mrissa | Cafe Rococo review

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Cafe Rococo review

I have a million and one things to say about this Montreal trip and the Farthing party, but first things first:

jonsinger, here is your Hungarian restaurant review.

Cafe Rococo is on Lincoln and Guy, nearly on top of the Guy-Concordia Metro station. Extremely easy to get to. There are tables outside and inside. It's not a huge restaurant -- if you were going to bring a party of more than eight, you would do best to call ahead. There is a large vegetarian section of the menu, but I couldn't tell how many of those dishes would be vegan. I suspect fairly few of them, unless you consider cream to be the flower of the cow plant. Prices are pretty low, $8-12 a person, with $2-3 salads etc. You can go up to $14 for dinner, but that's only if you get really extravagant.

The tables bear salt, pepper, and paprika shakers. The smells are equally promising.

timprov and I each ordered things we would both like so we could have tastes of the other person's stuff. My cucumber salad was excellent, just what a Hungarian cucumber salad should be, with dill and paprika, very thinly sliced. Nice. But -- cover your ears, people, because my mom is about to shriek in triumph, and you will be able to hear it from where you are --

timprov's beet salad was just as good. Really. Just as good as cucumbers. Cucumbers are among my favorite things, and I hate beets. I used to hate beets. Now it turns out I hate all but the very best beets. At this restaurant, they have the very best beets. The beets here are a revelation. They still taste like beets, but in a way that makes you say, "Oh, is that why people are willing to eat these noxious things! In hopes that it will taste like this!" I tasted them specifically in order to be able to say, "I still don't like beets," and I can't say that. Wow.

I ordered cabbage rolls, and they were It. They were The Thing. They had that lovely solidity of the internal meat that cabbage rolls are supposed to have. (Cooked cabbage is another revelation Hungarian cooking has given unto me, but that was several years ago.) The cabbage is flavorful and lovely.

timprov had lecso, which was not as outstanding as the cabbage rolls, in part because they didn't have their usual sausage and had to substitute. But it was good lecso. Just not as exciting. I was amused to see that their menus translated spaetzle as gnocchi, but whatever: it was spaetzle, it was good spaetzle, go spaetzle.

Of course we couldn't leave without palacsinta. The turo in

timprov's was really, really good turo, sweet and tart and perfect in texture. We can make turo at home, but I'm not sure we can make it taste like this yet. But it's worth working towards. The walnut filling in mine was equally fine: so fine, in fact, that they gave me two small palacsinta, and I took a few bites of the second one. People who eat with me know how big that is. (No worries about the rest;

timprov gave it a home.)

We are definitely doing this again when we return to Montreal.

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Okay, now I want to try these mysterious beets.

Yum.

I think I need to go there. If they're as devoted to paprika as I expect, this wouldn't do for

papersky; I may have to venture on my own, or with people other than her.

Well, they had appetizers and desserts that were probably

papersky-safe, and they had other sandwichy things that were non-Hungarian. She and

zorinth were talking about giving it a look maybe for dessert, and they could see about the menu from there.

But we'd happily go there with you next year.

I like beets, so I'm going to have to look up some recipes for such a salad. Yum!

I've had beet salads before. I've even had Hungarian beet salads before. But this one was really outstanding.

Ooh, that sounds good. Now I'm getting hungry.

Hey, you promised a reply to a comment of mine a while back, but you were too busy at the moment, and it's been a while -- I understand how easy it is to forget things like that, but I would still love to hear your thoughts. :)

If you can't remember what entry it was from, I can dig it up -- it was on writing...

If this (http://mrissa.livejournal.com/467217.html) isn't it, I can't think what it'd be, so you'll have to remind me. I'm going to spend the next day and a half traveling back to Mpls, and there will be homecoming things to do after that, so I don't promise it'll be by the end of the week.

I'm pretty sure that's it, though I can't see my comment.

Take your time... things are pretty crazy on my end of things, as well. Can't wait to read your response, all the same.

The question I answered within the entry is the only one I remember promising to get to for you. If you read the entry and haven't heard what you remember asking, please ask again.

In a word: yum!

