To paraphrase Diogenes where can I find an honest meal? Tonight I don’t want drizzle or foam or fashionista or an adventure in global cuisine, I don’t want my food labeled and justified, I don’t want to eat an animal whose short ecstatic life puts many human lives to shame. I don’t want to eat a vegetable personally raised by someone who chats to flowers. I don’t want to be worried about what fish I should eat. I don’t want to be confined to a restaurant which only appeals to my demographic - nor do I want to go to one, like a resto lounge. that makes me feel like an outsider. I’d like to be able to have a conversation without having to text my companion.

So I go to Tundra in the downtown Hilton reckoning a hotel must have the broad appeal I’m looking for. The chef’s got a rep: Kevin Prendergast left Toronto more than ten years for the Marriott in Manhattan and he returned in 2006 to the Hilton. The menu is all Canadian but without the customary self-congratulation. And since the Opera House opened right next door, Tundra’s become an opera goer favourite. It even offers dinners themed for operas.I wish I’d tasted how sous chef Kreg Graham had made Tosca taste like.

Tundra is housed in the huge Hilton foyer which has the warmth of an airport terminal. The colours are beige on neutral on vanishing and the pharonoic height, atleast four stories, turns humans into ants pushing wheeled luggage over a vast empty floor.

Tundra itself is a moveable feast, occupying an expandable/contractable space next to a long bar. I gather the same architects (Kuwabara Payne Mckenna Blumberg) who invested JK at the Gardiner with Stasi chic are responsible for Tundra’s triumphant impersonality where patrons remain anonymous in the indirect moonlight cast by a glowing giant pillar.

The welcome is pleasant enough but the greeter, while charming, has no authority. Now why do I expect authority in a welcome? Because I’m going to lay out serious spondulicks for a couple of hours in the sarcophagus chamber and I’d like to feel that the restaurant has the confidence to deliver. The avid eater who’s come along tonight is already fretting about his car. The machine in the lot beneath the Hilton swallows the Visa but fails to spit out a receipt. The greeter promises to investigate and get back to us. She doesn’t.

Service is otherwise brisk, our server Kevin is helpful-plus handing over large plastic-covered menus without being asked. I know it makes sense, the menus are reusable, but why is an expensive restaurant apparently trying to save money this way? Perhaps because it has another big ticket item to worry about. Food safety! Forget the parking problem, think gazillion dollar lawsuits for a rogue pathogen.

The now customary warning about allergies is accompanied by dishes picked out with a star : “These foods may be raw or undercooked…Consuming raw or undercooked meats, poultry, shellfish or eggs may increase your risk of food-borne illness.”

Wow there goes the Quebec foie gras, the carpaccio of angus beef tenderloin, the house cured gravlax, the Digby scallops and the duck breast, the farmed venison and the charbroiled angus striploin steak!


What’s left? We look at each other and decide to live dangerously.

The food is well worth the risk. True, a few slips at first. Why is one side of the bread stale? But the mildly spicy veggie dip is good. And the warm chevre that goes with the roast beet salad is dry and crackly. But I’m so glad I took my life in my hands and ordered the Digby scallops from Nova Scotia. Not only are they dry, which means they aren’t plumped up with dry cleaning fluid, but their sweetness is nicely enhanced by the mushy apple/celery confit and celeriac puree.

To the entrée. We skip the fish although feel deeply tempted by Nova Scotia lobster macaroni and cheese with fresh lumachini (snails) pasta dusted with vintage white cheddar ($26) for the more challenging meat.

Now both duck breast and farmed venison have issues: they can be tasteless and tough. Here both dishes are superb: the duck slices ($36) are moist and tender lapped by a sweet-sour cassis partridge berry sauce – what is a partridge berry? It’s a Canadian lingonberry close relative to a cranberry. Point is that it provides the acid spike in sweet cassis (black current) which doesn’t overwhelm the duck the way other sweet sauces often do. A nice fat savoy cabbage roll is stuffed with wild rice and duck confit.

I guess the juniper rub is what enlivens the farmed Ontario venison ($39). Thick tranches of tender pink meat tasting faintly piney go beautifully with sweet potato/chestnut puree and Saskatoon berry jus and the clincher is the carb of toasted pearl barley. We drink a pleasant California cab from a big list.

It’s ridiculous - but Tundra is too quiet. There are a dozen people scattered round the space and they’re as somnolent as sleeping cats. It makes us yearn for the buzz coming from the bar where a tour is eating dinner. We’d like some of the buzz right here but screens separate us. I guess this is the dilemma of a hotel restaurant – how to please everybody. It also results in a lack of clear identity: Tundra’s good food deserves three stars but it isn’t supported by great presentation.

We end with a classic, a spin on a hazelnut cream millefeuille, made with a crunchy disc. Simple and sophisticated. Now we’re ready to hear the fat lady sing….



**1/2 Tundra at the Hilton. 145 Richmond Street W
Tel: 1-416-869 3456. Wheelchair Access. Quiet. Dinner for two, food and tax:$137