Bistro 7 1/4

Oh, Bistro 7 1/4. Whenever asked, I name you as my favourite Winnipeg restaurant. Your central open kitchen, giving the room a sense of vitality and verve, your ambitious yet unpretentious menu, your on-point service--all usually make for an exceptionally enjoyable dining experience.

So why did I leave my 7th (or 8th, maybe) visit last night feeling slightly disappointed?

The restaurant summarizes itself as serving "luxurious comfort food". I think of it as equal parts French bistro and modern Canadian fare--really, my platonic ideal of a restaurant. The room itself strikes a fine balance between stark modernism and inviting homeyness. Dark woods, close quarters.

Friday nights are usually a bustling affair at Bistro, with diners waiting for a table crowding the (pretty much non-existant) foyer. The room isn't huge, but the somewhat tight quarters give the room an enjoyable boisterousness. Not everyone may enjoy this, though--it can definitely get loud, especially if a nearby table is populated by jackasses that can't modulate their laugh volume (which is usually the case).

However, whenever I eat at Bistro 7 1/4, I'm reminded of a quote from Thomas Keller's Bouchon cookbook:

"Bistros are boisterous and energetic and jostling, servers squeezing between tables, the smells of sizzling steak and fried potatoes in the air. You enter a bistro and you feel almost as if you've walked onto a stage and are part of a drama."

We began our evening by enquiring about the Chef's Odds and Ends. One of my dinner companions and I enjoy offal, and eating off the beaten path; previous visits had yielded some nice surprises, such as a delicate yet robustly gamey horse carpaccio. We started with a pig snout salad and a pickled tongue dish, as well as the chicken livers (a regular menu item) and a five cheese plate. Again, during previous visits the cheese plate had wowed, so we put ourselves in the hands of the kitchen in the choice of cheeses.

Before the appetizers arrived, a complimentary half baguette is served, with a tomato confit and a small mound of rosemary salt--a simple yet extremely elegant starter.

The cheese plate is beautifully composed, and served with bread, crackers, fresh fruit and a raspberry compote. Among the selections was a biting fresh blue cheese, and a Spanish semi-hard, yet no single cheese stood out and hollered of the genius of its making, as during previous visits.

The pig snout salad was composed of breaded, deep-fried pig snout bits, (including a single slice of the end of the snout, its genesis playfully obvious) served atop a lightly dressed salad of fennel and raisins. The sweetness of the fennel and raisins played well together; the pig snout bits were very crispy, and the innards tender nearly to the point of gooeyness. I didn't, however, detect any notes of offal's usual tang, and the flavour of the breading slightly overwhelmed the pig snout. This was my first pig snout experience, but I wasn't thoroughly impressed.

I had but a small bite of the pickled tongue, but it was served diced in a hot salad of beets and onions. Again, none of the gaminess or tangy bite that I usually look for in offal, but the sauce it was served in was quite appealing, if a bit sweet.

The chicken livers are poached in Fort Garry Dark Ale with huge lardons of bacon and caramelized onions, served with hunks of bread. The presentation is quite nice, one piece of bread hip-deep in the broth in the centre of the bowl supporting the remaining pieces of bread. The chicken livers were wonderfully tender, and the whole dish possessed an earthy, almost primal base note that flavoured every element within. This dish was probably the highlight of the meal, for me.

For the main course, I chose the evening's special, a Bison strip loin served with asparagus, beet hash and mission figs. The beet hash is mostly what sold me, since beets figure prominently in the novel I am currently reading (Tom Robbins' Jitterbug Perfume). The bison was cooked wonderfully, the potatoes in the beet hash were crisp and the beets tender. Everything was well cooked, aside from a few extra-large, woody pieces of asparagus, but the dish lacked a certain cohesiveness; there was nothing on the plate to tie all the disparate elements together. A tasty dish, to be sure--just not revelatory.

And this is the crux of the problem, the reason for my slight pangs of disappointment: every other visit to Bistro 7 1/4 has afforded me at least one of those moments of revelation. The moment that every serious diner lives for, when you put a piece of food in the your mouth, and you can't believe food can be this good, this unique, this amazing. (The supremely smoky barbecue sauce from a previous visit's special! (Why, oh why, is there not a bbq dish on the regular menu?) The intensely rich veal and foie gras sliders! I could go on, and on...) I discussed my slight disappointment with one of my dinner companions, and he agreed--socks firmly not knocked off. Have we set the bar too high? Have we been spoiled by so many delicious Bistro dinners that we're now jaded? Are we just burning out on our favourite restaurant?

Of course, it was a perfectly pleasant evening, full of perfectly fine food. The service was uniformly excellent, as it always is: unhurried, but prompt; friendly, knowledgeable. And when one of my dinner companions accidentally knocked over the wine bottle full of water each table carries, staff swooped in with napkins within seconds, carrying nary a look of scolding disapproval. (A small thing, yes, but surely you know this look that I refer to?) One of our appetizers did lag behind the others ever so slightly, but not to an extreme degree.

All told, if you haven't been, GO! What are you waiting for? I just hope my next trip will blow my socks clean off, again.

Price tag: $240 for four entrees, three appetizers, a cheese plate, and a bottle of wine, not including gratuity. So, yes, definitely on the expensive side of things. But two of the entrees were pretty much only half eaten--the portion sizes can border on the ridiculous.

Website: www.alexanderskitchen.com