Le Festival G.: Perles & Paddock (Montreal, Canada)

Le Festival G., Griffintown Gourmand Gastronomique, is a new food festival held from March 7 to 17th. As a replacement for this month’s Battle of Ingredients that was cancelled last minute due to all kinds of different things going on, we decided to give this new food festival a go. One of our friends wanted to try out Perles & Paddock after being rather impressed with their menu so after a lot of hard hurdles to get a reservation, we finally managed to get one via their online system. Peculiar, right? Take that as a good or bad thing as you wish, but just our suggestion, try online instead of reserving by phone.

There was an option of 3 menus: Brunch (which we obviously didn’t fit because we went for dinner and was unavailable); 5 a 7 Happy Hour or Table d’hote Menu. I’m not going to go into detail about it all however we all chose the Table d’Hote Menu except for the little one who got the Happy Hour menu.

Table d’Hote Menu includes a choice of two cocktails, 3 oysters, 3 choices of tasting dishes and a dessert. ($42)

Happy Hour Menu includes a choice of two cocktails, 6 oysters or 3 cheese plate, 1 choice of tasting dish ($17)

Cocktails

Left to right: Cirka Gin Cocktail, Prosecco & Mocktail

We had a half and half experience here. A few of us took the festival special cocktail which is made by a Quebec gin (if I remember correctly). I had a sip of it and it tasted a bit like grass but that might be the matcha powder sprinkled on top. The second one and what I took was the Prosecco champagne which is a little on the more acidic dry side of the spectrum. Its not horrible but not my first choice. My fantastic Battle of Ingredients co-host and friend Phoebe had the mocktail due to personal reasons.

Starters

Oysters

3 Cheese Plate

I didn’t have any of these. The little one got the 3 cheese plate. Phoebe, my husband and I all didn’t eat the oysters for our individual reasons and passed it on to our friends.

Tasting Dishes

Arctic Char

I’m going to start with my own choices which are the first three here. I started with the Arctic Char which was really good. It is paired with Enoki and Daikon and kaffir broth. Its all very delicious.

Braised Endives

The second one was the braised endives with a very acidic citrus sort of thing going on. I like the endives and the grapefruit but whatever other citrus was going on here was a bit much for me personally.

Lamb

The lamb was done really nicely. It had a lot of the lamb taste to it. The pickled vegetables were also done really well. There is a nice balance to it and the sauce here is good as well.

Broccoli

My husband choice the Arctic char, braised endives and this broccoli plate. He actually liked this one the best. He liked how the broccoli was prepared and the whole deal with the egg breaking and mixing up with the elements here worked well together (his words paraphrased).

Duck Tataki

I can’t remember what everyone else got but I know that Phoebe chose this as one of hers. Not sure how she feels about it exactly. I was interested to see how this tasted thought because it uses argousier, which is called sea berries or sea buckthorn, something I had never tasted before.

I’m sure that I left out some tasting dishes and then I can’t remember which one this dish was but I still wanted to add it in.

Desserts

Pamplemousse confit

The lactose free dessert option was this Grapefruit confit. I think they deserve kudos for have a lactose free choice and its one that is pretty good as well. With the whole confit thing, it has this little citrus treasure wrapped around the sorbet. Its pretty good. I’m not huge on grapefruit so that was more a personal preference because my husband liked this quite a bit.

Mousse a la Noisette

So, missing one dessert choice in the pictures and didn’t ask how anyone thought about this one. It certainly looks really good.

Overall Dining Experience

Perles and Paddock offered us a pretty nice dining experience. The restaurant decor is beautiful. The ambiance is also quite comfortable. There is a stable theme here from the bathrooms to the logo to the setup of the area and hallways. Its pretty unique. The waitress who served us was very nice and offered us a lot of patience and helped us clear things up. At the same time, there was a lot of people serving up the food that gave us descriptions of what we’re eating. We did have a few little hiccups throughout the meal but they were fixed immediately or compensated for in another format. These things show respect for their customers and their dining experience. The only difficulty and mixed messages we got was the reservation process and trying to get a clear answer on allergen free menu items and such.

Recap: Goodfood #10

We’re somewhat back to normal programming this week. I’m still off today for Boxing Day as all the time. I wasn’t able to get the post done before I headed out for shopping so a little late on my part so today we’re taking it easy with just a quick recap on last week’s Goodfood meal box. We’re at the 10th box! That’s pretty awesome since so far, they’ve been still very impressive. The recipes are helping us learn a lot about different ingredients and different types of meals.

Let’s check it out!

Spiced Shrimp & Preserved Lemon Topping
with Jerusalem Couscous, Sauteed Zucchini & Multicolored Carrots

Preserved Lemon was the highlight ingredient of this dish. I personally have seen it before. Preserved lemon is actually very good to use for honey lemon tea to soothe sore throats. Actually, my mom used to prefer using that when I was younger. With that said, I wasn’t sure how it’d turn out as a main dish but this shrimp dish was pretty good. Plus, for us, the main highlight might be tasting Jerusalem Coucous which isn’t commonly used in these meal boxes. However, I’d like to compare them a little to orzo and thats a compliment because I really like Jerusalem couscous and would consider looking at more recipes for it.

Chicken & Udon Stir Fry
with Chinese Broccoli

Udon, chicken, stir-fry plays exactly to what I like. I love learning how to make some of these dishes as I don’t have a really extensive know of Asian cuisine even though I’m Chinese and probably should. I get the idea of how to make many different Chinese meals but I do love Udon noodles and Chinese Broccoli so this one was pretty good. The spices and the simplicity of putting this together all turned out very delicious.

