Today I decided to visit Holt's Cafe to try the (supposedly) famous tartine which is made from the (really) famous Poilane bread that they fly in from France thrice weekly. The cafe is tucked away in one corner upstairs in the Bloor Street store of Holt Renfrew, which is a chain of department stores in Canada that sells all manner of atas things.
These are the photos I managed to get before one of the waiters told me that photos weren't allowed in the restaurant. It probably wouldn't do for an atas place to have some weird lanky guy running around taking pictures and disturbing the other patrons. Anyway I don't think I do them any injustice by representing the place as such:
The decor was trendy enough.
The corner table is where I sat. You can see my gloves on the table.
The view in the other direction from where I sat.
My tartine came with a salad, which came with three really atas-sounding condiments whose names I didn't catch. They came in the three little containers below with an atas wooden spoon.
I didn't really like the salad, but to be fair I'm not a salad person. It had one of those really sour dressings which is for diehard salad eaters only and not people like me who like to eat unhealthy food by the boatload. I didn't really like the atas condiments either. They tasted like raw plants and minerals that had just been harvested from the earth. You probably have to be really atas and snooty to enjoy this kind of thing.
The tartine.
I ordered the "brunch" tartine, even though though it was 5 pm. Apparently that's their bestseller. It comes with soft poached eggs, smoked salmon, mushrooms, oven-roasted tomatoes, and fresh basil. And of course all that came on top of the famous Poilane bread, which I thought was the only good part of the dish. I could probably eat it all day raw. The rest of the ingredients didn't really do anything for me - just a bunch of tastes swirling around in my mouth that didn't come together very well. Overall it wasn't really very tasty. The eggs Benedict I had a couple of days ago was much better.
Cost: Cad$18 before taxes, Cad$20.34 after taxes.
