Global Gourmet at Montreal’s Apollo Restaurant
Food porn is nearly as addictive as the other kind. If you’ve ever leafed through one of Chef Giovanni Apollo‘s glossy cookbooks and ogled at the lubricious photos and suggestive illustrations, then you know what it is to be tempted into gluttony. It doesn’t matter if you don’t read French: the pictures say it all.
What joy then to dine at a restaurant where the chef’s dishes are as seductive on the table as they are on the page – and as delicious as the fantasy.
Recently, my mother shared with me a recipe for a dessert she served at a dinner party: fresh sliced peaches marinated in almond, served with vanilla ice cream, and topped with caramelized pecans.
Chef Apollo did my mother one better: he added lobster. Served at Apollo, the lobster at Chef Apollo‘s new restaurant in downtown Montreal is offered as an appetizer: lightly poached lobster under a glaze of avocado oil, garnished with sliced peaches and avocados, drizzled with iced almond milk and cinnamon crumble.
Plated on white porcelain, the lobster was a revelation, as well as a reminder of summer’s bounty: the simplicity of fresh produce complemented by seafood.
There was something almost Proustian about Apollo‘s poached lobster, evoking a summer morning at a beach house, where a bowl of peaches sits atop a picnic table, alongside chilled lobster leftover from the night before’s clambake. Lobster for breakfast; lobster for dessert – why not?
A native of Italy, trained by French chefs Paul Bocuse and “les Frères Troisgros,” Apollo delights in playing with the range of taste and its many moods. You want soft shell crab? Apollo gives you soft shell crab tempura with sumac and kaffir lime in a medley of spices, which lingers on the palate like the best street food in Southeast Asia.
Throughout his career, Apollo has played at the culinary intersection of gastronomy and science to create dishes that simultaneously stimulate the palate, the eye, and the imagination. A well-loved voice on Radio-Canada and the author of four cookbooks, Apollo has cooked for dignitaries and heads of state, as well as various members of the royal families of Europe and Asia.
Apollo opened his first Montreal restaurant in 2006 and almost immediately, Le Bistro Apollo Concept was named one of the city’s best restaurants by numerous periodicals and websites. The restaurant’s ongoing critical and popular acclaim has helped contribute to Montreal’s reputation as an avant-garde culinary capital.
Located in downtown Montreal in a former Christ Church presbytery, an erstwhile residence of priests, Apollo retains elements of the historic architecture that preceded its conversion to a culinary cathedral. Furnished in soothing earth tones, the main dining room is complemented by a bar and lounge on the main floor. An outdoor terrace is private and pleasant in clement weather, while an upstairs banquet room has been the locale for numerous celebratory occasions, including wedding dinners.
Apollo’s interpretation of Coquilles St.-Jacques, one of the most classic recipes of 20th-century French-American cuisine, deconstructs the fabled gratinéed scallop dish by adding snow crab and flourishing the seafood with white beans, turnips, and carrots, alongside a horseradish sauce. Red snapper steak is accompanied by hummus, figs, red peppers, and arugula.
After regarding several of Apollo’s creations, one is reminded of the work of the 16th-century Italian painter, Giuseppe Arcimboldo who composed portraits of people made of his representations of fruits, vegetables, fish, and flowers.
Apollo’s other Montreal eateries include the original bistro on Saint Laurent Boulevard, as well as the more casual La Buvette de la Plage de l’Horloge and Les Eclusiers par Apollo, both in Old Montreal along the Saint Lawrence River.
More than a restaurant, Apollo is a culinary odyssey into the fervid imagination of a world gourmand.
