! Food, cities, people

Looking over Jean’s recent photos inspired me to write an activity update…

Toronto

We spent a weekend in Toronto at the end of January. We were blessed with unseasonably (though not unusually, this year) warm weather, which must have pleased these residents:

But people were still able to skate:

Things you do expect in Toronto — Isn’t this photo gorgeous?

And we enjoyed dinner at Ki Restaurant again—with the same great waitress as last time.

Tai with truffle oil and cranberry ponzu — Tai with truflle oil and cranberry ponzu

Party

Last weekend we were away for Jean’s company party. They always do an amazing job of this, not only offering dinner and dancing, but putting everyone up in a hotel. This was a big anniversary year, so we also had an Olympian (Gold medal winner, from Canada’s women’s hockey team) give an inspiring talk, anda live band playing jazz. That gave us an opportunity to do practice some tango, jive, and quick step—with plenty of room, as we were the only ones on the dance floor! (Bit intimidating, really….)

untitled_(75_of_149)_160220 — For once, Jean is in the picture

Berlin

Last night was supposed to be dinner out at the Naked Oyster with a friend, but he had to cancel due to illness. So, we took ourselves to Kitchener’s Berlin restaurant instead. Still a bit louder than we find ideal, but we had an excellent waiter (formerly of Langdon Hall) and the food was exquisite. Though Jean complained that I ordered the “better” option at every turn… Grilled squid over cheese appetizer, and then:

Roasted Duck Breast with Smoked Beets :) — Roast duck breask with smoked beets

over baked blue fish with duck confit gizzards; and then:

Hazelnut Puff Pastry like no other :D — Hazelnut puff pastry (so amazing)

over fruit crepe with cream.

But hey, it’s not a competition. (Even if I totally won.)

White rabbit

Based on a positive review in the Waterloo Region Record, we decided go out with a couple friends to Waterloo’s White Rabbit bar and restaurant.

White Rabbit isn’t huge and doesn’t take reservations, so we thought a Tuesday night would be a safer bet than, say, a Friday. We were surprised just how busy it was on a Tuesday, but we were able to get a table at the back of the room.

Between the number of people and the soundtrack, it seemed rather loud. We feared conversation might prove impossible. At the back it wasn’t as bad as that, though. We did have to speak up, but not yell at each other. (Not a place for a quiet, romantic dinner, though.)

white-rabbit-heather-davidson — Photo by Heather Davidson of the table we sat at

As the place does specialize in cocktails and such, I took the unusual step of ordering one: the Rabbit Black Dog, which mixes bourbon, lemon juice, simple syrup, and blueberries. It was nice—blueberry tasting, not too sweet. One of our friends went with a Scotch flight, complete with written tasting notes for each, which he enjoyed. They offer similar flights of bourbon, cocktails, and wine.

On the food front, Jean and I started with their cheese plate. It was really excellent. Five very good cheese, two from Ontario, two from Quebec, and one French. They were served with preserves, crackers, and grapes. Jean ordered a bottle (didn’t come by the glass, this one) of Oregon Pinot Noir to have with that.

As mains, two of us, including me, had the goat cheese agnolotti. I thought it was quite nice. Jean had the hangar steak. He said the meat was fine, but was especially impressed with the collard green side dish. It was similar for the friend who had the lobster roll: Protein was fine, but she found the side coleslaw outstanding.

We were all too full for the one homemade dessert on offer, though it did sound interesting. And we were a bit surprised to find they did not sell any tea or coffee. But we were happy they offered us the leftover bottle of wine to take home, even though they had decanted it. They just re-bottled and re-corked it for us.

No photographic proof, I’m afraid, but it was a fun place to go with friends.

Welcome 2016 dinner

I vaguely wanted to do our New Year’s gourmet-ish, cooking together dinner again this year, but I was completely uninspired as to what to make.

But I had the week off before Christmas and New Year’s, and I had three-month trial subscription to Texture (formerly Next Issue) magazine app, with its multiple food magazines. So I decided to go through those virtual pages for ideas.

