LEE LOUNGE (601 King West, at Portland, 416-504-7867, susur.com) Complete tapas meals for $75 per person, including tax, tip and a sake. Average tapas $15. Open for dinner Monday to Saturday 5:30 to 11:30 pm. Closed Sunday, holidays. Licensed. Access: one step at door, washrooms on same floor. Rating: NNNNN
Has Toronto ever been so resto-obsessed?
A new restaurant can’t even throw open its doors these days without becoming an instant internet sensation and the lead story on the 6 o’clock news, right up there with Justin Bieber’s new haircut and that Facebook thing in Egypt. Fifteen minutes of fame? Fifteen seconds, more like!
Those of us who kick it old-school believe a new beanery should be allowed a grace period before we waltz in with our opinions. Kitchens need time to work out culinary kinks, servers to find their feet. That’s why we’ve held back till its second night of operation to deliver our verdict on Susur Lee’s latest, Lee Lounge, the hottest thing to hit the Hogtown dining scene since the smelt stopped running.
Imagine our surprise to find a completely empty room the night after its Valentine’s Day launch. Has the social network already labelled Lounge a flop? No, it seems Ma Bell has mistakenly knocked out the land lines and no one knows if it’s open for business. This number is not in service, indeed.
But soon, as the evening progresses, the lights grow dimmer and the Buddha Bar comp louder, the Lounge fills up with an unusually stylish condo crowd in designer suits and little black dresses who knock back Japanese margaritas ($13.50) in the conversation pit, all the while taking photos of each other to later upload to their Flickr accounts. On a Tuesday night!
The Lounge is being hyped as the new, accessible Susur, from the wall of glass that now faces the street to the moderately priced tapas card he calls Susur Bites, though the full Lee menu, including his signature Singapore slaw ($19) and caramelized black cod ($27), is still available. It’s as if he’d thought, “What’s the last thing people would expect?”
And so we get beautifully crisp potato chips ($10) tossed with garlic and Italian parsley, paired with a whipped chickpea hummus dressed with a smoked chipotle pepper and pickled red onion relish, and a bamboo steamer basket of deep-fried Hunan chicken wings ($11) brilliantly dunked into Chinese black vinegar laced with Scotch bonnet peppers.
The globe-trotting continues with a Malaysian satay of grilled shrimp and spice-dusted pineapple finished with spicy chili sauce and squirts of juicy calamansi lime ($12). If the highest compliment an oyster can receive is a comparison to the ocean’s brine, a six-pack of Pacific shigokus on ice ($19) – “shigoku” meaning “ultimate” in Japanese – is like being French-kissed by a sea lion.
Echoing the kitschy 1950s Chinese restaurant decor, Lee’s playful take on Peking duck is the best indication of the Lounge’s new direction, a quartet of thin scallion pancakes spread with jammy persimmon foie gras mousse and dolled up with tender, pink roast duck confit and crunchy bean curd skin crackling ($22). Terrific stuff.
This truly exceptional nosh comes to a close with Lee’s spectacular dessert trio ($28/$10.50 each), sweet tong yuen rice dumpling “gnocchi” stuffed with bittersweet chocolate ganache in crème anglais, hot banana chocolate cake in butterscotch caramel sauce and pineapple upside-down panacotta sided with a scoop of house-made vanilla bean ice cream festooned with a chocolate hood ornament worthy of a 54 Packard.
The rebranding of chef Lee doesn’t stop on the plate. During our three-hour sampling, the supposedly gruff great man himself makes several laps of the room, stopping at our table each time, once to ask if we’d like chopsticks (“No, but do you have a small shovel?”) and later to happily answer our fan-geek Top Chef questions at length. (“It’s like boot camp, only very hush-hush: ‘Report to the compound!'”) As we leave, he even waves from the window.
If this is Susur Lee version 2.0, we’re with the program.
stevend@nowtoronto.com
