Love Shacks
Every big date needs just the right setting and menu to help stoke the fires of passion. Our top picks for the most romantic restos
Food of love: Splendido serves up romance
Image credit: Margaret Mulligan
Batifole
Chef Jean-Jacques Texier’s honest, inspired take on regional French cooking—truly superb Castelnaudary cassoulet ($24) one evening, elegant fillet of skate ($16) the next—puts the spring in any food lover’s step. The room is effortlessly elegant, with mood-setting music that tends more to Django Reinhardt than Diana Krall. A superb, affordable wine list, and servers who are expert at reading when
a couple wants attention, and when they would rather be left alone.
Langdon Hall
Couples dining here on warm summer weekends should
be prepared to witness at least one marriage proposal. The grounds are magnificent: century trees and technicolour gardens aflutter with butterflies and the beguiling aromas of tree fruit and fresh herbs. And young chef Jonathan Gushue is easily one of Ontario’s best, finding clean textures, luxurious presentations and complex but meaningful flavours in dishes—lavender honey and almond-roasted pickerel, say, or citrus-crusted loin of venison ($40)—that could make even the hardest heart swoon.
Scaramouche
The skyline view alone is almost worth the price of a dinner here. That the truly professional service and luxurious seasonal menu—provençale-style fish and shellfish soup ($15), or warm plum frangipane with prune-armagnac ice cream ($12)—seduce as much as the setting
is just a happy bonus.
Splendido
The place to take a hard-to-impress first date—if chef David Lee’s sumptuous, enthralling plates can’t do the trick, it’s time to move on. Try the butter-poached gnocchi with lobster–vanilla bean foam ($55), perhaps, or the duck confit–stuffed savoy cabbage ($21). Consistently among the top restaurants in the city for food, wine and kind, knowing service, Splendido does little short of spectacularly well. Staff here exceed expectations with freebie surprises, almost any one of which could put most other restaurants on the map. The elegant mood here is the perfect inducement to sweet whispered nothings.
Starfish
Who says romance has to happen over French linen tablecloths and frou-frou food? Friday afternoons at this downtown oyster bed—the city’s best—see plenty of starry-eyed couples canoodling over trays of Paddy’s fresh-shucked shellfish ($30 per mixed dozen) and glasses of cool, crisp chablis. And a meal here can be as long—or as blessedly short—as the mood would have it.
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