Bronte - Review

Intro
Bronte - Highly Recommended
1800 Sherbrooke Ouest
Montreal, PQ H3H 1E5

The final restaurant of the weekend extravaganza. Located in our hotel (Le Meridian), someone mentioned that this restaurant won best new restaurant in Montreal in 2004. Well deserved as I was completely shocked how good this place is. Very comparable to Aureole, one of my favorite restaurants in NY, in terms of quality of cooking. Overall, I give the restaurant a 87/100.

My Menu

1) Braised Rabbit Papperdelle **
2) Sea Bass with roasted tomatoes and potatoes **
3) Semi Freddo *

Rating System
--- What the F - in a bad way
* Good
** Great
*** What the F – in a good way

Dish Comments
1) Pasta is a little passion of mine and I could tell by picking the first noodle up with a fork that it was perfectly cooked. Nice texture on the pasta too - very silky with a slight al-denteness to it. Combine that with the intense sauce of porcini mushrooms and a nicely braised rabbit and you got a real winner. Wished the rabbit were slightly more tender and juicier though.
2) Although I've been to many an upscale seafood restaurant, I've never really had sea bass at an upscale restaurant (Chilean sea bass is different) so usually when I think of this dish I think of the steamed whole version you get at Chinese restaurants. This was perfectly cooked - nice and moist fish, crisp skin, meyer lemon vinaigrette that provided a nice tartness to the sweet fish. Roasted tomatoes were spectacular for this time of year and totally inspiring me to make roasted tomatoes myself. Potatoes were nicely flavored but a little too cold.
3) A nice hazlenut semi-fredo (think melted ice cream) with good texture and great hazlenut flavor. There was way too much of the berry sauce for me though which made the dish overly tart.

Overall Restaurant Experience (87/100)

• Food 8.8/10 – Great app and entree, but the dessert was a letdown after the previous two great savory dishes. All food was beautifully plated served on gargantuan plates - nary a sauce on the rims of these monster plates. Scores would have been much higher, but the dessert brought it down. Also, no real what the f moments, but that'll be difficult with this style of food since I've had many like this...
  
• Service 8.6/10 – Attentive waiters and waitresses. The waiter warned us that the food will come out slow, but we didn't notice that much although the meal was 2 1/2 hours. No crumb cleanup duty in between plates though. I think if we weren't so tired from the food and after hours party from the night before, we may have been irritated by the length of time it took.
  
• Atmosphere 8.8/10 – Trendy looking restaurant that had a feel similar to A Voce - some white wall with dark wood and lots of bright colors on the opposite walls. Crowds were mainly in groups of 2-4 and quite restrained. We were very loud I would assume :) Called up at 6pm that night and got in...probably due to the fact that we stayed at the hotel attached to the restaurant.
  
• Price 7.5/10 – $100 a head including tip and 1 bottle of wine. Reflecting back, I believe this was a tad bit too expensive for 3 courses. Although the food was great, Aureole's food is much better and for a better deal - $115 for 7 courses. With that said, I was extremely happy with the meal and didn't care about the price.
  

Closing Comments
Great, great meal and totally unexpected. I tasted two of my friend's dishes and they were much better than mine. Scallops were so sweet and such an amazing flavor. The salmon may have been even better - so soft and no caramelization, but the proteins still firmed up. If I'm back in Montreal, I may have to say this is a must visit. We were so exhausted from the night before - otherwise I definitely would have had pictures of the beautifully presented food. Montreal - you guys got it good in terms of eats...can't wait to check out what other restaurants have to offer.