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Lessons from Ottawa’s newest restaurant

By Valerie Howes

Atelier gives old-school ingredients new-school treatment.

Statistics class
The odds are very much in your favor for a special evening at Atelier. This restaurant in Ottawa, Ontario, offers just one service – a tasting menu of 12 courses – to 20 diners per evening. With five employees hard at work in the kitchen and five running the front of house, the ratio of diners to staff is just 2:1, so there’s no vying for attention when it’s time for a refill.

Speaking of wine, at least 50 percent of the offerings are carefully selected from Canadian vineyards – the majority from the nearby Niagara Valley. With the restaurant being relatively tiny, sommelier Steve Robinson can offer small-batch bottles such as Daniel Lenko’s buttery Chardonnay and Le Clos Jordanne’s robust Pinot Noir – “one of the top three Pinot Noirs I’ve tasted in my life,” says chef-owner Marc Lepine.

Science class
The kitchen (which diners often visit) seems more like a chemistry lab. There’s no gas oven, no deep-fat fryer, no grill – cooking is done on energy-efficient induction surfaces or in a small solar-powered oven, both kinder to the planet. Induction is used to boil huge pots of water, liquid nitrogen to freeze ice cream in seconds. An enthusiastic experimenter (his menu changes daily), Lepine champions the weird and wonderful tools and techniques of molecular gastronomy. His first priority, however, is flavor.

Pork cooked sous-vide tastes tender and delicious enveloped in the tart, smoky and caramel flavors of emulsified apple, cabbage, marshmallow and Tootsie Roll sauce (I kid you not!). And some courses let diners call the shots: A creamy potato chowder comes with spoons, designed specially for Atelier, with handles that look like test tubes. We are each given a different ingredient in the handle of our spoon: truffle oil, powdered popcorn or bacon bits. We pop the corks stoppering the test-tube part and tip a little of each garnish into one another’s bowl before tucking into our own soup. Guessing what the wildly improbable elements are in each course keeps us debating and laughing throughout the meal. Our server keeps the dialogue going, curious for our reactions.

Geography class
You’re not likely to stumble upon this restaurant while you’re out sightseeing in the capital. Tucked away on a quiet residential street, it’s somewhere you hear about from locals in the know and make a special trip to experience. Atelier sits close to Little Italy, so savvy old-world neighbors have helped set up a chef’s garden out back where organic ingredients like tomatoes and wild mint grow.

And since Ottawa is surrounded by countryside, the whole staff takes off regularly to forage for ingredients. Unique items such as palate-cleansing sumac popsicles – made from the juice of tart little red berries found along country trails – come out of these excursions. “It’s awesome for the servers to be at the table explaining the menu and be able to say ‘I helped harvest that,’” says Lepine. Just one more thing that’s wild about Atelier.

Getting here

Atelier, 540 Rochester St., 613-321-3537, atelierrestaurant.ca
Ottawa Tourism, 1-888-OTTAWA8 (1-888-688-2928), ottawatourism.ca
Ontario Tourism, 1-800-ONTARIO (1-800-668-2746), www.ontariotravel.net

Valerie Howes is the senior editor of Pure Canada and something of a glutton.