Atelier Fall Menu & Sunday Supper Club

I had a planned visit to Atelier last week. But, an opportunity presented itself: Chef Hunter's Sunday supper club was back, so I had to book that too. Here's a post with both Atelier's early fall menu, plus the supper!

The fall menu had a couple items from early September's take-out menu. I liked them at home, but they were 200% better in the resturant: the garlic knots had a perfect crisp shell, and the pear galette was better with the herbacious ice cream and all its other finnicky garnishes that wouldn't travel well.

It's hard to come up with any stand-out dishes, because I'm looking at the menu and thinking about how all of these were knock-outs. The chimichurri with the steak was exceptional, brassicas was liked the world's best coleslaw, wheat berries was a distillation of thanksgiving on our first sort-of-chilly day of the year, the bacon benedict-type thing was 🤌, ...

But I will call attention to the last bite: turkish delight. This is the thing we all read about in Narnia and want to try, until finally you're 30 years old and somebody has left a box in the break room at work. You remember the book and grab one, only to be shown that C. S. Lewis has ruined his palette by chain-smoking 9000 cigarettes a day because it's utter dogshit. Or maybe that's just me?

BUT! This turkish delight was really good. Not too sticky, not too messy, and somebody was careful with the rosewater instead of slopping a whole bucket in there. Perfect turkish delight worth betraying your family for. So, props.

The watermelon in the larder was fun: when they were prepping it, I would have sworn it was tuna sashimi. It was a real shock when they went through the dishes.

The cocktail we started with was really good. The menu says pear bramble, poire cidre, london dry gin, and blackberry. It was a very fall drink, and the fruit flavours were working really well with the juniper from the gin! 🍸

I had received some intel late last week about one of the non-alcoholic pairings: some sort of A5 fat-washed mocktail. That sounded cool, so we subbed out our wine for that. It was pretty nifty: I guess they fat-washed Pink Salt? They weren't sure fat washing would work with a spirit-free spirit, but report that it changed things for the better. I dunno what Pink Salt is like without the wash, but it definitely had a very clean taste and heavier mouth-feel than I expected.

I believe the menu is in error about the milk & cookie: it says coffee milk, but I'm 99% sure it was milk tea instead¹. It was The Most Milktea milk tea I've tasted. The milk & cookie course has been around for a while, and it's always amazing.

Sunday Supper

This was something they'd announced at the start of summer as a weekly thing. It's supposed to be a family-style thing, so I was planning an excursion with a bunch of friends & coworkers, lest we be seated next to strangers ... but, the club ended up petering out after two weeks. I wasn't exactly sure why², but it was a bummer, because we didn't have a date everyone lined up on until late July.

But on Wednesday, they posted about the third Sunday supper, so I booked that immediatley and began recruiting other folks to join. But I was look looking forward to Squash Guacamole (squacamole) all week.

Service happened at two big communal tables they'd set up, and it was being run by Chef Hunter and two additional staff³. We did a lot of pouring our own drinks, passing around silverware, and collecting the plates, to keep their workload at a reasonable level.

It ran smoothly. They had advertised it as seating 20; I didn't count the attendees up, but it was probably close to that. This made the resturant pretty loud, which wasn't ideal for our party of seven.

The food was, as expected from Atelier, fuckin' awesome.

I just had a tostada on their regular menu on Thursday, but this one was a different dish entirely. The squacamole delivered on its promises: fainly sweet, which was great with the corn and the heavier toppings.

Chef Hunter described sikil pal as a very old Mayan salsa recipe, and this may have been my favorite part of the tostada. I want to try making some of this myself -- it should be easy to find some pumpkin seeds, given that it's mid-October.