food review: Les Infideles
Les Infideles is a small and very soothing French restaurant just by the intersection of Rachel and St. Hubert, where papersky and I went last night for dinner. Generally good and sometimes excellent, is the short version.

The presentation is really lovely; one is welcomed with bread [ very good baguettes, in an upright-ish wire rack sort of thing ], salt in a little mound in a low wooden dish, and fresh butter, and later a little dollop of delicious mostly-trout-with-a-little-shrimp mousse, which was wonderfully rich, basically made with sour cream and a hint of black pepper, and fresh enough to need no lemon. Yum.

We opted for the five-course tasting menu. First was the potage du moment [ potage du jour clearly not being dynamic enough ] which was pear and fennel; a peculiar notion, and while the pear went surprisingly well with the underlying beef stock [ "This is some sort of mysterious Occidental version of miso soup" ] the fennel was just odd. 'Twould be interesting to try something similar with cauliflower or turnip, perhaps.

For starters I had venison tartare, which worked by being full of red onion and capers and generally doing with semi-pickling what one normally does with heat to make venison nice [ better cooking through chemistry ] and which was still strong enough that I was very glad of the potato base on which it rested. papersky had something that no sane person would ever have come up with, a foie gras creme brulee with a hint of truffle oil. [ and there I thought that the foie gras poutine at Au Pied de Cochon was some sort of limit case for culinary decadence. Silly me. ] This was definitely in the top ten most delicious things I've ever put in my mouth in my life.

Between courses, they offered a sorbet, which turned out to be fairly strong pink grapefruit doused in seriously strong vodka. This was, I think, a bit much; not so much cleansing one's palate as taking a blowtorch to it. Then the main courses, which consisted of pheasant on linguini in a shrimp and basil sauce, which was quite good, I'd not had pheasant before and I do not think it will become one of my favourites, and an absolutely wonderful caribou, so rare it might almost be better described as seared, meat that was almost closer to a really good tuna sashimi than to mammalian meat, served with a perfect complement of jam-like blackcurrants, and ornamented with a pear cooked in spiced wine, which seemed a relative of the brandied apple wedges in Reubens.

We were just about able to fit in desserts; papersky had a lovely delicate goat-cheese cheesecake, with a mix of fruits on top that included dried apricot and fig and what might have been cranberries. I ordered what was described as a cookie, but this was a failure on behalf of the waitress' English, as it turned out to be one of those chocolate cake things that's cake on the outside and chocolate lava on the inside; perfectly good of its kind, but a little bit heavier than I would have knowingly ordered.

The service was unobtrusively excellent, and the wine was good but we brought it ourselves so that doesn't really count. Tasting menu $49 per person, though some of the more exotic dishes such as the caribou add a small surcharge to that if taken as part of said menu; it came to $112 in total. Which is definitely in the "occasional treat" range for us but very much worth it.