L'Abattoir Restaurant

Hi Guys!  It's been a long time since my last food blog post.  I was actually out of town for the past month, experiencing the exotic cuisine of Australia and Taiwan.  But I'm back now and ready to share my food adventures with you guys again!

A good friend of mine had his birthday last week and it's always been tradition that we'll go out to a fine dining restaurant for his birthday.  This year we tried "L'Abattoir" in Gas Town.  

Slow roasted Pork Belly with poached egg.  I love pork belly (it's the same cut of meat where bacon is from).  This is a fairly rich dish but the chef wisely used a brighter vinegar based sauce to help cut through the richness.  

Crispy steelhead trout salad.  This was a great starter.  The trout was served raw and had the texture and fattiness of salmon.  The plate was really well put together.  Crispy fondant potatoes adds a crunchy element and smokey soft/medium boiled egg really adds to the dish.  Arugula and dill completes the dish.  By the way my friend is a professional photographer so you can see how well he uses an iphone camera compared to my own pics!

Lamb 3 ways.  On the left there was a portion of the lamb the server called the 'Cap'.  The middle is 2 pieces of tenderloin.  The right is a sausage made from lamb meat.  Accompanying the dish is a celery root pure, some sort of slaw made out of celery root, and pickled red onions.  The sauce was some sort of red wine reduction.  I enjoyed this dish tremendously.  The gaminess of the lamb did come out but it was balanced by the tartness of the pickled sides.  Each lamb portion was super moist and tender and seasoned and flavoured excellently.

Poached pear and peaches in vanilla syrup.  Accompanying it is a quenelle of cream cheese mousse.  The cream cheese mousse was surprisingly light tasting which was unexpected as cream cheese can feel heavy.  The cake that the fruit was sitting on had an interesting cardamon spicy flavour.  I've never seen micro greens added to a dessert before but in this case it added a citrusy lemon element that was very interesting.















Overall I have to say that I'm very impressed with the chef at L'Abattoir.  Each plate was very complex and was composed of many parts that balanced each other out.   For each rich or gamey element of a dish, there was a corresponding bright or tart element that contrasted it.  Being a foodie I really enjoyed trying to piece together the chef's thought process on how he put together each plate.


Here are some more glamour shots that my friend took of the evening!