Quebec City: Les Moines Echanson

Les moines Echanson
We head out through the rain to dinner early. Because I haven’t been feeling verygood, we forego our 7:30 reservation and show up at 6pm. They’ve already got the tables marked for reservations so we’re glad that we reserved. We are shown to a table in the window where we can see the lively action on the street (which is a mix of people running by trying to get out of the rain, children stomping in the puddles and people carrying bottles of wine to the local apporter vin restaurants which apparently are pretty common).
The restaurant is quite small with 10 tables. The three in the window are wrought iron and horribly uncomfortable, but the price you pay for the view I suppose. The place becomes progressively busy as the night progresses and when we leave around 8;30, the place is full up. Our waiter suggests some sparkling wine to start. One is a muscat and the other is a white I’m not familiar with. Both are way too sweet for me, so he brings out three additional whites (non sparkling) for me to try before I find one that works. The wines are very unusual grapes, most grapes we haven’t heard of and from places we aren’t familiar with. We’re excited about the wines from the get go because of this unfamiliarity. The restaurant is known for pairing its wines with its dishes. The menu is quite small, with perhaps five appetizers, five mains and five desserts and the waiter goes through each dish and explains exactly what it is. We’re flummoxed. Very unusual dishes and we have to decide between things we don’t normally eat (should we have mussels or blood pudding?). But, we anticipate the food in any case.
We finally decide to start with a spinach salad with a fennel mousse on a green bell pepper soup thing (I don’t think we completely understood this dish) and a ratatouille with goat cheese. What shows up are startling in their beauty. The salad is in a large whiskey glass with the first layer of green bell pepper stuff/soup, followed by the fennel mousse with the spinach on top. It’s vivid green and it almost looks like it’s growing. The eggplant is not as dramatic, but it’s served in a coffee mug with the goat cheese bruleed on top with finely fried onions on top of that. The ratatouille is excellent. I don’t usually like ratatouille because it’s often slimey and acidic but this is perfectly balanced with red bell pepper, eggplant, zucchini and some tomato and wonderful flavors complemented by the tangy goat cheese. The salad is extremely fresh tasting, almost like you’re eating from a spinach field which is as good as far as that goes, but I would like a bit more flavor. Still, it was beautiful.
Our mains consisted of a paella with mussels (sounded more appetizing than the blood pudding) and a cornucopia of chorizo and sweet potato chips and grilled calamari and some kind of fried cake thing (crab maybe?). The paella was served in a small cast iron skillet and it was cooked beautifully with each piece of rice separate. It had shrimp, mussels, scallops and chicken. The mussels were tasty, actually, and did not take forever to chew. Both of us ate them. Vive’s dish was fascinating. It was served in a newspaper cornette with an anchovy mayo for dipping. The food left in the cornet did tend to get soggy so it had to be eaten quickly or eaten soggy. We thoroughly enjoyed it.
A word about the wines. Each dish was paired with a different wine. The waiter would ask if we wanted white or red, and I requested 2oz as opposed to 4oz pours, which they were happy to accommodate. So we had four different wines with the meal. All were unusual and I can’t remember the grapes, but they were all Mediterranean wines.
Finally, we had to have dessert given how wonderful the rest of the meal was. The waiter recommended strawberry soup so we thought what the heck. It was wonderful. It wasn’t super sweet but it tasted as if it had been mixed with some balsamic vinegar and had a deep, rich, intense flavor. There were lots of berries (raspberries, blueberries and strawberries) in it and then there was a blueberry gelato on top and several little cookies. A great way to end the meal.