calendar note: on Thanksgiving Day, October 10, 2016 The Morris Gastropub hosted dinner for eight. Read reviewer comments below:
“basic meat and potatoes, but SO GOOD”
fearless!?!: you don’t come here for gastronomical whimsies like the Deconstructed Faux Fig Foam they serve at Atelier, or the Higgs-Boson Particles in a Fractionated Sub-Atomic Broth of Split Peas, Turnip and Parsnips that was once seen on the menu at Vive la bouffe!
You come here for tasty, hearty, well-prepared classics like what the head waiter (in a rather bold orange blazer) unveiled at the table tonight: turkey with stuffing, mashed potatoes, Brussels sprouts and for dessert, apple pie and ice cream. Nothing foamed, nothing fractionated. A good reason to be Giving Thanks on this Thanksgiving Day.
calendar note: on Sunday April 30 the Morris GastroPub 'Special of the Day' was Bouillabaisse. Read reviewer comments below—
"Thank you Lord for the bouillabaisse. Salad was good too"
BEeatin'88: Ate here tonight with a group of devout Christians. One of them, a baker who had brought one loaf of bread but who witnessed at the dinner table two loaves, was so moved by the miracle that he decided to seek out the most accurate, the most sacred, the holiest version of The Bible he could find. Was it The King James Version? The Gideon Version? The Coles Notes Condensed Bible (12 pages)? It was a lively discussion. And the Bouillabaisse? Heavenly. Will be back.
"from religion to... real estate"
skittles1: I was their that night too, and when the religious fervour finally subsided and the conversation turned to real estate, the Morris chef said very authoritatively that owning was better than renting. His remark clearly had an impact... within a week two of our fellow diners had cancelled their plans to rent a bakery and are now looking to buy instead. On top of that, the Morris chef gifted them with a bible (King James Version). They will now be able to pray—using authentic religious supplications—that they will be able to find a new bakery to purchase, one with a big kitchen, by August, September at the latest.
On the evening of Monday, October 9 (2017), The Morris GastroPub hosted a special Thanksgiving Prime Rib Dinner, featuring a tender and golden Yorkshire Pudding. Read reviewer's comments below—
"more to this place than meets the eye?"
GastroSleuth: Gracious host, attentive service and exquisite food (on tonight's menu: melt-in-your-mouth Prime Rib, rich and golden Yorkshire Pudding, fresh-picked Carrots, Mashed Potatoes and Gravy), but I have to wonder: is our beloved Morris GastroPub—Ottawa's answer to London's historic Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese—a front for something illicit?!!? The art on the walls, for example. Am pretty sure I've seen some if not most of these paintings at the National Gallery. So how did they end up here? That's what I found myself pondering at the end of the evening when somehow, over the sound of splashing water and the clattering of plates coming from the kitchen, I managed to tune into snatches of an audacious plan being hatched by one of the 'customers' and Gastro's maître d'—all I can tell you is that the plot had something to do with kidnapping a certain 'Dusty Miller' (an art forger maybe?) and his gang members.
"Have to act fast", I heard the scheming customer say in the front hallway.
"Don't get caught", the maître d' cautioned.
"Don't worry", she said with a conspiratorial smirk. "I'll have 'em in the back of my car before anyone even notices they're gone".
"And then bury them".
"Oh yah, I'll bury 'em all right. Bury 'em deep".
Yikes! What is going on at our beloved GastroPub??!!
On the evening of Wednesday December 27, eight guests enjoyed a superb Coq au Vin, cooked up by the Morris GastroPub's Chief Cook and Mechanic. Read customer comments below—
"kitchen here runs like a well-oiled machine"
mysaladdays: Hubby and I went to MGP tonite and had a great time. Coq au Vin, assembled by Morris GastroPub's Chief Mechanic, was a-MA-zing! At our table, an animated group of customers including the owners of Ottawa's REX (closed for the holidays), the waiter and waitress from Vive la bouffe! (also taking the night off), and an ex-bouffe! employee visiting from Toronto. Also: a lively duo we first met a year ago at a dinner party at REX, both of them avant-garde chefs at Montreal's cutting-edge Poulet Vérité. Great food, great company. Will be back!
"good technical/diagnostic skills on full display tonite!"
My2Cents: Was impressed with the GastroPub chef's strong technical aptitude. Even with 4 or 5 customers crowded into his repair shop yakking away about wine, art (and dogs), he stayed focused on the job at hand—carefully checking the oil levels in the Coq au Vin and remembering to rotate the dinner plates. Final touch: an alignment job on the green beans just before serving.
"cookbook got 'burned' LOL!"
DriveThru: For me, the evening's high point, after the Coq au Vin of course, came when (for some reason) a copy of an old cookbook was pried out from under the short leg of a wobbly table in the next room and brought into MGP's dining room so that it could be passed around and 'reviewed' by the customers. The consensus? Overwrought, kitschy and (aside from its quirky obsession with freshly-ground black pepper) utterly conventional. One of the avant-gardiste diners pointed to a bland photograph of some beef stew—a particularly blatant example of "the author's worshipful deference to mass, meat-and-potato, culture". Ugh. Why couldn't the cookbook's author have included a recipe for Coq au vin instead of beef stew!! Too pioneering and daring for him no doubt!
"should also add that..."
Sweaterpants: ... although the cookbook looked to those of us at the table like "just another profit-fixated capitalist venture" (other copies, we were told, even feature a 'Heather's Pick' sticker on the cover! Can't get much more bourgeois than that FFS) I thought it was worth mentioning that, to my knowledge, not a single copy of the book has ever been sold. When this was mentioned, conversation at the table stopped, and the book was quietly placed back under the table leg in the next room (where at least it makes itself useful LOL!).
lumentelo: