March 18, 2006 Archives
It was still a gibbous moon tonight. Tomorrow's a full moon I've heard but it's not, since full moon was Wed. But the mood downtown was on the weird side, people were on the streets despite the fact that it was still freezing -10C above ground up here. No incident to report, except that it was St.Patrick's. an exciting evening - after the Piton de la Fournaise, I joined my group of friends at McLean's, a random Irish Pub on Peel Street, and drank two pseudo-pints of Irish beer. $18 not well-spent, as I will try to do better tomorrow. A live band kept chanting Irish hymns, other patrons created atmosphere on the dance floor, and that was well-enough compensating.
It's a Bring-your-own-wine, which would explain the out-of-the-ordinary prices. But it was well worth my $35 taxes and tips included, although I should've brought the wine. >_>
I had the cari shark. "Cari" is not the same thing as curry, even if we tend to translate it like this in French. Le Piton de la Fournaise is the name of the volcano dominating the Reunion Island, a territory off Madagascar belonging to France (in fact a French Département). It is also the name of a restaurant that serves cuisine from the Island, located on Duluth, near St-Hubert.
The entree (a watercrest soup) was forgettable (and a bit too salty), but the main dish was teh fabulous. A symphony of taste. The 'cari' is a spicy sauce, but 'spicy' is in the sense of flavour/herbs, rather than hot. I have some difficulty pinpointing the exact taste. It was along the lines of zesty and fruity; a sauce that coated beautiful cubes of shark meat that didn't remind me of what shark usually tastes like (was a bit on the soggy side, and felt more like rayfish - but I might be mixing shark with mahi-mahi). The rice on the side was topped with a delicated leguminous-based sauce, and the dishes were to be optionally seasonned with special spicy sauces (in the 'hot' sense, this time), which came in three different flavours - lemon bits, eggplant and tomatos.
The dessert was a rich and stomach-expanding sweet potato home recipe pie served with a fizz of fresh cream and freshmint leaves that I would pleasantly bite on between each bite of pie. This stuff was God.
