Mod Squab
The city’s top chefs are doing seriously cool things with pigeons By Shaun Smith
The squab that you eat in a restaurant is not the same breed of flying rat that calls Yonge-Dundas Square home. Most on the city’s top menus are utility king pigeons from Ontario’s Richview Farms, prized for their luxuriously dark meat with a tender beef strip loin texture and rich foie gras–like taste. A robust fowl, it’s the perfect muse for chefs to experiment with bold flavours. Here are three creative takes on the bird.
COLBORNE LANE
45 Colborne St., 416-368-9009
In his adaptation of an unagi hand roll, Claudio Aprile tucks tender tea-smoked squab breast, leg confit, slivered apple, sticky rice and shiitake tapioca noodles neatly inside a crisp seaweed cone, then serves it standing on a salty and piquant crumble of tamarind-and-cashew praline. $17.
PERIGEE
55 Mill St., Cannery Building, 416-364-1397
Chris Brown pan-sears a juicy sous-vide breast ruby rare and surrounds it with a sweet hubbard squash purée. A moist cube of savoury sticky pudding, dark with molasses, is accompanied by nutmeg-infused squab jus and cool baby turnip. $120 as part of a nine-course tasting menu.
RAIN
19 Mercer St., 416-599-7246
Guy Rubino’s trio of squab-and-cherry dishes combines Asian and molecular methods. A smoked breast has a Peking-style soy lacquer; squab pâté comes with 100-year-old morimo barley miso and cherry-and-almond-methyl-cellulose wafers; and a terrine is dusted with liquid-nitro-frozen almond powder. $36.
Photography by Carolyn C
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