I hit pay dirt almost right away, in a Food and Wine magazine from December 2015. They had recipes for all these different theme parties. But instead of sticking with one theme, I picked and choosed among different ones. Preferred criteria were that they sound good, of course, but not require me to run all over town looking for obscure ingredients. And not having us slaving in the kitchen all day.

The one course not covered by this one Food and Wine issue was dessert. And I wasn’t finding much inspiration in other magazines, either. But that weekend’s Globe and Mail happened to feature a New Year’s Eve menu for two people—including a cake that made just two servings! We had a winner.

We did this on January 2. We started working around 4:00, and were dining by about 6:30.

Theoretically first up (really, most everything was ready at the same time) were marinated olives with oranges, which, at Jean’s suggestion, were served with almonds and walnuts.

This involved frying up some garlic, orange zest, and hot pepper, to which olives were added. Then everything marinated in orange juice. So pretty simple.

I don’t how much that treatment enhanced the olives? But I was pleased to find that the Finger Lakes Cabernet Franc we’d selected went nicely with them.

The main course was a smoky mussel stew. For this one, potatoes and Brussels sprouts were roasted, while fresh mussels cooked in a mix of white wine, butter, shallots, and herbs. The mussels were then removed from the broth, and cream added. Everything then came together: potatoes, Brussels sprouts, mussels (shelled), with the addition of smoked mussels.

This isn’t the prettiest dish ever, but it was some good! The slight smoky with the creamy and the butter and the roast veg… Even the fact that we had to use frozen Brussels sprouts (fresh unavailable!) couldn’t wreck this. Yum.

The side dish was brown basmati rice with coconut and turmeric; basically, rice cooked in coconut mik with turmeric and salt. And served with mint on top. It was fine, but nothing outstanding. Rice does turns a nice yellow colour, though.

The wine we had with was an Ontario Gewurtz. Great wine; not sure if it was the best possible match, however.

The salad was spinach with orange and goat wine, with a red wine vinaigrette. I wasn’t able to find blood oranges, so Jean suggested adding cranberries to make the pictures prettier. 🙂

The dessert, finally, was a gâteau Basque. You make it a bit like a pie crust, mixing together flour, egg, sugar, and butter, then forming it into a disk and putting it in the fridge. When ready to bake later, you roll it out to cake pan size.

It was served with a simple cream sauce of whipping cream, sherry, and sugar, and topped with raspberries.

It was yummy, yummy this. As was the sparkling Moscato D’Asti we had with. Though supposedly only two servings, we had enough left to enjoy the next day, also.

Happy start to 2016.

New year’s eve in Berlin

No, not that Berlin. (Though stay tuned on that score.)

We didn’t have any New Year’s Eve plans until mere days before. Still kind of in mourning for Verses New Year’s, nothing else seemed to be working out. Langdon Hall sold out ages ago. Solé’s menu didn’t look that interesting. The meal at the club where our ballroom dance friends were going seemed even less enticing.

But a new restaurant named The Berlin, by a former Langdon Hall chef, opened on December 21. And on December 26, they tweeted that they would be doing a New Year’s Eve dinner. Though just announced, already the only times available were 5:00, 5:30… Then 9:00 or later.

Apparently, many people were just waiting for the right dinner to appear. (We went with 9:00.)

The Berlin has a nice room, but it was packed that evening, and just the proximity of so many neighbours did make it a bit loud. And, unsurprisingly for a restaurant so newly opened, there were a few glitches in the service.

But the food, though.

On offer was a four-course menu with four or five choices at each stop, for $75. Optional wine pairings were an additional $45.

Jean started with a poached egg item, while I was intrigued by smoked roasted beets with sour cream, bread crumbs, and herbs. I don’t know how you smoke beets, but oh my God, were they delicious (as long as you like beets, I guess).

Smoked Beets! Great Dish ... yes both! — Suddenly, I don’t care so much about the noise

In one service glitch, the food arrived before our matching wines. But once notified, the Sommelier came over and apologized, and poured us each a sparkling wine: a fine champagne rosé for me and an even better brut reserva for Jean (which, by the bottle, was half the price of mine, by the way).

