Restaurant 18 celebrates its second 4-diamond award in characteristic style
Originally filed at roneade.com
On a culinary seascape awash with awards and best-whatever lists, a few originals rise above the flotsam. Four diamonds is one of them.
Archive note. This page preserves work first published on roneade.com between 2014 and 2016. Ron Eade died in August 2015; nothing on this site is new writing in his voice, and the reporting below is presented as a dated record rather than as current coverage. Restaurants, prices and staffing described here reflect the moment the piece was filed.
The award
Restaurant E18hteen in the ByWard Market received a four-diamond rating for the second consecutive year. Eade recalled the first, in January 2014, awarded for decor, service and food under the restaurant's then executive chef, an Algonquin College graduate who had since moved to Toronto to become chef de cuisine at a museum restaurant.
The 2015 rating was earned under a new executive chef, Jonathan Korecki, who also oversaw a companion restaurant, with Kirk Robert Daniel Morrison as chef de cuisine and Blain Wagg as sous chef.
The award was marked with a charity fundraising brunch on the Sunday — the kind of event, Eade noted, that chefs unfailingly look forward to as an opportunity to show what they can do.
What four diamonds actually means
Eade quoted the awarding motoring association's own definition rather than paraphrasing it. A four-diamond designation identifies a restaurant "geared to providing individuals with a distinctive fine-dining experience," where menus, "often orchestrated by an executive chef and accomplished staff, reflect a high degree of creativity and complexity using innovative presentations to enhance high quality."
The mechanism matters more than the wording. Each establishment, hotel or restaurant, is visited anonymously by professional evaluators — and here Eade could not resist a swipe at the alternative, describing the evaluators as "not folks whose claim to fame is ownership of a laptop." Each property is graded against almost a hundred criteria. In a four-diamond restaurant, the association says, the experience "shouldn't be just a meal, but a completely enchanting experience." The Canadian Automobile Association administers the rating in Canada.
The distinction Eade was drawing is the reason this short piece sits in the archive at all. In a period thick with crowd-sourced rankings and best-of lists, an anonymously inspected, criteria-based rating carries a different kind of information — and he wanted his readers to know which kind they were reading.
The cooking
He singled out one dish as characteristic of the new chef's approach: a seafood appetizer designed to mimic both the appearance and the flavours of the sea. British Columbia albacore tuna tartare with a bright undercurrent of citrus vinaigrette, coriander and other fresh herbs, lapped with a splash of sea buckthorn, and finished with a thin seaweed tuile standing at one side, its face spread with tapioca pearls and dried for crunch so that it read as barnacles. "So brilliant, on many levels," was his verdict.
Other plates recorded from the brunch: granola parfait with vanilla yoghurt and fresh fruit; butter-poached lobster salad with aioli, celery and tender peas; sturgeon caviar on a potato blini with crème fraîche and tarragon; seared beef tataki with sesame, soy and radish salad; reserve prime rib with a mustard crust and roasting jus, served with caramelised hash browns and a soft-baked egg with chives and shaved truffle; and a chocolate marquise with toasted marshmallow, blood orange and graham crumb.
Context
This piece was filed in March 2015, ten months after the run of closures that dominates the 2014 material, and it reads differently for it. The same market that had shut one celebrated restaurant over tax arrears and prompted another owner to walk away after eighteen years was, at the same time, sustaining an anonymously inspected four-diamond kitchen in the same neighbourhood.
It is also one of the last substantial posts in the archive. Eade died in August of that year.