Posted by Greg Clow in in the papers, news and media on March 22, 2008 at 12:48 pm

Given her propensity to complain about the excessive volume level at many of the restaurants where she dines, it's odd to see Gina Mallet having just the opposite problem in her review of Tundra in today's National Post, where she finds the restaurant at the downtown Hilton much too quiet. The food, however, gets some praise:

Both duck breast and farmed venison have issues: They can be tasteless and tough. Here both dishes are superb. The duck slices ($36) are moist and tender lapped by a sweet-sour cassis partridge-berry sauce. What is a partridge berry? It's a Canadian lingonberry, close relative to a cranberry. Point is that it provides the acid spike in sweet cassis (black current), which doesn't overwhelm the duck the way other sweet sauces often do. A nice fat savoy cabbage roll is stuffed with wild rice and duck confit.

I guess the juniper rub is what enlivens the farmed Ontario venison ($39). Thick tranches of tender pink meat tasting faintly piney go beautifully with sweet potato/chestnut puree and saskatoon-berry juice, and the clincher is the carb of toasted pearl barley.

Also in the Post:

• Margaret Swaine reports on an oyster and red wine tasting presented last week by Patrick McMurray of Starfish and "sexy sommelier-about-town" (her words, not mine!) Zoltan Szabo.
• Jason Chow visits Roncesvalles Bakery & Deli to try some zurek, a traditional Polish soup made with fermented rye and assorted cured meats.
• A Reuters wire piece by Rina Chandran looks at the attempts of various multinationals to break into the lucrative prepared foods market in India.
• Bonnie Stern suggests two recipes for Easter brunch.
• Jerry Langton looks at the runaway success of Bacon Salt, a seasoning created by two guys in Seattle who decided that "everything should taste like bacon". Well, duh!

Over in the Globe & Mail, Joanne Kates discovers that the newest Queen Street hotspot, Nyood, lives up to the hype and more:

Chef Roger Mooking, who has done such delectable work at Kultura, is exec chef at Nyood, and his culinary imprimatur is on every plate. Nyood's fare, the inevitable tapas, is as wonderful as Kultura's, every dish sparkling with flavour and texture, every item a small jewel.

Mooking's octopus is startling in its tenderness. He tosses it with blood orange, shaved crisped Jerusalem artichokes and exotic olives, adding fresh basil leaves at the last minute. It is an homage to fresh and tangy. Arctic char tartare is chewy chunks of impeccably fresh char served on a creamy tomato purée, with baby coriander seedlings and dots of crème fraîche. In beet salad he emphasizes the sweetness of beets with apple, chèvre and young watercress.

Also in the Globe:

• Beppi Crosariol finds inspiration for this week's wine column in the fashion section of Us Weekly. No, really.
• Lucy Waverman cooks with lamb, lemon and chocolate for Easter dinner.
• Janet McFarland reports on the reaction to the announcement this past Thursday that Wal-Mart in the U.S. will begin sourcing their store brand milk exclusively from cows not treated with artificial growth hormones.
• Elizabeth Renzetti talks to British restaurant critics Giles Coren and Jay Rayner about the infamously acidic and witty bent that they and other UK food writers take in their work.
• John Allemang digs through the layers of guilt, angst and fear that surround our modern approach to food and eating.
• Sinclair Stewart picks some of the best foodie finds along 1st Avenue in NYC's East Village.

In the Toronto Star, Amy Pataki proves that while the foodies may tend to flock to the latest and greatest new restaurants, there's also something to be said for longevity, as she is generally pleased with Matignon, where they've been serving bistro classics for over 30 years:

"People don't know that the most difficult and also the best dishes are the simple ones," says chef Fernand Point in New Yorker writer Joseph Wechsberg's 1949 essay on La Pyramide.

Almost 50 years later, it remains true. There's the simplicity of Matignon's moist salmon ($24.95) painted with coriander seeds and vermouth, steamed mussels ($8.95) as large as a baby's fist, lamb chops gussied up with only Dijon and thyme.

Steak frites ($23.95), that Parisian standby, is another case in point. Durantet grills six ounces of tender Black Angus sirloin, then anoints it with herbed butter. His frites are a marvel, short and crisp and with that inimitable flavour that comes from potato starch meeting vegetable oil at just the right temperature.

Also in the Star:

• Marion Kane reports on some of the happenings at last month's South Beach Wine and Food Festival, and shares her variation on Tyler Florence's grilled sausage & mozzarella pizza.
• Gord Stimmell tastes some good picks from the burgeoning Price Edward County wine scene, although only the intro to his column appears online.
• Mark Bittman's syndicated column features chicken with salsa verde.
• Emily Mathieu & John Marshall check into the new trend of "all-you-can-eat" seats at sporting events (including several upcoming Blue Jays games), where a slightly higher ticket price buys you all the popcorn, peanuts, hot dogs and soda pop that you can shove into your gaping maw.