FFWD Weekly
Copyright © 1997. All Rights Reserved.
Not just brain food, good food too
Celadon provides both food and food for thought
By Patrick RenggerIt is something of a tired and worn cliché that we need more than food for thought. Yet the contrary is also more than true - that we need more than thought for food. To pile cliché upon cliché, man may not be able to live by food alone, but he assuredly can't get by without it - and preferably some good tapas and a glass of wine as well.
Celadon (720 - 11 th Avenue S.W.) knows this as well as anyone, being located beneath Calgary's premiere independent bookstore, Sandpiper, and generously furnished with a stack of magazines to buy just in case your dinner companion turns out to be a conversational bust. It is furnished in the spare, post-industrial, post-apocalyptic basement style that is the latest vogue in London and New York and has a small but eclectic menu to match. This is the kind of place Mad Max might take a date if he could get his act together - and I mean that in the best way.
The menu is the basic sort of tapas style previously mentioned, but with a mainly Asian twist featuring such items as oven baked chicken shittake mushrooms with a vegetable collage ($8), duck sausage pizza ($10) and Soba noodle salad with Thai ginger grilled pistachio.
My companion started with the pistachio coated goat cheese with garnished bread sticks ($6) while I decided upon the open faced Nori rolls with barbecue prawns ($7). The Nori rolls, essentially a vegetable sushi, were more than excellent, quite as good or better than anything one would find in a full sushi restaurant, while the goat cheese was smooth and full bodied without being too heavy. We followed this with the shittake mushrooms previously mentioned and I chose the beef tenderloin roll with spicy roulie and greens ($10). The dumplings were both light and tasty, a rare mix for this particular dish, while the beef tenderloin roll was delicious and tender, the roll almost melting in your mouth. Both dishes were quite spicy. The meal was accompanied by glasses of pleasant zimmerbloen ($5), a merlot, and a delightful pinot noir from Flynn ($6.50).
Not only is the restaurant itself appealing, but the meals, too, are presented in high style with as much effort going into their presentation as the excellent preparation. All in all a highly satisfying combination of form and function. For someone like myself, who is always at war as to whether food or literature is my prime concern, Celadon and its location provides a long overdue solution: a place where I can satisfy both my oft times jonesed for addictions at the same time. It is a restaurant where one can eat a little or a lot and feel tastefully satisfied - and while definitely not the cheapest food purveyor in town, it is none the less a gem worth a try as you mull over the mysteries of Jean Paul Sartre, or the latest John Grisham.
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