For simply one night, and simplest at THRU on Rochester Avenue, you need to forget what they say approximately turning off your cellphone to be able to provide your entire attention to dinner and your eating companion. Indeed, earlier than THRU opened Wednesday night time, its chef-proprietor Marc Lepine emailed the six folks that could fill its seats to recommend: “Mobile telephones (fully charged) are strongly recommended for the whole experience.” There turned into no similar clarification. I suspect that if I’d spoken back with an electronic mail asking, “Why?” Lepine would have written returned, “You’ll see for yourself.”
As the six people discovered out at Wednesday’s dinner, THRU isn’t always pretty much the adventurous and even avant-garde pleasant eating that you’d anticipate from Lepine, a -time winner of the Canadian Culinary Championships. THRU is about mysteries and discoveries, introduced via impeccably crafted, unabashedly innovative, contemporary cooking. Lepine serves up deliciousness, liberally pro with whimsy and wonder, provided that a guest surrenders to the meal’s abundance and interactivity.
THRU turned into a long-term coming. Lepine, who opened his acclaimed eating place Atelier in 2008, started talking, albeit cryptically, approximately THRU in 2013. He confirmed off THRU, which is basically a private eating room on Atelier’s 2nd story, in early 2016, and pix emerged of its stark, vibrant, silver and black interior. But it was only with THRU’s full unveiling on Wednesday that its first clients have been able to draw close the entirety of Lepine’s concept.
Full disclosure: My wife and I ate there at Lepine’s invitation, in a scarce exception to my standard coverage of looking to dine incognito and pay for dinner. The policies were bent, so you may want to get the lowdown on THRU ASAP, specifically given the shortage of its seats, which ought to be offered in advance online.
THRU tickets are already nearly all bought out thru June, and July’s tickets will really promote swiftly when they go on sale on June 2 at 2 p.M.; yes, the tickets for two human beings go for $350, carrier and fees in, but as steep as that sounds for Ottawa, more or less similar Michelin-starred tasting menus in New York can easily top $two hundred and even $three hundred US in step with man or woman.
While Atelier serves a 12-route, $125-consistent with man or woman tasting menu with an optionally available wine pairing, THRU American ante drastically, I’ll caution you currently, in light of Lepine retaining his disclosures to a minimum, that the rest of this evaluate quantities to one spoiler after another. You read on at the threat of diminishing revelations when you consume at THRU. The identical fare will be served there for “the foreseeable future,” a server instructed me.
At THRU, Lepine served, if my tally changed into correct, approximately 50 objects in a wave of extra than 30 savory objects accompanied using a candy wave of no longer quite 20 objects. I say “gadgets” because neither “publications” nor “small plates” nor “bites” seems quite proper, and due to the fact some objects were cocktails or teas.
It would help if you considered THRU’s meal as a gargantuan blind tasting menu, except that in which other eating places would possibly send out publications one after another, THRU’s objects landed at the desk not quite pell-mell but occasionally some at a time, so that gadgets accrued on the desk, nearly like a dim sum meal.
Alternately, some other analogy for eating at THRU is probably a sport of bingo. Once our black desk material became eliminated, the table became dotted with QR codes with the names of meals above them, and whilst the black-clad servers arrived, they placed items in their proper spots. Some of the savory labels protected beef tendon, ostrich tartare, smooth-shell crab, snail caviar, potato skins, scallops, sake, and penicillin, even as a number of the cakes were tiramisu, cheesecake, chocolate, fizzy grapes, or even campfire marshmallow.
