Restaurant review: Vancouver's Michelin-recommended Nero Tondo cooks in the here and now
Nero Tondo
Where:
1879 Powell St., Vancouver
When:
Dinner, Tuesday to Saturday
Info:
604-895-4233 |
The name holds the key to the soul of this restaurant. Nero tondo, the namesake vegetable, is a Spanish black radish with unhandsome, coarse black skin and an initial taste akin to snorting fire. Not on many chefs’ dance cards.
“It’s a vegetable with a difficult personality, but it is a vegetable and that’s what our cooking revolves around and what we’re all about,” says Devon Latté, owner and chef along with Lucas Johnston. In their ninja thinking, they embrace the “extremely difficult ingredient” for its vegetableness.
“It needs some love,” says Latté. Typically, they’ll marinate, roast and sear it at high heat.
Their vegetable love doesn’t exclude animal protein but it’s mostly in the form of excellent seafood. The food at Nero Tondo is super seasonal and always changing, and they take inspiration from their travels, leaning to French, Japanese and Italian cuisines.
Along with seasonality, the chefs devote time and energy to extreme locavore cooking and avoiding imports. Soy sauce? They make their own. Lemons? The amazing Jane Squier on Salt Spring Island is a saviour of sour with the dozens of varieties of citrus she grows — like makrut lime, Buddha’s hand, finger limes, calamansi, sudachi — as well as other tropical plants such as avocados in her greenhouse.
“It’s a tropical paradise out there and her greenhouse is heated with compost,” says Latté.
Latté and Johnston met while cooking at Acorn, the Michelin-recommended vegetarian restaurant. They opened Nero Tondo to extend the hyper-local approach to the bar and wine program. In their first year, they nabbed a Michelin recommendation.
“With local ingredients, the quality can’t be matched. We know the soil where our produce comes from, the waters where the fish are from, the fishers we buy from,” says Latté.
“It definitely feels good connecting with our purveyors and to know who’s coming through the door every day,” adds Johnston. “The farmers markets are social hours for Devon and I.”
The staff connects enthusiastically to their guests, too, rushing up in greeting you with lit-up faces like they’ve been waiting just for you. The cheerful service staff is led by general manager/sommelier, Meghan McDowell Johnston (yep, Johnston’s real-life partner).
Nero Tendo’s squeezy kitchen is not for the portly — my home kitchen seems vast in comparison. The narrow space has two induction burners and itsy-bitsy cooking counters. Diners sitting at a far end of the counter could reach over and toss salads or plate their meal. Chefs share the galley with servers and bar staff while feeding 18 to 20 diners. “Behind you! Behind you!” is the constant mantra.
“It’s something we got used to in our careers,” says Latté. “There’s nowhere to hide. No wall to go behind. It speaks to our cuisine and style of cooking, talking about our purveyors and putting them on the pedestal.”
The retro serving dishes were Latté’s grandmother’s but the vintage collection is taking on a life of its own. “People come in and say, ‘I love your plates!’ I’ve got boxes of these in my basement,” says Johnston. A customer cleaning out a storage locker bequeathed her stash of old china. “We’ve got a good mix now,” he says.
The menu goes two ways — à la carte or tasting. Most opt for the latter because $79 for five to six courses is a no brainer. “Our goal is value,” says Johnston. “We’d like everyone we’ve worked with, friends, neighbours, to come in and be able to afford it more than once.”
I, of course, opted for the tasting menu. First up was a chanterelle broth with miso and smoked kelp oil to round out flavour and gently whet the appetite.
An oyster on the half shell, from an Indigenously operated farm on Desolation Sound, was splashed with a mignonette of housemade strawberry leaf red wine vinegar and makrut lime. Grilled shishito pepper is sourced from the non-profit Sharing Farm in Richmond, which donates $20,000 to different charities. The shishito was served with huacatay sauce (Peruvian black mint, grown locally).
Vegetable crudités, with local pedigree, came with a garlic lentil dip. Skin-on sweet potatoes with Thousand Island-style dressing shared a plate with sweet corn vierge.
Julienned chayote and kohlrabi salad with pinto beans was dressed in Thai flavours of makrut lime, palm sugar, fish sauce, herbs and honey. A bowl of mussels came with Johnston’s sourdough focaccia. He makes different breads daily, using “Margaret,” the sourdough starter. During dinner, he slapped some Margaret dough on the counter, kneading and prepping for the next day. A palate brightener of radicchio, honeycrisp apple, hazelnuts and Jersey Blue cheese from Golden was tossed with Salt Spring Island Meyer lemon, beet juice and apple cider vinaigrette. Baked parmigiana pasta is Johnston’s aunt Nicolette’s dish, another family touchstone that seems to matter in this restaurant.
The albacore tuna duo (tuna tartare and edge-seared) is a real standout dish because the fish is unbelievably lovely. It’s line-caught and dispatched by the Japanese ikejime method, which is fast and avoids stressing the fish and contaminating the flesh with lactic acid and blood. The chefs are super excited to source local rice, grown in Abbotsford by Artisan SakeMaker’s Masa Shiroki.
“This year’s harvest is the highest quality we’ve seen from his team,” says Latté. “We serve a duo of rice with this dish — with a tiny bit of citrus condiment and as puffed rice on top of the tartare.”
Dessert is Latté’s grandmother’s. “My mom called it Wendy’s angel food cake. It’s simple, with strawberry preserves, like a sundae or parfait.” But Latté sprinkles it with powdered sea asparagus. “The flavour resembles matcha tea. It’s one of the seven wonders of the world,” he says.
The hyperlocal modus operandi extends to the beverage menu as well. Signature cocktails are all made with B.C. craft spirits. Beers are local and craft. Wines are all B.C., of course, with a focus on small, natural wineries like Scout, Kutatas, Aasha and Poppyshake.
How did poet T.S. Eliot put it? “We shall not cease from exploration/And at the end of all our exploring/Will be to arrive where we started/And to know the place for the first time.”
“Here” is a blessed and interesting place to be and Nero Tondo knows how to honour it.
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Source: vancouversun.com