This is the antithesis of the long-lived Hamburger Mary’s across the street. Exile Bistro isn’t a one-menu fits all sort of restaurant but it should most certainly pique the interest of the healthy-eating cognoscenti. How can Exile do anything but since owner Vanessa Bourget is a holistic nutritionist . But she also spent 14 years in the restaurant industry (holistic cocktail bartender at Waldorf Hotel under the previous management, as bar manager at Heirloom vegetarian restaurant, beverage manager at Nuba, and helped set up Parker vegetarian restaurant). Exile, which opened last month, merges her twin interests.
Exile offers a modern menu with an emphasis on locally foraged wild, native ingredients. It detours around chicken, pork, beef as well as “mono crops like corn, wheat and soy that don’t contribute to biodiversity,” she says. “We’re trying not to be part of the big corporate food world. I’ve studied a lot about the effects of food, how it’s grown, how it affects the body and that’s where our passion is. We’re part of a huge movement of rewilding because nutrients (in commercial foods) are declining. With wild foods, you tap into rich and dense phytonutrients that your body is missing.”
It sounds awfully earnest but this isn’t a preachy restaurant. It’s upbeat, has bluesy music running through the small room (20 seater), and if Cory Munro is on the floor, he’s a charmer.
It wasn’t terribly busy on our visits but those who were there, (women mostly) certainly appreciated the food.
A woman at the next table savoured each bite in slow motion, appreciatively, as though she might were dining at The French Laundry or Noma (two of the best restaurants in the world). Aha! Listening in, I learn she’s a student of holistic nutrition.
There is no chef, although Lina Caschetto (who’d worked at Fable, Wildebeest, Cuchillo, Les Faux Bourgeois) was brought in at the beginning. But now it’s a team effort, says Bourget. “Everyone contributes.”
One of her staff has foraged for 11 years and brings in shoots, roots, blooms and flowers for culinary, medicinal and cocktail use.
The foraging is right on trend but they don’t see it that way. They see it as an age-old and healthy way to eat.
The sharing style dishes are $10 to $14 although a hot pot with game meat, roots and shoots is $20.
One of the first dishes we tried comes “with a little wink” as Bourget says. It’s the oyster mushrooms with bloomed mustard seeds, seaweed and dabs of spirulina sauce. The mushrooms look and feel like oysters and is presented on oyster shells.
Bread of the day is $4. On one visit, it was naan but it was more like pita. Another day, our waiter said the bread hadn’t turned out. Not a strong point.
“Talk about Paleo Diet,” my husband said when the pemmican with wild berries arrived. “It’s like a dialogue of what it represented to the First Nations,” says Bourget. “They made a block out of powdered meat, mixed it with rendered fat and berries. We’re doing a cherry and duck fat emulsion,” says Bourget. That is, the cherry-tinted duck fat was served alongside the pemmican. Duck fat rules but I didn’t get this match-up.
A round of really fresh steelhead tartare with blood orange jelly was plated to off-centre (very vogue) with sprinkles of sweet cicely and other wild greens.
A towering, fluffed salad of foraged and cultivated greens and coconut chips was dressed with spruce tip vinaigrette (a tad expensive at $14) is health in a bowl.
Farmhouse Lady Jane cheese was wrapped in kale and served with spruce tip honey and olive oil. The kale, pounded and fermented like Greek grape leaves, was tough, preventing a clean cut into the cheese and masking its mild flavor.
The fermented buckwheat porridge is fermented and it’s good for digestion, says Bourget. It’s topped with beet bacon (smokey), burdock and cabbage.
Cast iron broth pot with game meat, roots and shoots was made very awkward to eat by its interactive presentation. The fondue pot, with its small opening made it difficult to cook and retrieve the ingredients which included dramatic candy cane beet slices. Bibimbop featured a nice crusty rice in the cast iron pot and a beautiful egg but was nothing like my favourite Korean dish.
Desserts get a modernist treatment with little bits and pieces arranged in a collage. One involved bits of chamomile cake, a dollop of house-made ricotta, beet whipped cream and sea foam confection. I would have liked a larger piece of the very nice cake with the pinkish whipped cream or ricotta. Another dessert was an assembly of tapioca, apple sorbet and knotweed. I’m not a fan of these landscaped desserts.
Wines and cocktails are as healthy as alcohol can get. Wines are organic or bio-dynamically produced; cocktails are ‘holistic’ and includes drinks like the Red Margarita, with aloe vera, hibiscus and of course, tequila. The aloe vera, Bourget says, hydrates and processes alcohol in the body.
Kudos, I say, to Exile for taking healthy eating to quite another level and into the wild.
EXILE BISTRO. 1220 Bute, 604-563-8633. Exilebistro.com. Open for dinner Tuesday to Sunday; brunch on Saturday and Sunday.
Overall: ***1/2
Food: ***1/2
Ambience: ***
Service: ***1/2
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