I love Hungarian food. I'm so glad you wrote up this place ... girlfriend and I will have to put it on our list of places to go when we eventually get to Montreal :)

It will need to be a very long list. The food in Montreal, ohhhhhh.

I'm with the various folks who said "Yum!" and "I think I need to go there." Probably won't be able to find a whole lot on the menu that I can safely eat, but it will clearly smell great, and I think I may be able to risk the cabbage rolls. (The salads you describe could be safe, though it depends on what kind of vinegar they use.)

I gave up on beets when I was a small child, and only began to look at them with something that later came to resemble equanimity around 1989. Still can't deal with borscht, but at least if I encounter them as pickles or even steamed I can deal. They are also surprisingly nice in mixed vegetable/fruit juices. (I was rather frightened the first time I saw one go into a juicer, knowing that I was going to be obliged to drink some of the result, but it worked out really well. The fact that everything except the fresh ginger was right out of the garden didn't hurt either.)

Isn't it wonderful when something (particularly something you dislike) abruptly reveals a new and wonderful aspect? When I was a kid I loathed corduroy, for reasons I can't even remember now; when I was maybe 15 I saw wide-wale for the first time, and my entire set of feelings about the stuff just went »ploit!«, right there.

Again, many thanks for your writeup —
jon

They had chestnut paste dessert, for one thing -- I don't know if you can have chestnuts, but it wouldn't contain any of the trouble foods you've mentioned in my presence. So there might well be enough to make an interesting meal.

Borscht and I are not friends, either.

The "problem" here is that as I get older, I can state far fewer absolutes about food. I used to say I didn't eat shrimp, and then I went to House of Nanking. And now the beets. This resulted in me trying the beets in the first place: I no longer have faith in categorically disliking very many of the things I thought I categorically disliked. (This is, overall, not such a bad problem!)

Ahhh. Chestnut paste would be just fine, as long as they managed not to put any wine into it. (Wine, of course, = yeast.)

[Borscht saddens me, as it is generally a lovely color, and I always think I'm going to like it. Bleh. I can get a similar base color in juice, of course, but it's very dark; I don't get the wonderful lurid magenta because I don't put imitation sourcream into my juices. Speaking of lurid colors: if you want a startlement for entertaining Small Persons, I suspect that a small amount of baking soda added to beet juice (filtered, so you can see through it in the glass) would turn it quite blue. I should check this.]

As "problems" go, you've got a good one. Until the food allergy crap started I had the same one, and I deal (or dealt, sigh) the same way — by trying things even if I already knew I didn't like them. A lot of this probably derives from the attitude my parents had when we were kids, which was basically that we were not permitted to reject things out of hand. We had to at least try them. If we could give a considered opinion, and it was not a happy one, they'd find us something else to eat. Entirely aside from the fact that this avoided all of the usual wretched baggage kids acquire about hated foods and new foods, it also meant that trying things, even things I knew I didn't like (it was not usually sufficient to say "I didn't like it last time, why should I like it this time?" unless the interval was quite short), became easy and routine, and it meant that I actually noticed changes in my likes and dislikes.

[It was also notably self-reinforcing. One triumphant moment: I am maybe 14. It is summer, so we're in Vermont (my parents taught, which gave them summers off and let us escape NYC), and we have gone down to Andersen's, in Stowe, for one of their weekly smörgåsbords. I am acquiring food, just ahead of my mom, who is just ahead of some guy we've never met. I look at a large bowl of pale green glop, and with some suspicion I ask my mom what it is. She tells me it's creamed spinach, which is about what I thought. I make the usual ‘varf brech’ noise, state my frank feelings about such materials, and take some. The guy behind her gets this deer-in-the-headlights look on his face, and asks me why I'm taking it if I hate it, so I tell him that it is some time since I've tried any spinach; how do I know my taste hasn't changed if I don't check once in a while? ...Whereupon violet flames come out of his head, and I observe a blissful smile on my mother's face. (Well, okay, no actual flames, but he was clearly taken by wonder.) Bwah-ha-ha. Mirabile dictu, I actually liked the creamed spinach enough to go back for seconds, which was unprecedented at least as far as spinach is concerned.]

Best —
jon

Yah, I expect to like borscht more than I do, too. It's very sad.

