My Experience at River Café

My Experience at River Café

        I was very surprised to have found a small restaurant tucked away behind the trees on Prince Edward Island. Even though I have been to the park almost every year for the Canada Day celebration, I never noticed the rustic cottage-like building. The inside of the restaurant was brighter than I expected, with wooden furniture and things such as snowshoes to give it a “back-country” feel. This is consistent with the “local” theme we studied in class, as it reminded me of a small wooden cabin by the foothills of the rocky mountain. As I walk past the fire place and took a seat, the crackling fire and the beautiful snow covered scenery outside sets the mood for the lunch we are about to have; some of the woven backs of the chairs even had blankets, which further eluded that this was not a public restaurant but a cozy back-woods cabin where old friends and families gather for a home-cooked meal.

        Before the lunch field trip, we learned that the River Café was known for its ethical business practices, clean and organic food source, as well as food grown and raised locally. Keeping this in mind, I had the assumption that this place probably served mostly vegetarian dishes with names I never heard of before and very little variation in the menu items since it is located in a city where winter is around more than half the time. I was fairly surprised with the customized menu for that afternoon; it had four courses with a wide range of ingredients. The servers kindly asked each guest their beverage preference and food allergies and served us “military style’, which meant that each guests received their dishes at the same time.

The first dish was a creamy carrot soup, which was my personal favorite. After a long walk through the snowy and rather windy park, this really brought warmth and life back into my body. The soup was topped with lemon-preserved yogurt and oil infused with exotic spices. Next came the salad topped with duck prosciutto with a side of bruschetta. It also had bits of Asian pear and a strange chunk of cheese in the middle. I found this to be the most interesting dish; to me it resembled a fusion dish that combined Asian (I presume Chinese, from the duck and pear) and Italian components, especially with the light flavours of the pear and cheese. Chinese dishes rarely have really cheesy ingredients in them and this light-tasting, stuffed mozzarella paired really well with the refreshing tastes of the pear. The outside of the mozzarella reminded me of a hard-boiled egg white and its inside reminded me of a deviled egg. The main course was steak with smoked veggies. It initially sounded like a very North-American dish, which I always associated with sides of fries. The actual dish looked far from what we would usually get in a pub restaurant. The steak was already cut into strips, paired with a brown sauce. The potatoes were very creamy and soaked in the sauce the steak came in. this tasted very strange to me. What was even stranger was the small cubes of fruit, which I found out was actually apple. It tasted nothing like an apple and someone from the table even confidently stated that this was a type of exotic tropical fruit she once had. Dessert was my second favorite dish. It had infused flavor of pumpkin spices and was topped with a fruity berry (huckleberry) sauce. Though I had always hated any flavours that were similar to cinnamon, such as apple or pumpkin spice, the creamy and rich taste of the pudding completely won me over. Being raised mostly on an Asian diet, this dessert had just the right amount of sweetness to my taste, concluding the dining part of our experience at the River Café.

        After the meal, we heard from the restaurant manager and head chef. Personally, I thought this segment might have enriched our dining experience more if it was scheduled before the meal. If we had known the amount of effort the staff went to procuring the ingredients used in our meals, we probably would have appreciated it even more during the meal and on some level, comforted by the fact that all the ingredients were local, fresh, and organic. For example, we learned that the yogurt and the duck prosciutto were both made on site right inside the small kitchens of the restaurant. The staff had taken extreme care in curing and aging the meat, as well as making sure the yogurt fermented perfectly. Even the spices used in the soup were from some remote part of Africa (which was fairly traded for). Consistent with the local food and slow movement we studied in class, all of these ingredients were obtained from small local businesses. The vegetables were grown from a green house and the duck and beef were raised humanely on local farms and put on strict grain diets. More than once during the meal, I heard someone say “I have never tasted this before!” or “this isn’t like what I tasted before.” Though these ingredients are commonly found in large chain grocery stores, their taste was foreign to us. Homogenization of the food industry changed our taste preference so much that when we taste “real” food like these, we are not able to recognize them.