Customer knows best

Taverne Crescent lets you
decide what price is right

by MATHILDE RABBAT

Tough economic times call for creative measures, at least where one downtown eatery is concerned. Faced with the prospect of having to let employees go due to financial woes, Taverne Crescent implemented an ingenious pay-what-you-want strategy, designed to fill empty seats over the lunchtime break.

Is it a P.R. gimmick? Sure. Does it work? You bet your shrinking paycheque. The number of customers in for a midday bite has grown exponentially since the winning strategy took effect over a month ago. New employees have even been hired to cater to the growing amount of hungry punters.

A limited lunchtime menu du jour—only an appetizer and main are part of the deal—includes a choice of three appetizers, a soup, salad or house- made meatball and a handful of main dishes. The no frills soup of the day (a sweet potato purée base with oregano overtones) and a simple salad (mixed greens with a pine nut garnish, in a shear drizzle of olive oil) both held their own quite nicely.

On my visit, poultry, beef, fish and pasta made up the offerings for the pay-what-you-want lunch. (And let’s be clear here, the title is no joke—some pay as little as two bucks for a meal, though the manager assured me, most don’t take too much advantage of the situation.) A slab of grilled omega-packed salmon was presented on a bed of crunchy grilled veggies, resting in a balsamic vinaigrette. On the whole, a satisfying dish, but one in need of a bit of fine-tuning. The grilled fish was enjoyably tender, yet imbued with that right-off-the-grill crunch, but the marinade—something akin to honey-dijon—I found to be too sweet.

A salsa topping, composed of thinly diced tomato, onion and red pepper, might also have contributed to the sweetness of the dish. That having been said, flavourful al dente grilled asparagus and string beans lent a vibrant punch of green to this main, and were decidedly more eventful than their somewhat uninspiring baby potato dish-mates.

The pub-like steak and fries, which seemed to be popular with punters, surpassed the salmon by a mile. A modest yet satisfying, thick portion of grilled beef met its full potential on the grill, seared long enough to garner a nice tan, but brief enough to seal in its juices. The cut was simply too tasty to dunk in the rather ordinary dijonnaise that accompanied it. What would such a pub dish be without fries? A mound of dark shoestring potato curls, with the skins still on, were almost not worthy enough to sit next to the ever so perfect steak.

For dessert, which doesn’t figure on the lunch menu, and in an act of self-sacrifice, I felt that I had an obligation to my readers to subject myself to what one manager termed “an upper cut to the liver.” On the regular menu, it’s under the catchier and less macabre “Pimp My Cupcake” heading; nine bucks will buy you an upside down chocolate cupcake topped with a choice of three ingredients, such as Oreo cookies, raspberries, custard, caramel sauce, bananas, or my three, vanilla ice cream, chocolate sauce and delicious roasted macadamia nuts.

The whole thing is served in a gigantic martini glass under a foamy whipped cream maraschino cherry mess. You can even dress her up with all toppings for 15 smackers, if you so desire. The cupcake already has its own Facebook page, and I suspect an MTV show will be in the works at some point as well.

The pimped out cupcake is available on the regular, more dinner-like menu with prices ($9–$23 for entrées and $14–$19 for mains), which is incidentally stamped on all paper placemats for the lunchtime rush. This is hardly a coincidence, of course. It’s easier to gauge what you should pay for lunch when you’ve got the dinner numbers in front of you—though that doesn’t stop some from throwing down a fiver. Each pay-what-you-want bill is settled with a manager, which acts as an added incentive for the client to make sure the price is right.