Homemade Merguez with Herbed Yogurt Sauce
& Bulgar Salad

The husband was the one that got to eat both of the meals here. I did help with putting together the bulgar salad and doing the preparation work. He is a fan of merguez so suffice to say that he enjoyed the meaty part of this a lot. The bulgar was different for him. It did seem like a fresh sort of salad with a mixture of bulgar along with fresh vegetables. However, the yogurt herbed sauce didn’t really come into play here as we found some fabric in the yogurt and while I was positive it wasn’t hair, he took the safer measure to not eat it as we didn’t know where it came from. Something perhaps for Goodfood to be a little bit more careful about when putting together their boxes especially when dealing with food related business.

Whisky Rubbed Pork Chop with Scalloped Potatoes
Green Salad & Sweet Onion Vinaigrette

Finally, the last meal was this whisky rubbed pork chop. I prepared most of the meal and made the scalloped potatoes however, my husband took care of cooking the pork chops. Thanks to holidays, these last two meals were more of a collaborative effort to make which is always fun. He had the salad and the scalloped potatoes while I had the pork chop paired it with some cooked romaine lettuce. Scalloped potatoes are quite interesting to make to be honest and it was pretty fun and probably more efficient with a mandolin which I didn’t so I had to just thinly slice the potatoes with a knife so there was some uneven parts. However, the whisky spice blend here had a bit of heat but was very flavorful.

Overall, four good meals. It was definitely an educational box with preserved lemons, Jerusalem couscous and scalloped potatoes making appearances.

Trying Goodfood

As some of you may have noticed, July was an intensely crazy month. It was an entire month of a few days of vacation followed by 3 weeks and a weekend of media coverage. Now, I’m not complaining. I’m truly grateful for the opportunity and I loved every minute of it. However, on stressful weeks like those where its basically maintaining my normal everyday routine, eating becomes an incredibly hard thing to keep up with, mostly because of the cooking part. My husband did a great job trying to keep up but even he has a crazy work schedule and I can’t really let my new stuff put all the load on him. Our other meal subscription plan has really been not having any inspirational choices so after reading about my friend and fellow blogger, Day’s Lee’s post on Goodfood, I decided to give it a go. You can check out Goodfood here.

First impressions right off the site as just being in the process of getting this subscription signed up and going.

• The first subscription offers you a few meals for free so you only pay a fraction of a price. I like that idea. Its a nice way to get the customer in just so they can have a little trial to see if this is for them. Nice move on their part.
• Second thing I like is the customization. Sure, they don’t show the menus in advance for the week before but they offer you six or seven choices and you can change from the initial ones they have picked for ones you like without having to pay more. I like to have choices, especially because I have dietary restrictions and my husband is a somewhat picky eater, so finding meals that work for the both of us can be difficult.
• Next is the customization, you can choose when to have it delivered as in which day of the week works for you and gives you a clear cut-off date to choose your menu and finalize whether you want a delivery or skip the week.

Delivery & Packaging

Delivery was pretty good. We got our box on an unfortunate day where it was having heavy rain. However, they did position it under our shelter so the box itself wasn’t wet however somehow part of the bottom did get it a little wet. What does help is that the box is thick enough that it doesn’t affect the food packaged itself. Minor things.

As for the packaging, this part I love a lot. They have ziploc bags to divide up the portions. The meat is packaged incredibly well. My favorite part is that the chicken is packaged like how you’d get it in the supermarket in a tray. There was just one thing that needed a better job at packaging and it was the fish as that leaked.

Meals

Morroccan Haddock and Stewed Vegetables

Moroccan Haddock and Stewed Vegetables was very delicious. The quinoa was really good mix. The moroccan spices was great and the vegetables was good.

Mole Chicken with Lime Cilantro Rice

Mole Chicken with Lime Cilantro Rice was the more bizarre choice here as this sauce has 70% dark chocolate. We can’t say that we’re a huge fan but the rice does have a distinct taste to match with the meal. The chicken however turned out very tender which is a great thing. You can’t win them all. Every box has an experimental thing usually and this one was ours.

Pork and Shanghai Noodles with Garlic Scapes

Goodfood sent us a newsletter about Garlic Scapes and how they aren’t quite used enough in any recipes and how they included it into this meal of Pork and Shanghai Noodles. I’m personally a huge fan of Shanghai Noodles but never quite knew how to make it. This meal was our fave from the box. The garlic scapes are decent. The pork chop should be cut. However, the photo above was taken before it was cut (sorry!). Delicious altogether.

Meal not photographed: Ground Beef, Potato and Green Pea Keema

Ground Beef, potato and Green Pea Keema came with Naan bread. I had to opt out of the bread myself and used normal bread mostly because I feel like naan bread has some dairy ingredients and I like to be safe. The meal itself is a little heavy on the lemon juice. Probably because of our inexperience and not really knowing how this should taste. It was decent overall. It definitely should be paired with something to absorb the taste.

Overall…

We’re really happy with the first Goodfood experience. We aren’t sponsored or anything so this is completely honest on our part (as we always are). Its been an uphill climb trying to find something that could fit what we wanted and this change and chance we took was a great one. There are minor issues in delivery and packaging that I had me a little cautious however, we did end up ordering a second meal subscription for the week after. This meal’s star menu was the Pork and Shanghai Noodles.

Our next recap for Goodfood will be coming up soon!