BOHEMIAN GASTROPUB (571 Queen West, at Portland, 416-361-6154, thebohemiangastropub.ca) Complete dinners for $45 per person (lunches $30), including tax, tip and a pint of local microbrew. Average main $18/$14. Open daily 11 am to midnight. Bar till close. Licensed. Access: barrier-free. Rating: NN
The Bohemian Gastropub makes no bones about it: beer is the bottom line. From the near-dozen local microbrews on tap to the frat-boy rock dinner music, suds are the recently launched resto’s raison d’être.
The food that goes with the swilling is the focus of co-owner and executive chef Paul Boehmer’s inaugural carte as well, though its conception is the work of partner and chef de cuisine Chris Scott, last seen infusing avant-garde gnocchi with cigar smoke at L.A.B. on College.
“Paul gave me the box,” explains Scott.
And so he fills it with the kind of small, shareable plates that seem like a good idea after the third pint of Mill Street Cobblestone Stout ($6). Smelts ($9), say, or thinly sliced, overly salty fried pigs’ ears paired with an underpowered smoked-paprika tartar sauce. Fancy-pants tapas these ain’t.
Worthy of the midway, a savoury take on funnel cake ($8) made with potato flour and drizzled with crème fraîche and chopped chives tastes like deep-fried air and doesn’t seem worth the empty calories.
A similar spin on poutine ($10) cleverly replaces spuds with spaetzle, their gravy sadly a too-thin jus that pools in the bottom of the bowl instead of coating the mini-dumplings. And who can tell if their cheese curds are squeaky or not above the constant din of passing dump trucks and angry 50-year-old men (aka Metallica and the Beastie Boys) yelling over the sound system?
Greens are as rare on the Bohemian’s meat-mad menu as they are in the Alberta Legislature. Zucchini gets shredded and formed into dumplings stuffed with cheddar before being deep-fried and plated next to a smear of Riesling-soaked chutney and a few frozen grapes. You’ll need the latter once you bite into the molten-lava-like cheese.
Far more successful, the skinny green bean salad (both $7) comes tossed with pink pickled radish, red onion threads, lemony cucumber and what Scott describes as “fried croutons” but we call random chunks of challah.
Since the pork knuckle ($21) is off again tonight, we opt for the Maultaschen, which turns out to be tasty Swabian ravioli thick with shredded lamb shoulder and spinach in a bacon broth that could use less lemon zest and a lot more dill. Batter and deep-fry a scallop of veal and it’s bound to be a bit tough, exactly the fate inflicted on Bohemian’s otherwise exemplary schnitzel (both $18), sided with warm potato salad laced with diced cucumber and a smear of tart cloudberry jam.
Dubbed the Baker’s Oven ($19) and served in a lidded Le Creuset mini-casserole, the beef ‘n’ mushroom stew needs more garlic and wine, its side of pan-roasted pearl onions and miscellaneous root vegetables one of the so-called gastropub’s few highlights. Tonight’s Half Bird ($18) – a free-range chicken naturally raised in Quebec (and, boy, are its wings tired) – arrives flabby of skin and obscenely stratified with fat. An excessively buttered bed of cabbage underneath offers little relief.
Literally saving the worst till last, the Wurst Pizza Ever ($8) – their words, not mine – finds a cookbook-perfect tarte flambée cracker crust à la Buca, La Cigogne and Elle M’a Dit distressingly dressed with crumbled sausage, sliced bratwurst and house-made “purple” mustard.
A dish this diabolical could drive anyone to drink.
stevend@nowtoronto.com