Q Haute Modern Tea

This menu was a fucking masterpiece, hands down one of the best ‘event dinners’ that we’ve done.

I’ve gotta be one of the worst procrastinators around, deadlines are certainly my best friend when it comes to planning stuff. I’ve thought about doing a tea dinner since early November 2014, but only in May 2015 did we have our first event. This is a summary from start to finish about how menus like this are born.

Pre-planning:
I think there is a big distinction of tasting/judging beverages, and planning/pairing them with food.  About a month before the event, Guylaine brought Paul, Sean, and I some tea to taste. She prepared it all herself, but for us it’s not a good environment to plan in. It’s awkward to take too much of someones time while you think about all the intricacies that a drink has, and a level of respect that is shown to someone who gives you a drink — in that you don’t want to say the undesirable or bad qualities it may have. We quietly scribbled down our initial thoughts of the tea, and built a skeleton of the menu.

This was Seans paper, everyone except him is irresponsible and lost theirs.

Scramble planning:
As much pre-planning as we do, it never seems to amount to much in the end. I think only 1 of our original thoughts carried through to the finalized menu, but even those go through heavy changes. When I refer to scramble planning I really mean it’s the last minute get shit done session we have before a big event. We’re all busy with our typical work load, so planning these events is really above and beyond. It was late Saturday night, a big Persian/Irish wedding was going on in the Manhattan room, the chefs finishing up their weekly ‘spray down’ of the kitchen. I prepared a table in the dining room with tea cups, carafes, wine and stationary. Wine? It helps to loosen up your tongue and say what you really think.

At 12:00am we eventually sat down, Paul, Jeff and I (Sean joined around 3:00am) brewed up the first of the tea. ‘Nano’ a Taiwanese white tea. I guses spinach and leafy greens were the primary flavours we got during that session. The first time I tried this tea personally I felt it was much more towards fruitcake or shortbread. Anyway we do a little course here once in a while for kitchen tables and other VIP guests which is a little garden planted in potato puree. I proposed it, it was a pretty easy sell. In the final version some of the special vegetables we ‘planted’ included miner lettuce, watermelon radish, shimeji mushrooms, golden beets, wild onion.

The Kamairicha was up next, a Japanese pan fried/dried green tea. Seems there were 2 big flavour profiles that we jumped to when we tried it. I said roasted chestnuts, everyone else said seaweed. Using ingredients not in season is against the philosophy of restaurant. This creates problems for me, because it forces me into a box. It’s the reality though, and we have to make it work. Chestnuts are not in season, so they cannot play a pivotal role in the flavour of the dish, but they can be present in minor ways.We ended up compromising on crusting scallops with chestnuts to go down that flavour avenue, and doing a mascarpone cheese white risotto with mussels and kombu/nori oil.

As it was mentioned earlier, Sean was off working on something in the kitchen until around 3am, so around 2:30am Paul went to take a piss and disappeared for an hour. I guess he snuck out to help Sean leaving Jeff and I to sit awkwardly and plan on our own. This guy has some ideas, lemme tell ya. If you throw practicality out the window and just listen to shit that comes out of his mouth, it’s inspiring. The Zhenghe Hong Gongfu pairing was more or less his inspiration. Duck, chocolate, smoke, salt, I pitched in dandelion. It was an easy course, there’s no way that could have failed.

It was 3:45ish by this point, planning the pastry section was pretty easy. I’ve wanted to do Victorian sandwiches since the dinners initial thought, to pay homage to the concept of high tea if not for any other reason. The Assam tea was really savory with nice tannins, as good as the 3 components were, the one to really shine was the scone.

Pu’Erh was next, or as Paul would write with his U.K-tier english, Poo-air. Somehow these things are really funny at 4am. It’s a super earthy tea, doing something with hay would have been ideal, but we don’t have any of that at the moment. We stuck with a traditional earthy path and went with mushrooms. Would have been sweet to get matsutake mushrooms flown in from BC but its probably not the season, not to mention the price. The cap is what we needed, and stuffing it with something was about as technical as we needed to get.

Eventually the mushrooms turned into dicks.

The final pairing with the sweets was to go with the orange liqueur into Darjeeling black tea, a drink with a strong, but pleasant astringent orange flavour. The pairing concept was to bring about an ‘Old Fashioned’ profile. Using flavours of Angostura bitters, bourbon, sugar and oranges in the food, to sync up with the cocktail. Eventually the 4:30, fuck it mentality kicked in and the rest his history.