Author: vitodoli1979

I hesitate to write a less than stellar review of this establishment as the staff went out of their way to make us feel welcome and happy, and it is a lovely place to have dinner. Also, I must preface this by saying my wife...is from the south of France and craves the food of her homeland, and is therefore quite critical. That being said we, and our daughter, and son in law have eaten the traditional French dishes such as duck confit and cassoulet many times in restaurants in France and at relatives homes there so we do know what we are looking for. We were quite excited to find these dishes on the menus. Unfortunately, Batifole's version of both the confit and cassoulet were not as good as we hoped. The confit duck was a leg and breast and of a nice large size. It looked great but the way it is traditionally prepared is in a very hot frying pan so the fatty skin is crisp and a bit salty, but here it seemed to be slow baked and was therefore falling off the bone tender but the fat was soft and it lacked the true confit flavour which is also dependent on the duck being preserved in fat for preferably a long period of time. This did not seem to be the case. It should be noted that this standard of confit is particularly hard to find these days even in France, but we had our hopes up. Cassoulet is also difficult to get right, and the Batifole version was not bad, but rather than having the big white beans which is traditional it had small navy beans which I suppose is also acceptable. The problem was that it had a crust of bread crumbs quite baked onto the surface and seemed a bit on the dry side, and overcooked perhaps so that the individual flavours did not come out. Sausage was not Toulouse, pork belly seemed more like a piece of bacon, and again the confit just tasted like duck, not preserved duck. The beef tartar we started with was very spicy which we were not expecting or welcome. The scallops, home made bread, and (cod) fish dish were all excellent, as was every other aspect of this well run restaurant. So there you have a critical assessment based on our admittedly super high expectations, and I really do like the place and wish it well, but I am still looking for a place in Toronto to eat the duck confit and cassoulet of our memories of the South-West until such a time that we can visit there again.