St. John’s has a lack of cool restaurants – I mean the kind of place where The Arcade Fire segues into James Blake over the course of a small-plates filled evening. There’s usually some kind of exposed brick wall, a welcoming bar with small-batch booze, comfortable banquettes, and a lot of people beards.
There you go – cool, defined.
To be fair, I was a bit young to appreciate cool restaurants when I lived in Newfoundland, but going back every year and seeing the updates made me realize that there just weren’t enough restaurants to have (need? want?) many of the restaurant trends I was seeing in Toronto and Montréal.
But I was feeling that it needed a place to take a date for a sort of upscale, kind of sexy, not too expensive meal with a craft cocktail and some pan-Asian sustainable fare, incoporating local ingredients whenever possible.
There you go – Adelaide Oyster House, defined.
I think Chef Steve Vardy realized that St. John’s has never really had the opportunity to share before. The idea of splitting small plates of deep-fried salt-and-pepper squid wih srirachi aioli ($14), raw albacore tuna with local honey, almond crumble, popcorn and cilantro ($14), and sweet scallop ceviche with radish slices, grapefruit and passionfruit ($14) is as foreign as it comes. And for a province where Sunday dinner is a family-style meal, that was a little sad.
So after hunting for parking for 20 minutes (the biggest downfall of downtown dining), we arrived and put our name on the list for a table or seat at the bar – the best seats in the house if you like watching bartenders shake dark rum and Tequila cocktails.
The other thing St. John’s doesn’t do a lot of is raw fish. When Sun Sushi opened about a decade ago, the owner had a lot of explaining to do. coat the fish in batter and serve it with chips and you’re alright, though…
…which is where those salt-and-pepper squid ($14) come in. Coated in rice flour (gluten-free!), they’re miraculously tender. Dip each crunchy piece in a sweet chili lime sauce and make an appropriate comment to your eco-friendly date that it’s sustainable to boot and how you’re living for the day that Ches’s serves sustainable cod in gluten free batter.
That guacamole with ancho and serrano chilies (Newfoundland heat level = low unless specified) and fried 100% corn tortillas ($9) should probably have come out first, but the law of Adelaide is that plates come out when they’re ready (much like there are no reservations and you’re seated when there’s a table – though, considerate and friendly staff that they are, they’ll give you a wait time and call when when your table’s ready).
And those silken scallops, though not local, don’t have to travel that far. Vardy admits that fish sourcing is still tough. But thanks to Raymond’s, Mallard Cottage and other Noma-inspired locavore fiends, eating Newfoundland is now a possibility.
The cabbage in the tuna taco ($7) is local, but it’s all about the avocado and baja sauce.
The spicy octopus salad (rice vermicelli, cilantro, mint, basil, peanuts spicy sauce with more sriracha) is now replaced by the spicy octopus ssam with a miso-aji panca sauce (crunchier, served on lettce, no vermicelli – $12).
And there are oysters – mostly East Coasters, so big, fat and briny. And noobies who don’t like the whole raw thing can get them broiled. But maybe it’s about time you try them, and in ten years you’ll find yourself at Sun Sushi with someone snuffing is nose at raw fish, and you too will think more sushi pizza for me.
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