Batter up

by MARK SLUTSKY

I was excited when I heard that a restaurant named Prêt à Manger had opened downtown, but for all the wrong reasons. See, on a visit to London some years ago, I’d become taken with a U.K. sandwich chain of the same name (referred to by everyone just as “Prêt”) that offered semi-gourmet sandwiches at semi-affordable prices. I knew the company was tentatively venturing over the pond, having opened a couple of branches in New York, so I assumed they had struck northward.

Well, I couldn’t have been more mistaken. Montreal’s Prêt à Manger is not, as the name might have you imagine, a cafeteriastyle eatery or a take-out place. It’s actually a big, brightly lit Chinese restaurant in the Chinatown style, though located on Ste- Catherine between Concordia and Atwater in a once quite dilapidated little area that now boasts a few great Asian restos (Maison Bulgogi and Manchuria Dumpling King among them).

With a big, bound menu and a separate two-sided colour card with photographs (and no overlapping dishes) Prêt has a lot to offer, with plenty of Chinese fare and the occasional Thai or Japanese selection.

On a recent visit, we started with a round of hot and sour soup ($3.50), skipping the shark fin soup, which starts at $50 for the small and $95 for the large. It was tasty, with no real surprises, although someone commented that it wasn’t quite sour enough. We wanted to follow that up with some steamed dumplings ($3.50), though the waiter informed us that it would be a 15–20 minute wait for them, as they were frozen. So much for prêt à manger. One appetizer that we did end up settling on was the salty and spicy fried tofu ($3.95). Crisp triangles of bean curd tasting of a hint of garlic and pleasantly spicy, they were addictive and disappeared fast.

Similarly tasting of salt and oil was the salt and pepper seafood dish ($12.95). I wasn’t sure exactly what to expect from this, but I was still a little surprised to see that it was a heaping platter of various seafood—shrimp, octopus, scallop etc.—with each piece deep-fried in batter. The seafood tasted fresh, and they weren’t lying with the name: it was incredibly, even audaciously salty. And yet, it was awesome. Yes, it was battered to high heaven, but the dish never tasted as greasy as you’d imagine, and the saltiness ended up thrilling.

Seeing a couple of hot pots on the menu, we decided on the chicken ($9.95). This was also somewhat of a batter-stravaganza, as the fowl was battered and deepfried before it hit the pot, where it mingled with vegetables and a thick gravy. Tasty, but decadent. The shrimp and sugar peas sautéed with XO sauce ($10.95) was definitely on the lighter side, with the crisp sweet peas, the fresh shrimp and the mysterious XO intermingling nicely.

Another popular dish at our table was the Japanese tofu and eggplant ($10.95). Vegetarians beware: despite the innocuous name, this dish is liberally sprinkled with crumbled pork. If you can handle that (or if you can get them to withhold it), the silky tofu and eggplant combo is very satisfying.

We had almost forgot we ordered the BBQ duck with special sauce ($14.95) when it arrived, we were so full already. But we soldiered on for the yummy-looking bird. The special sauce was actually nothing more than hoisin (though I happen to think that hoisin sauce is special stuff, so I guess they have a point). With deliciously crisp skin, beneath which lay an equally tasty, if scandalously generous layer of fat, this was another delicious dish (especially with the dipping sauce) that made me feel like I was going to have a heart attack. With food like this, you can’t help but wonder what Prêt’s effect is going to be on the neighbourhood’s mortality rate.

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