An Irresistible Twist on Indian

Globe and Mail July 26, 2008
by Chris Nuttall-Smith

BREAD BAR

3305 Yonge St., Toronto. 416-487-1100. Dinner for two with tax, wine and tip, $160

Say what you will about the state of Mexican, regional Italian and even barbecue in Toronto, but Indian cuisine here has rarely suffered from inauthenticity. I have yet to find a single staple ingredient from the subcontinent that can't be purchased for at least part of the year in one of the city's innumerable south Asian grocery stores. Even 150 years ago, a food historian told me recently, Toronto cooks were known to toast and grind fenugreek, cumin, coriander seeds and turmeric to make colonial-style curries.

To my taste at least, the food at many of the city's subcontinental stalwarts - at Moti Mahal, at Rashnaa, at the beloved Banjara - has always been as good or better than what you'll commonly find in Mumbai, or Cochin or Delhi.

This is impressive. Or at least it was until I tried the new Bread Bar.
The Bread Bar, an offshoot of Hemant Bhagwani and Derek Valleau's Amaya The Indian Room, the acclaimed modern Indian restaurant on Bayview Avenue, does Indian with a textural range that extends well beyond the usual slow-cooked mush.

The flavours are fresh and generally light (ghee seems almost to have been banished here), preparation is often à la minute, and the dishes are frequently inventive, touched with decidedly non-Indian ingredients and just enough modern French technique.

So you'll find a vindaloo beef tenderloin, fork-tender and pink in the middle, served with roasted cherry tomatoes and soft, smoky pearl onions. And a watermelon and ginger shooter as an amuse bouche - a sip of summertime sublime that prods the palate and cools it all at once. And prawns rolled in lemon sole and served over a spinach sauce. And chocolate garam masala truffles.

Which is to say that Bread Bar is wildly, unapologetically inauthentic. It's also very nearly the best Indian food I've encountered in Canada, second only to Vij's, in Vancouver.

Only a kitchen with a sandal in both India and North America could have come up with Bread Bar's jalapeno onion rings, for example: a spicy, let's-not-take-ourselves-too-seriously riff on onion bhaji that's served with a deep, tomatoey, nigella-studded chutney in place of ketchup.

Or Bread Bar's "naanini," a glorious grilled sandwich of aloo palak gobi (soft pulled lamb, potatoes, spinach) and house-made naan. The naanini can also be ordered stuffed with lobster and sided with coconut curry and roasted corn.

Jhal muri chaat, by contrast, plays it relatively straight and entirely delicious; here the popular Calcutta street food of puffed rice, vermicelli, peanuts, sprouted beans and mustard oil is studded with chopped mango and cucumber and drizzled with a creamy raita.

The kitchen uses its coal-fired tandoor (most in the city are fueled with gas) to mostly excellent effect. Its Amaya prawns are impeccably fresh, plump and fire-flavoured, and they're set off with a refreshing green mango and mint sauce.

Sweet and sour eggplant is outstanding: soft, sweet flesh tossed in a well-layered sauce of sour tamarind and curry leaves.

The only slip-up here is the naan, which is flat and dense and undercooked, where what you'd expect from a kitchen this good is soft and fragrant, puffed with bubbles and slightly charred in spots. This is jarring, a bit, in a place that's named for its bread.

But the dessert platter fixes things. In addition to the garam masala truffles, which are mellow with spice and enrobed in dark, fruity melt-in-your-fingers chocolate, the platter brings truffles with pink peppercorns, and shortbread made with ginger, and a pane of pistachio, peanut and almond brittle, and a handful of chopped pistachios mixed with fresh, bursting pomegranate seeds - a combination that covers off salty, sweet, nutty and sour so that you want to go on eating it forever.

The restaurant is mostly tapas-style: Dishes are smallish, which works beautifully for people who like trying lots of different tastes and who learned at an early enough age the importance of sharing. Bread Bar also offers a tasting menu that delivers just about as many different dishes as anybody I've ever met can conceivably consume. At $45 a head for nearly a dozen dishes, it's one of the best dining values in town.
Service is smart and friendly. The wine list is short (six whites, six reds, two sparkling) though well chosen and affordable; cocktails, including a kheera-mirchi gimlet and a Bombay bellini made with sparkling wine, fresh ginger juice and candied ginger, are a must.

The décor - well, it's simple. (Couldn't they have done something about the ceiling's acoustic tiles?) But it's bright and clean and comfortable, and with food this good, who cares whether the bar is made of zebrawood?

Authenticity is so overrated.

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