Hot beef injection

>> New steakhouse Méchant Boeuf
will fill you up but good

by MARK SLUTSKY

Everyone wants to be a burger king these days. Or maybe everybody just wants to eat burgers. But it’s hard to ignore the proliferation of the high-end burger, made with truffles, Kobe beef, blue cheese, what have you.

I’ve got nothing against this trend in general, as I like a good burger, but paying $20 for one can hurt. Still, if you’ve got the budget and are in the mood for high-end comfort food, you’ve got plenty of options.

As noted in these pages a few months ago, Moishe’s venture M:Brgr makes a particularly fine, and seemingly infinitely customizable variation on the gourmet burger. Another newish place to lay claim to the high-end hamburger is Méchant Boeuf Bar-Brasserie, one of two restaurants (the other is the more formal Verses) in Old Montreal’s Hotel Nelligan.

The restaurant claims to be “a chic pub with a British flavour and French accents,” although they also describe it as a steakhouse. So there’s a lot going on there. Really, it feels like a large, comfortable, clubbish restaurant where both suits and jeans could be appropriate. The long bar, with flat-screen TVs showing hockey games above, quickly dispels any over-formality. Booths and club chairs make it a relaxing enough place to hang, though I’d stop short at “chic”; there’s still a lingering hotel-restaurant aura.

The Web site boldly announces that they play only classic rock, and I don’t really know what to say about that. (It should be noted that their definition of “classic rock” includes U2, R.E.M., Tears for Fears and the Cure. For whatever that’s worth.)

More important for our purposes, Méchant Boeuf also claims to have the best burger in town, which is what drew my eye from the start. I was eager to compare their offering with M:Brgr’s. More on that later; to start, we ordered a bowl of Boston-style clam chowder ($9) and the beef carpaccio with chipotle Caesar salad ($14).

The soup was, to my surprise, the best dish of the night, though strictly speaking, it was more of a seafood chowder, with mussels, crab and squid rings bobbing in the creamy broth. It was addictive, and very, very dense: honestly, a bowl of that stuff with some bread on the side could fill you up quite nicely on its own.

The chipotle Caesar salad received mixed notices. The good news: the Caesar salad part of the dish was beyond criticism—the greens were fresh, the dressing was sharp, the bacon bits were big and chewy, the croutons crunched vividly and the shaved parmesan was elevating. But hidden beneath the greenery was the carpaccio itself, which was sorely lacking in… something. I want to say… flavour. It definitely could have used some salt; as it was, it tasted like slices of dull roast beef. Not a good sign for a place with “beef” in the name.

But on to the mains. The burger ($16), made with smoked bacon, blue cheese, gruyere and caramelized onions. How was it? Let’s start with the fries, which were crisp and delicious. The burger itself? Good… but not great, and definitely not on a par with M:Brgr. While I appreciate a charcoal grilling, the meat seemed to absorb a little too much of that burnt charcoal flavour, and the cheese was piled on a little too thick; I didn’t particularly care for what the blue cheese brought to the table, flavour-wise, either. I like blue cheese on its own—it just didn’t fit.

As the place bills itself as a steakhouse, we had to go for one of those. We chose the 10-ounce New York steak with cheese mashed potatoes ($22, $29 for the 14 ouncer). It was a tender and satisfying piece of meat, and the kitchen cooked it rare to our liking. It sat on a massive flotilla of potato and vegetable, making for an incredibly dense meal.

Dense is really the key word at Méchant Boeuf. You will walk away full, and mostly satisfied—but not amazed.