On Saturday night, Pauline and I, along with Nelson & Kitty, Aaron and Richard went to Tundra for a Winterlicious dinner. Tundra is supposedly one of the top 10 restaurants in Toronto and is located within the Toronto Hilton. Tundra serves Canadian cuisine, which is accented by its wood furnishings and rock serving as a paperweight for your napkin. When we went, you could tell that Winterlicious was in full swing as there were many people our age eating in the restaurant — and a lack of hotel guests.

Our sitting was at 9PM which I thought was excessively late. We didn’t finish dinner until after 11PM! That also meant that I was pretty hungry by “dinner time” — but hey, food tastes better when you’re hungry right? I started with the Shrimp Bisque with brandied glazed shellfish & creme fraiche (I think). It was too salty and there was no pepper available at the table! Pauline had the Tundra mixed greens with oven dried cranberries, toasted pistachios & blue cheese crumble, sour cherry emulsion. I tried a bit of this but thought it was too cheesy and promptly switched back to my salty soup.

Our table debated awhile about what to get for entrees, because we were tipped off by Nelson’s friend about was good and not. Apparently the chicken was nothing special, so no one in our group got that. I ordered the Steak Frites with Mesculin peppered merlot jus. I don’t have anything special to say about this aside from the fact that all I really remember is that the fries were really salty! Pauline had the Wild mushroom risotto with caramelized butternut squash, pearl onions, english peas and smoked tomato jus. We had spied a salmon from another table so we figured we would take a chance on this dish. That was a mistake, and was pretty disappointing.

For dessert, we both got the Warm pear strudel and liquorice ice cream, with Pauline replacing the liquorice with vanilla. I’ve had bad experiences with licorice but this ice cream wasn’t THAT bad. Although my scoop was too hard so I couldn’t actually eat any ice cream for the first 10 minutes or so. To make matters worse, the strudel part was impossible to break off and eat, so I spent a lot of time fighting my dessert. Also, while the pear was tasty, it was the only part that was warm.

While the service was polite and professional, it was not as prompt as I would expect from a high-class restaurant. Tundra seemed ill-suited to handle the number of people they served for Winterlicious. Although, I suppose I should blame that on the 19-person and 14-person table behind us full of asian Chinese fobby kids. I expect that if I went there again, the service would be better.

I don’t think I would go to Tundra again for Winterlicious. The food was nothing special, in fact I would have expected better quality and/or preparation. I don’t think it was worth the $55 per person that we ended up at — although that’s still much cheaper than if we went at a regular time. I suspect that Tundra knows from experience that Winterlicious customers were like those huge fobby tables, people order a $35 dinner and water, so they need to have a sufficiently profitable menu to make participating in Winterlicious worthwhile.

Posted by Kevin in Blogs Tags: elec2005, food, winterlicious