And yes, sometimes it's good to make one's mother smug.

Did you have any of the crispy spinach at the Asian Fusion place down St. Denis? It was astonishing.

Hmm! I don't think I got to the Asian Fusion place. Have to try to remember to try it, the next time I'm up there. (Is that an amazing food neighborhood, or what?) Was the preparation evident enough that you could tell what they had done?

Cheers, and thanks for the commend —
jon

As near as we could reconstruct it, they had dredged the spinach in sugar to slightly dehydrate it, then shaken it off, then flash-fried it in some extremely hot oil or combination of oils, likely with a nut oil component but not entirely nut oil. It was really quite astonishing. I had never had the like.

Speaking of mixes of beets and fruit, there's a recipe for baked beets with apples (about half of each) in the Joy of Cooking edition from a decade ago. I find it really quite good indeed, and it's fairly simple too.

The local farmers market had some quinces a couple of weeks ago when

tiger_spot and I were there, and having not to our recollection ever had quinces, we decided to get one each to see how they tasted. And were somewhat saddened to find, upon checking JoC's "about quinces" section, that they couldn't be munched raw (well, I would slightly dispute that, but I grew up with a crabapple tree in the front yard and acquired a taste for the things), so we ended up cooking them with some mango-orange juice (having no actual normal orange juice handy, which is what the recipe called for) and putting the mix over ice cream. And now we want to try making beets-and-quinces sometime, just because. And also a little bit because it seems like it would be quite tasty, too, but there's a distinct element of Just Because there too.

I actually like tiny thin slices of raw quince, but I also like to eat ‘Dolgo’ crabapples right off the tree. (I don't eat the typical little bitter ones, though; only the nice strong crisp tart ones, all or nearly all of which seem to be named varieties.)

What I usually do with quinces is either bake them like apples, with cinnamon and maybe allspice and a clove or two, or make “applesauce” out of them. They work fairly well either way, though you do have to cook them for a while.

I have, btw, tried to make applesauce out of ornamental quinces, and it uniformly fails. By the time you get enough sugar in there to make them edible, they turn into jelly right in the pan. The cool thing is that it is really great jelly, so I am always on the lookout for fruits on ornamental quince bushes. (They are much sparser than on the fruiting type; much smaller too, and generally quite sour even when ripe. They have a nice tangy fragrance, reminiscent of orange peel, but it mostly goes away when you cook them.)

Beets & quinces sounds very interesting. If you actually do this, please let me know what you think of the result. (I have never been a big beet fan, and in fact I went through a very long period during which I just couldn't deal with them at all; but I can eat them now, and I have been shown that they work pretty well in juice, so that's what I generally do with them these days.)

Best —
jon

Oh, my. That does sound good.

I am plotting how to get to Montreal next September, I think.

What, exactly, goes into a cucumber salad of the sort that you're talking about? It sounds like something I'd probably like, if I tried it.

Veryvery thinly sliced cucumbers. The right kind of vinegar. Paprika. Dill. Garlic. They're very like fresh pickles, only different.

Y'know, that's a nice parallel to sunomono or to the Sichuan pickled cabbage thing, and it sounds yummy. Makes me want to go to the store & find some dill and a few cucumbers.

I bet it would work with sunchokes, btw, if you like crunchy things in your salads. (I learned the sunchoke salad from my neighbors, when I lived in Boulder. IIRC, theirs was closer to sunomono — I think they used only Japanese rice vinegar and a tiny bit of something sweet, maybe Mirin or just a touch of honey; it was very plain, and they only let it marinate for about 15 minutes. I could easily see dill being compatible with it, though, to say nothing of paprika and garlic.)

Best —
jon

Ooh, I could try that. I like some crunchy things, at least.

It occurs to me, thinking about this, that fresh water-chestnuts should also work. The one issue there is the fact that they release some starch grains when you cut them, so the marinade would end up with a slightly sandy/gritty texture. Still, the flavor of a fresh water-chestnut is really nice, and I suppose you could replace the marinade just before serving the salad if it's an issue.

Best —
jon

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Cafe Rococo review

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Hungarian restaurant (Thank you!) --

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