Restaurants
Grano Restaurant
This year my Winterlicious run began with a $15 prix fixe lunch at Grano, an Italian eatery on Yonge, just north of Davisville.
The experience, while delicious, was much like an overpacked MEC backpack...
Heavy enough to sink you through a sidewalk.
Grano, like a number of restaurants participating in Winterlicious, is offering a very abridged version of their menu for lunch. The 3 course selection is made up of a choice between 2 appetizers, 2 entrees and 2 desserts. Today, dessert had been further abridged to 1.
Looking on the positive side, the choices seemed interesting and with 2 people sitting down to lunch we just ordered both apps, both entrees and the dessert, to share. Perfect.
First comes a plate of mixed buns and foccaccia to sample. The foccaccia is pretty dense but we decide to try it anyways -- very nice, but an easy way to ruin your appetite.
Soon after come the fried calamari and a lovely salad. The calamari were tender and fried just right (which any squid-lovin' diner can appreciate). The salad was nice but a little too sweet for our tastes with a sweet dressing, a touch of sliced fruit and raisin granola making it seem like a nice idea for a healthy breakfast dish.
Next stop, entrees.
Both choices on the Winterlicious menu are cream AND pasta based, so the lactose or wheat intolerant (not to mention carb counting) need not make this trip. They are crespelle (crepes) with porcini mushrooms and bechamel sauce OR gnocchi (potato dumpling pasta) with radicchio, roasted squash, almonds and parmesan cheese.
The prior sounds like the lighter choice (despite the bechamel) because gnocchi are, of course, usually a weighty number. In come the plates and I am, SO, very wrong.
The crespelle, hugging a generous serving of porcini mushrooms (mmm), are served in a deep dish and topped/coated/slathered/drowning in a lot of bechamel. Santa Maria. A couple bites in, I realized what I was faced with and started trying to avoid scooping up too much cream in each forkful (which, on a sidenote, felt awkward... and as if I should have had a spoon because the was so stewish.)
The gnocchi, on the other hand, are small and taste soft and light (as light as a potato dumpling can be). They also appear quite obviously freshly made in-house. Lovely. The portion is a reasonable size*, but yet, by half way through, it's beginning to slow us down. The culprit: heavy parmesan-rich cream.
Dessert you say? Sure, why not.. the cramps hadn't kicked in yet. ;)
The dessert was a nice light-- er, yeah right... dessert was a "white chocolate, raspberry, and pistachio flan with biscotto". In other words, a wonderfully colourful and delectable, but seriously rich and heavy tart. It was also intensely sweet (as white chocolate can be) so we were compelled to order up a couple bitter 'canadian' coffees to balance things out.
The dish also came with a pair of cookies, which we -- like old ladies at the Mandarin -- pack into napkins and put in our bags for later (when they could actually be appreciated).
Hoisting ourselves out of our seats, we head out and decide to walk half way home, through Mount Pleasant cemetery and across St. Clair just to deal with our creamy guilt.
It was good but we left unhappy and a little unsettled, so last year's $15 lunch at Goldfish, still holds the prize (for me) for best Winterlicious lunch.
*note: portions in photos look small only because the dishes are really quite large.
--
Grano - 2035 Yonge St. North of Davisville subway station.
Discussion
0 Comments
Sort By Oldest First / Newest First
Subscribe