For the appetizer course, we did that rare thing of both ordering the same item: Potted duck leg with duck liver parfait, and apple chutney. Fortunately, it was divine. And served with a really intriguing, off-dry Niagara Chenin Blanc from Big Head winery. We did get that before the food, and had to resist drinking it all ahead of time.

Onto the mains! (Although not before they tried to bring us some starters again, in another small glitch. But honestly, we didn’t mind a bit of wait at this point.) Jean went with the pork belly served with chick peas and cabbage stew. I had trout with wild mushroom and leek. Both were excellently prepared and flavorful.

Pork Belly ... now in my belly :) — Not the trout

Jean got a really interesting red Italian wine with this, called Etna Terre Nerre Rosso. I had a nice Riesling.

This was a good amount of food, but it’s true there’s always room for dessert. Mine was an amazing dark chocolate terrine with lavendar ice cream. It was served, believe it or not, with this spicy dark beer! Which totally complemented the chocolate!

Jean’s cheese dessert was frankly richer and creamier than the chocolate, and served with this freakin’ amazing truffle honey. The earthy truffle, plus the sweetness… Whoah. He got an off-dry wine from Spain with this.

We were done around 11:15 or so, so we made it home to ring in the New Year there. Cheers, everyone!

The Christmas after

For our Christmas travels I’d lost the argument about flying this year, so we drove off after work on December 22 and made it to Huntsville, then finished the journey the next day. Our unseasonably mild and snow-less winter made for a good drive, fog being the only challenge at times.

Timmins did have snow, albeit far less than usual, and it seemed almost freakishly warm (up to +3 C!).

My younger sister and family flew to Timmins without issues, but my older one had the unpleasant experience of her flight getting all the way to Timmins, then refusing to land due to fog! (Though other airlines were landing in the same conditions.) So she ended up spending Christmas in Toronto after all.

Celebrations began on the 23rd with a belated 80th birthday party for my Dad, held at my brother’s. Pretty well-attended, considering the busy time of year.

Gerry_McN_BDay2015_(14_of_43)_151223 — The birthday boy (foreground)

December 24 brought very high winds, then widespread power outages to Timmins. But power was back most everywhere by mid-afternoon. We attended mass at my Dad’s church, then headed off to Réveillon celebrations, first at my cousin’s, then at Lefebvre’s.

Dad's gonna PieFace her! .. or he takes one for her :) — The “pie in face” game was delighting the kids this year. (I abstained from play.)

Always too much food! ... it' s Christmas — We didn’t lack for food

The “left / right” gift exchange theme this year was “computers,” and the price limit is pretty modest. That meant a lot of USB sticks going around.

and the Grrraand Prize goes to Come, he also get's the clown. — But some people were more creative (and no, Jean did not come up with this mouse pad himself)

Christmas morning was at McNair’s, where we tried a new approach of the “stealing” game.

Caleb showing enthousiasm ;) — This resulted in some kids getting items they were less-than-enthused about

Master Skyper John! — The Toronto folks participated via Skype

A round of trading afterward produced more satisfactory results, at least for some. (I took the mini-Cuisinart off my nephew’s hands and he got my cool gift pack of gourmet popcorn and DVDs.)

A few specific gifts were handed out as well.

S-S modeling her — You’ll never guess who gave my niece this Buffy T-shirt

Champagne instead of coffee in the morning ... That's how you know it's Christmas :) — And we enjoyed the morning Champagne

The afternoon was consumed with helping Dad prepare the Christmas turkey and fixings. We had 13 people over for dinner, and everything turned out great.

On Boxing Day we resisted the sales, but managed to get together with some Timmins friends at a local coffee shop, which was very nice.

We departed the following afternoon, and except for the car having a mysterious battery failure (solved with a boost), the two-part drive home was uneventful. We even found a very good restaurant in Hunstville for dinner (3 Guys and a Stove).

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Toronto

Party

Berlin

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But the food, though.

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